Documents / FOIA release
This FBI file release, date unknown, reproduces press coverage of cattle mutilations: a magazine report by Ed Sanders and a Newsweek article dated September 30, 1974. The material describes about 1,500 mutilated cattle across 22 states, helicopter sightings, and theories ranging from predators to satanic cults to UFOs. It details a 1975 federal investigation into informants A. Kenneth Bankston and Dan Dugan, whose claims about a satanic cult the investigators came to doubt. It records that the inquiry was then dropped without resolution.
Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.
THE MUTILATION MYSTERY As far as I have been able to determine, it was investigators in Colorado who first suggested that teriological-warfare research was be. I the mutilations. perfect: They've got a van; they've got all the ground support in that van pulling that trailer; and the chopper is in the trailer." The chopper, the investigator continued, could be put in the air in a matter of minutes. As far as I have been able to determine, it was investigators in Colorado who first suggested that bacteriological-warfare research was behind the mutilations—that apimals were being injected with bacteria or toxins and that glands and other parts were being removed to test the effects of the agents. The mutilators, the theory went, were deliberately trying to put the blame on UFOs or satanists or predators as a cover for what was really going on. The theory has some appeal, as it makes the whole phenomenon more eager, and it makes many things about it very understandable. Bacteriological and chemical-warfare research, except for purely defensive purposes, has been banned in the United States since 1970. The ban grew out of an incident in Utah in March 1968, when thousands of sheep were accidentally killed by deadly VX nerve gas that apparently flocked away from the Dugway Proving Grounds, a bacteriological-warfare research center located southwest of Salt Lake City. The Army paid local ranchers something like, $376,000 in damages for 6,400 snuffed sheep. After that little ovine indiscretion, there was tremendous pressure, particularly in Utah, to ban such research and development. President Richard Nixon himself ordered a halt to the biological and chemical programs and the destruction of existing stock piles. The order was framed in November 1969 and sent to Federal agencies in February 1970. Not all Government agencies complied with the Presidential order, however. Senator Frank Church's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found earlier this year that the CIA, for instance, had stored a quantity of cobra venom and enough saxitoxin (shellfish toxin) to kill hundreds of thousands of humans. Senator Church's committee also found that the CIA had socked away many pathers of toxin and/or bacteria of the Clostridia genus. One of the theories in the multi-state mutilations case is that a regue band of researchers is working with bacteria of the Clostridia genus. There are some 93 species of Clostridia, among which are several diseases that afflict cattle; these include blackleg (Clostridium chauveti) and malignant edema (Clostridium septicum). Clostridia attack humans, also. Tetanus is caused by a Clostridia (Clostridium leoni) and boe of the world's most potent toxins is produced by Clostridium botulinum (which causes botulism); according to Seymour Herph's Chemical and Biological Warfare—America's Hidden Arsenal, a mere eight minutes of botulinum toxin could theoretically kill everybody in the world. In virtually every state where multilations have occurred, clostridial infections were found to be the cause of death in some cases. Two well-informed Colorado investigators told me that they felt that the cause of death was being covered up by vaguely worded laboratory reports prepared by the state government investigators; it has even been charged that lab reports on the mutes have been suppressed. The well-informed investigator Girodo, for instance, told me of a female buffalo that was mutilated at a zoo in Colorado Springs on October 21, 1915. "An autopsy was performed," Girodo said, "and traces of a chemical foreign to the animal were found in its blood stream. Boy, after that they clamped down on. They didn't let another word out." E. Paso County, Colorado, undersher, Gary Gibbs, who coordinated much of the early multilations investigation in the state, believes that a clamp was subsequently put on tests at the laboratory run by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation in Denver and at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. But why would an agency of the Colorado state government participate
FOIA release, from the fbi-vault collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 25 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.