Dead Cows I’ve Known: A Fresh Look At Cattle Mutilation Theory
by Ted Oliphant III
Dead Cows I’ve Known: A Fresh Look At Cattle Mutilation Theory
By Ted Oliphant III
Recently the British Secretary of Health admitted that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or “Mad Cow Disease” may be a species jumper. This means that humans exposed to animals with BSE, can also contract it. This announcement set off a panic, with many countries (Most Notably France, Belgium, Germany and The United States) announcing boycotts of all British beef. There was serious consideration given to destroying all eleven million head of British cattle. But how do you dispose of 11,000,000 dead cows?
Some projections for the year 2010, suggest that up to 200,000 people could be affected each year from Mad Cow Disease related Creutzfeldt Jakob Disease (CJD). This is in Great Britain alone. People don’t die from Mad Cow Disease, but from CJD after BSE infection.
What is Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease?
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (“CJD”) is a rare, fatal brain disorder which causes a rapid, progressive dementia and associated neuromuscular disturbances. The disease is often referred to as a sub acute spongiform encephalopathy because it usually produces microscopic vacuoles in neurons that appear “sponge-like”. * Under the microscope, you can see “holes” in brain tissue. CJD, BSE and other Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies are now referred to as “Prion” diseases, but there is still much debate in both the medical and scientific communities.
In addition to CJD, these suspected human “Prion” diseases include Kuru, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease and Fatal Familial Insomnia. Kuru was originally found only among the Fore tribe in Papua, New Guinea and has been significantly reduced since the cessation of the ritual handling and eating of the brains of deceased relatives. Kuru is not eliminated, but only reduced to a nearly normal level. The different names for these various prion diseases have historical reasons, but they all are variations of CJD.
Among the first symptoms of the human prion diseases are visual disturbances and changes in skin sensation. There are also psychological changes. The disease is characterized by progressive problems with coordination which are typically followed by dementia. Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease and fatal familial insomnia are predominantly hereditary disorders with the former usually marked by progressive coordination and movement problems and the latter evidenced by sleeping problems preceding dementia. The suspected prion diseases occurring in animals consist of: Scrapie in sheep and goats (The pre-cursor to BSE); Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy; Chronic Wasting Disease of mule deer and elk; Feline Spongiform Encephalopathy and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.
On March 20, 1996, the British Government, in a complete reversal of its previous position, stated that there was a possible link between BSE and CJD. This new acknowledgment arose from the identification of an apparently new strain of CJD which was discovered in 10 people under the age of 42, including some teenagers. Additionally, five of the people were associated with the meat and livestock industry. Scientists advising the British Government decided that the most likely explanation for this unusual outbreak was the consumption of beef from diseased cattle before 1989, when regulations were adopted for the disposal of potentially infectious cattle offal, including brains, and the use of sheep entrails as feed ceased.*
On November 10, 1997 in England, Professor John Pattison, Chairman of the British Government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Board announced on BBC TV’s Panorama program; that the National Blood Supply could be contaminated with a “New” human strain of mad cow disease. “It’s still impossible to say with any accuracy but there could be quite significant numbers of people incubating new variant CJD, raising the possibility that these people could be donating infected blood to the national stocks,” he said.
At the present time, the only proven manner for contracting CJD from an infected person has been through iatrogenic transmission, an unintended consequence of a medical procedure using tainted human matter or surgical instruments. Iatrogenic transmission of CJD has occurred in cases involving corneal transplants, implantation of electrodes in the brain, dura matter grafts, contaminated surgical instruments and the injection of natural human growth hormone derived from cadaveric pituitaries. Thus, one may become infected with CJD from direct contamination with infected neural tissue.*
There are new, strict guidelines for the handling of suspected BSE, CJD and Kuru infected tissues. Once a brain biopsy is completed, surgical instruments, scalpels and the like, are disposed of because sterilization will not kill the Prions, or proteins. This raises the question of how many times before the new guidelines were instituted, were contaminated surgical instruments used from patient to patient? Prions can not be killed, because they are not living beings. Heat sterilization does reduce the infectivity by several orders of magnitude, but the reduction is NOT total.
BSE & CJD have the potential to become Doomsday Diseases, they are very hard to detect and there is no cure or treatment. Neither is it known how many different places it could pop up: blood supplies, food supplies etc.
How did this happen & where did it come from?
The main suspicion traces the un-natural practice of feeding vegetarian animals “Rendered” food made of contaminated animals who are found dead. Rendered foods come from “Rendering plants” like the Avon plant in Geraldine, Alabama. There are hundreds of these plants throughout the United States and the world. The problem is the feeding of infectious material, but not only to vegetarian animals. This practice was also lethal for several wild cats in British zoos, and the mink populations in the United States.
What goes on at a rendering plant?
Rendering plants act as an animal disposal unit for dead livestock. Instead of burning and disposing of dead animals, they are converted to animal feeds. I visited the Avon plant in 1993 and witnessed this process, where nothing is wasted. Area farmers and ranchers are invited to drop off any dead farm animal. The animals are crushed up in large mulchers and poured into enormous high pressure vats where they are cooked into multi-animal stew. The stew is further processed until it is packaged and sold to area farmers as livestock feed. I’ve witnessed pigs, goats, cows and horses brought to rendering plants. The animals were in various conditions. Some had been dead for over 24 hours, yet were still rendered into livestock feed. None of these animals are checked for disease or illness before they enter the food chain. Shockingly, many cows that been found “mutilated”, ( missing various glands, tissue and organs) were brought to these rendering factories and processed into food for their still living relatives. I was shocked, but unlike Great Britain which has had protections against such practices since 1989, there are no such guidelines here in the United States.
What is the prospect for Mad Cow Disease to appear in the United States?
That is THE question several of us are asking, what does our government know and what aren’t they telling us? The first case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease appeared in the 1890’s, was finally identified in 1920 and first considered contagious during the identification and study of Kuru in the 1950’s though it was, at that time, thought to be fully contained. However the identification of contaminated surgical instruments as a transport mechanism raises a bigger question…how many surgeries used contaminated scalpels?
The incubation period for BSE and CJD can range from six months to beyond 40 years. However, the incubation time can be very much longer. That means that if you ingested contaminated meat prior to becoming a vegetarian, you can still get sick many years down the road.
This isn’t the first time animal parts introduced into the food chain, caused illness and death. Thyrotoxicosis (New England Journal of Medicine, Hedburg CW, Fishbein DB et all 316: 993-8, 1987) occurred when bovine thyroid glands were combined with hamburger meat and distributed throughout many communities. This caused over 100,000 people to get sick. Finally the Center for Disease Control (CDC) investigated and concluded that large doses of bovine thyroid hormone in hamburger meat, was the culprit. Here’s what happened. For years the US Government bought every bovine thyroid gland it could get it’s hands on for research. As a result, every meat packing plant in America was removing the thyroids and selling them to Uncle Sam for top dollar. Then all of the sudden, our government stopped buying them. Meat packing plants and butchers starting grinding up the glands and mixing them with our hamburger. That practice has, for the most part, been stopped thanks to the CDC.
The U.S. Army, The National Institute of Health (NIH) & Rocky Mountain Labs
Quietly and secretly, The United States Army and the Center For Disease Control have worked together, off & on, for years. A perfect example of this clandestine cooperation was the outbreak and containment of Ebola Reston. You can learn more about this in an excellent book “The Hot Zone”. The Army & The CDC entered the Reston monkey houses, took care of business and were gone before anybody knew what happened. They showed up in civilian clothes, and un-marked vans. All of this was done right under the noses of television camera crews who were looking around, but never saw them because the Army & CDC hid their vehicles behind buildings! Currently another organization, The National Institute of Health (NIH) has been tasked with tracking and studying something even more frightening: Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathies and other Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). Much of the research has been conducted at Rocky Mountain Labs. Originally it was thought that a foreign power might be trying to contaminate the American food supply. Instead they discovered a new variation of TSEs. But TSEs are no new biological evolution, in fact they are much older than the primates.
The funding for this research is hidden in the NIH’s black budget for the study of AIDS. Neither AIDS or BSE are viruses, rather they are the consequences of immune systems that have been thwarted. The research has been kept quiet to prevent an outbreak of panic. But the cats out of the bag, all of us are in the same boat. Every American who’s ever eaten meat has potentially been exposed to our new, common threat: Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies.
Over the last ten years, law enforcement in dozens of States have been trying to track and identify unmarked helicopters sighted where area livestock have been discovered dead under suspicious circumstances. The helicopters are seen before and after these cows are found in pastures, missing certain organs. The same things are always taken. Bovine jaws are stripped to the bone, reproductive organs removed, entire tongues, digestive tracks and rectums are “cored” out. There is little to no blood at the scene. Many tissue samples taken by police investigators and analyzed at veterinary labs, show signs of exposure to heat, three hundred degrees or more. The tissue is cooked and the incisions are cauterized by the heat. This prevents blood and other fluids from leeching onto the ground. Everything taken has to do with input, output and reproduction. In recent mutilation cases, Alabama 1993 & 1994, California 1996 and Florida 1997; pharmaceuticals have been found in bovine blood. They are: Barbiturates, Anti-coagulants, Synthetic Amphetamines, Aluminum-Titanium-Oxygen-Silicon flakes, and Antimony (Antimony: A brittle lustrous white metallic element occurring in nature, free or combined, used chiefly in alloys and in compounds in medicine. Webster’s). According to recent police reports, some investigating officers have claimed that the concentrations of drugs found are not of veterinary nature, that the are pharmaceutical concentrations found would be more associated with humans. Among those law enforcement agents who have thoroughly investigated these bovine excision sites, there is a consensus that some kind of medical testing going on. The additional presence of helicopters on scene, before and after cattle are found dead missing specific organs, leads both victimized farmers and investigating officers to conclude that there is a connection. But why use human drugs on cows? Use your imagination.
Every organ taken from affected livestock has to do with input, output and reproduction. Where entire jaws have been excised in large, oval excisions, the bone is exposed and is perfectly clean. The wounds have been cauterized and there is no presence of blood. The jaw is an important area, particularly because enzymes produced in human saliva glands can kill viruses and bacteria. Though it’s not the case in animals, we wonder why similar things are taken? The digestive track also acts as a filter, that absorbs, collects and stores traces of any chemical or toxin introduced. The rectum is a similar filter, as are ears. They store traces of toxins and chemicals like a library. This is true in humans and animals. So far there are no known cases of inherited BSE, but the reproductive system may be a good place to find look for clues on how TSEs pass to the next generation.
In 1993, I got a call from a man who told me that if I went to a certain place on a certain evening, I would see several helicopters land and refuel. He was right. Well after dark, two Chinook helicopters (The large twin rotor type) landed in the field behind some trees and carrying black plastic fuel bladders. Minutes later several smaller scout helicopters landed nearby, shut down and crews from the Chinooks walked over with large hoses and refueled each of a half dozen helicopters. The whole operation took less than 30 minutes and the Chinook helicopters took off and headed across the border where we tracked them to their home base, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Now we knew who they were but we couldn’t figure out why they refueled on Sand Mountain. The next morning a reporter, Steven Smith from the Rainsville Weekly Post, called the Public Affairs Officer, Captain William Gibbons of the 101st Airborne and asked if they might’ve been in our area the previous evening. “We have no aircraft in your area, it wasn’t us” said the captain. It certainly was. So we knew then that some kind of secret operation was being conducted, but we didn’t know what it was. We still don’t, but when you look at each piece of evidence and try to use them as puzzle pieces, these so called “cattle mutilations” might be associated with government studies of epidemiology. With BSE & CJD and many other diseases being so devastating, is it possible than many alleged cases of “cattle mutilations” are actually evidence of our tax dollars at work?
The Evidence Suppression Team from Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama; & The F.A.A. Investigation of un-marked helicopters over Sand Mountain.
The 101st Airborne Division is not suspected of being directly involved in the cattle mutilations that occurred between Oct. 1992 through May of 1993. But is seems possible they may have refueled the other witnessed un-marked helicopters that we eventually traced to Maxwell Air Force Base. The 101st’s inability to tell the truth about where they had been, seems to be a constant in Federal Government employee behavior: You don’t tell the truth unless somebody holds a gun to your head.
When un-marked helicopters were witnessed by local farmers and law enforcement officers, Albertville Police’s Chief of Detectives Tommy Cole called in the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate. Detective Cole had lost a cow to the phantom surgeons and his wife had seen an un-marked helicopter over their pasture January 8th, 1993; the day before they discovered one of their Black Angus steers mutilated. An FAA investigator came to Albertville and Cole took him for a ride in his police car. The FAA investigator was skeptical until an un-marked helicopter flew near them. The FAA investigator couldn’t believe his own eyes and pulled out a hand held radio and hailed the helicopter. The helicopter pilot didn’t respond and ignored demands that he identify himself. This infuriated the FAA investigator who had now reversed his skepticism. He was able to trace the helicopter to Maxwell Air Force Base in Southern Alabama. When he launched an inquiry at the base, he was immediately told to drop it and never talk about again. A week later Chief Detective Cole received a call after midnight, it was the FAA investigator. It seems that while out in a boat on nearby Lake Guntersville, he and his family had witnessed a large triangle shaped craft flying maneuvers above them. I wonder if he ever reported that to his superiors?
There’s something very wrong at the Barton Ranch in Red Bluff, California.
Bill & Jean Barton have been cattle ranchers all their lives. Jean’s family has owned the same 1,600 acre cattle ranch in Northern California for over a hundred years. They have always been cattle ranchers, they have lived simple, normal lives most of that time. Then, something terrible happened on Oct. 16, 1995. Something that would change their lives forever. of their cows were found dead on their land near Eagle Lake. It was found missing teats from the udder, it’s jaw had been stripped and an ear was missing. Then it happened again, and again and again. By the time the first year had passed, the Barton’s had lost four head of livestock. Then, exactly one year from the first grizzly discovery, it happened again. On Oct. 16, 1996 a cow was found missing it’s entire udder, it’s rectum had been cut out and it’s jaw was also missing.
The Barton’s had never seen anything like this before, not in a lifetime of raising cattle. But the nightmare wasn’t, isn’t over. By the end 1996, the Barton’s had lost seven more head under the exact same circumstances. This brought the head-count to eleven. In March 2, 1997 I received a call from Jean Barton asking me to come investigate suspicious cattle death number 14. When I and another investigator, Stan Musselman, arrived at the ranch, Jean took us to the crime scene. This cow had been dead for three days, It was in a state of typical decomposition. That’s the problem when you own such a large ranch, you can’t police it. It might be two days before you discover something wrong. It turned into a recipe for certain disaster, and the circumstances and logistics, ensured the Barton’s continual victimization.
There was blow fly larvae under the cows left front shoulder. There was the attendant smell of rotting flesh. I had learned early on, to stand up-wind of bovine carcasses. I learned that important lesson fast, when I first examined similar cases in Alabama in 1992 & 1993. If you don’t stand up-wind, you’ll get sick quick. This cow looked identical to what I’d witnessed, over and over, thirty five times before on Alabama ranches. Under the right front shoulder, there was an eight inch diameter circle of flesh and udder missing. The udder was missing. Their was an enormous gaping hole where the rectum and vagina had been. It measured over ten inches across. Where the udder had once been, there was an even larger incision which lead halfway down the right rear leg. The leg muscle had been removed all the way to the bone. Then I saw something I’d seen once before.
Along the edges of the incision I could see a swirling, stepped and notched cut made by something similar to pinking shears. Again there was no blood on the incisions where hide, muscle and organs had been extricated. Deja-Vu, I might as well have been back in Alabama. The same damn thing, over and over and over again. “What the hell is going on?” Stanley and I asked each other. The animal was “too far gone” to order an autopsy, or If we had known sooner, within hours of the animal’s death, we could have learned more. What else had been “done” to this poor animal? The Barton’s used to make a simple, honest living. Now, with the substantial economic loss they’ve sustained, they aren’t even allowed that “luxury”. These ranchers cannot afford this, it’s killing their cattle, their business and most importantly, them. Surely they deserve better, but who will help them end their agony? Who will answer the question of what’s happening to their cows? They deserve an answer, just like the ranchers who have found themselves in a similar predicament, over the last 34 years. What makes the Barton cases so unusual, is their sheer number. I have never heard of anyone being victimized 15 times in two years. There’s something very wrong at the Barton Ranch, but what? There’s a number of reason’s why it’s safe for me to make the following statement…”If you’ve had fifteen mutilations on your ranch, in two years, you’ve got a problem”.
What might that reason be? Are devil worshippers performing surgery on your animals in time for their monthly celebrations? Or are aliens visiting you for snack food? Is this the work of coyotes? Or is it your tax dollars are work? If it isn’t the devil worshippers, and if it isn’t the aliens, and the coyotes have an alibi , what does that leave us with? I’m a student of Arthur Conan Doyle, and his alter-ego Sherlock Holmes. I must conclude, as they did, that after you have ruled everything else out, what you are left with MUST be the answer. My personal choice has to be “Your tax dollars at work”. But why are they at work on the Barton Ranch? What’s the attraction? By August of 1997, The Barton’s ranch had fallen prey to the same phantom surgeons for the fifteenth time. Fifteen mutilations on the same ranch? Why? There’s something very wrong at the Barton ranch, but what?
In the United States, something strange is happening at the Mexican Border.
All of the sudden truck-loads of un-healthy looking cows are being shipped into America. Forty-thousand a month. Where are they coming from?, is Mexico producing nearly a half million cattle a year for export? Or are they coming from somewhere else? Nobody seems to know, but it makes me nervous.
I don’t pretend to know the solution to either the bovine excision cases nor the appearance of the mystery helicopters. I don’t know where the “Mexican” cattle are really coming from. I don’t know that America faces a threat from BSE, but I do feel that these questions deserve our attention. President Ronald Reagan once hypothesized: “What if one day we all found that we faced a common threat from outer space, wouldn’t we all put aside our differences and work together?”. President Reagan wasn’t so far off, today we DO face a common threat, soon we’ll realize that we all have something in common: possible exposure to Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies and a host of other disease like we’ve never seen before.
If you have any information, pertinent speculations, criticisms or a rebuttal to this draft, please contact me. I would like to correct any mistakes before the final manuscript is published in book form..
*Courtesy of the Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Research Foundation.
The author is eternally grateful to the following researchers & investigators for their many contributions, critiques and research presented in this article. They are:
Ed Gehrman, The Sonoma County Free Press, Sonoma County, California Roland Heynkes, A Molecular Biologist working in Aachen, Germany. Sgt. Ron Ogletree, Post Commander, Alabama State Troopers, Gadsden AL. Tommy Cole, Chief of Detectives, Albertville Police, Albertville, Alabama Officers Ken Mote & Mike Rice, Albertville Police. Corey Dobson, Ranger, Bucks Pocket State Park, Buck’s Pocket, Alabama. Carey & Teri Baker. Rainsville Weekly Post, Rainsville, Alabama. Steven Smith, Rainsville Weekly Post, Rainsville, Alabama. Mayor Boyd Graben, Fyffe, Alabama. Chief Junior Garmany, Fyffe Police Department, Fyffe, Alabama. Chief Fred Works, Fyffe Police Department.
Copyright 1997 Ted Oliphant III . All rights reserved.