The Mutilation of Snippy the Horse

From fall 1966 through spring 1970, people in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado reported unknown lights and craft over the Great Sand Dunes. Cars lined the roads to watch.

On the Harry King ranch, about seventeen miles from Alamosa, lived a 3-year-old Appaloosa mare named Lady. She belonged to Nellie Lewis, Harry's sister, and her husband Berle Lewis. The world would know her as Snippy.

Thursday, 7 September 1967. Lady did not come back to the ranch for her evening drink. Two days later Harry King found her, about a quarter mile from the ranch house. Her head and neck had been skinned and the flesh removed from nose to withers. Only bleached bones remained. The rest of the body was untouched. To King the cuts looked very precise. Completely smooth.

There was no blood. Not on the body, not on the ground. Her hoofprints stopped about 100 feet from the remains. A sickening sweet odor hung over the site. Nellie Lewis touched the remaining flesh. It felt sticky, she said, and her hand burned and turned red.

Nearby lay dark patches the family described as scorch or exhaust marks. About 100 yards away, a shrub was squashed nearly flat, with six small, round indentations arranged in a circle. Agnes King, Harry's 87-year-old mother, said a large object had passed over the ranch house around the time the horse disappeared. She had not been wearing her glasses.

Nellie Lewis told the story herself in the Pueblo Chieftain. Through the Associated Press, it reached newspapers nationwide on 5 October 1967. Judge Charles E. Bennett and his wife reported that on the day the horse died they saw three reddish-orange rings in a triangular formation, moving at high speed and humming. Duane Martin of the U.S. Forest Service reportedly found radioactive burn marks with a Geiger counter.

Decades later, Denver pathologist Dr. John Altshuler told his own story. Police had found him watching for UFOs in the Great Sand Dunes after dark and took him to the carcass at night. The lungs, heart and thyroid were gone, he said, removed with some of the cleanest cuts he had ever seen. The skin edges were firm, almost as if they had been cauterized.

NICAP ruled on 1 December 1967 that it was neither a UFO case nor particularly mysterious. For the Condon Committee, the Air Force-funded study at the University of Colorado, Dr. Robert O. Adams of Colorado State University examined the case. Adams found an infection in the right flank that probably killed her. Scavengers could have done the rest. The report found no evidence of abnormal causes. Nellie Lewis objected that this explained neither the chemical smell nor the missing blood. In 1968 Edward Condon still called it the "most bizarre" case his group had investigated.

Then local vet Dr. Wallace Leary found two small caliber bullet wounds in the right flank. Two Alamosa State College students reportedly confessed to shooting the horse.

Snippy became the first case to tie UFOs to animal mutilation. It set the pattern for the cattle mutilation waves of the 1970s. Linda Moulton Howe revisited the case in 1989. In 1993 Berle Lewis told Christopher O'Brien: "I know it was something we...I don't know about, killed the horse." Judy Messoline bought the skeleton in late 2021, and since 2022 it has stood at the UFO Watchtower near Hooper. As O'Brien put it, "It's the story that keeps on giving."