The Argentine Cattle Mutilation Wave and the SENASA Inquiry (2002)

April 2002. Salliqueló, in Buenos Aires province. A cow was found without its tongue. Muscles, ligaments and cheek cartilage were gone. Ranchers later told of strange lights in the night sky, and of three mutilated cattle found the next morning.

It was the first public case. It would not be the last. Reports soon came from La Pampa, Río Negro, Córdoba, Santa Fe, Entre Ríos, Chaco and Tucumán. At Leubucó, a calf lost its left ear, cheek, tongue, pharynx and genitals. At Mayor Buratovich, 60 km from Bahía Blanca, a 9-month-old Aberdeen Angus calf had a circular cut on the jaw and smooth bones.

The pattern repeated. Eyes, ears, tongues, genitals, udders. Jaws stripped to bone. Witnesses said the cuts were clean and often round. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle, and no tracks of people or animals. One report said "no carrion birds had approached the animal" for days. A Salliqueló vet said the skin was burned along the edges, as if cut with "some sort of heating element."

The counts never agreed. La Pampa police tallied 59 animals from April to July. Página/12 reported more than 100 by 22 June. One retrospective put the total near 500.

A Wednesday night in mid June. About 21:00. Puente Dique, over the Río Colorado near Catriel. Operator Jorge Hernández watched a powerful red light that grew brighter and dimmer. "The light was suspended for more or less 20 minutes… it couldn't be a plane or helicopter because of the way it remained still."

Sheriff Gustavo Martínez confirmed sightings of strange lights, "sometimes reddish and then blue." It was "significantly larger than [a] star, more like the size of a tennis ball." At Santa Rosa de Leales, in Tucumán, 8 cattle and 7 goats were found mutilated. Resident María del Carmen Reyes saw "a bright light, which was followed by the discovery of the dead animals." Rumours of "green dwarves" spread too. No witness was ever named.

SENASA, under Dr Bernardo Cané, first floated isolated esoteric practices. Cané then toured the affected areas with three scientists from the national atomic energy body. Radiation levels were normal. A leaked draft report from UNICEN in Tandil covered 7 cattle on 4 farms. Cané said: "Sin dudas hay intencionalidad. Al mismo tiempo no sabemos quién puede estar haciendo todo esto."

On 1 July 2002 came the final word. The animals had died of natural causes, such as pneumonia, malnutrition and winter diseases. The cuts came after death, from scavengers, chiefly the red hocicudo rodent, Oxymycterus rufus. Carcasses left in the field developed the same lesions. The clean edges came from drying tissue. "There were no little green men or extraterrestrials," Cané said.

La Pampa rejected the verdict. Production Minister Néstor Alcalá said: "That type of mouse does not exist in the region." Rodent specialist Jaime Polop argued that "it is impossible for that type of dentition to produce clean cuts on animal hides." Others blamed aliens, the chupacabra, a cult, or military, CIA or corporate experiments. Folklorists Martha Blache and Silvia Balzano suggested the coverage itself taught people what a mutilation looked like. When media attention moved on, the reports stopped.

Scattered cases kept coming into 2003. Alejandro Agostinelli revisited the wave in his 2009 book Invasores. One question was never answered. The report could not explain why the rodent's diet had changed. Toxicologist Ofelia Tapia said it "deserves study."