United States.New Mexico cattle mutilation wave (Dulce)

Between 1975 and 1979, New Mexico ranchers began finding dead cattle missing a tongue, an ear, an eye, the udder, the genitals or the rectum, often with no visible blood around them. The first reports came in 1975 from the plains in the east of the state (Clayton, Raton, Tucumcari, Springer), and the New Mexico Livestock Board asked the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to help determine the cause of death. The Board's own list, later included in the FBI file, records some 25 cases from August 1975 to September 1976, with entries such as "Numerous track of coyote's (or dog)" or "None" in the track evidence box. From 1976 the focus moved north, to Rio Arriba County and above all to Dulce, next to the Jicarilla Apache Reservation.

The case that set the pattern began on the night of June 13, 1976, when Manuel Gomez reported a dead cow on his ranch, 13 miles east of Dulce according to the police report; State Police officer Gabe Valdez examined it the next morning and described a three-year-old cow without its left ear, tongue, udder or rectum, removed with what appeared to be "a sharp precise instrument", and a trail of circular tripod marks, about 4 inches across, that followed the cow for some 600 feet. According to his report, the State Police laboratory and the medical examiner's office analyzed skin samples and reported that the skin "had been cut with a sharp instrument". He also noted a yellow oily substance that no laboratory was able to identify, and radiation readings twice normal background, taken three days later by Howard Burgess, a retired Sandia scientist. He also wrote that "the tripod marks had returned and removed the left ear", which was intact when Gomez found the animal. His report attributed the mutilations to a "sophisticated and secretive operation", not to cults or predators. The second wave came in 1978: an eleven-month-old Gomez bull on April 24, its liver "all white" and "like mush"; several cows in May with legs Valdez judged to be broken and marks he read as clamps; and another Gomez cow on June 14. Los Alamos examined tissue from the bull and replied on May 9, 1978 that a heart culture grew Clostridium, but that possible contamination prevented the conclusion that infection was the cause of death; according to Rommel, the scientist who ran the test informally thought the animal had probably died of blackleg. In July, Valdez and Burgess ran some 70 Gomez cattle under ultraviolet light and found a fluorescent substance on five of them; according to Rommel, none of the marked animals was later mutilated.

Political pressure grew at the same time. Gomez wrote to Senator Harrison Schmitt, who in December 1978 asked Attorney General Griffin Bell to reopen a federal investigation. A memo from his office counted, with Valdez's figures, 65 cattle and six horse mutilations in New Mexico since 1975, 45 of them in 1978, eight on the Jicarilla reservation and seven on Santa Clara Pueblo (Rommel's later count, from Livestock Board, State Police and press reports, would give 90 cases from 1975 to May 1979, 30 of them in 1978 and 26 in the whole of Rio Arriba County). The same memo recorded the January 29, 1979 case in Torrance County: the sergeant who found it said the steer was still warm enough to melt the snow around it and that its scrotum and penis had been removed "with surgical precision". Since only cases on Indian lands gave federal jurisdiction, the Justice Department told the FBI in March 1979 to investigate those fifteen. According to the FBI's Albuquerque office, Valdez held that this was a clandestine CIA or Department of Energy operation tied to biological warfare. According to the Albuquerque Journal, on April 8, 1979 two Jicarilla tribal police officers saw an aircraft hovering about 50 feet off the ground with a spotlight on the cattle, and a Dulce police officer later saw it as well. On April 20, Schmitt and U.S. Attorney R. E. Thompson gathered some 180 people in Albuquerque. Valdez spoke of 90 cattle and six horses dead in three years; Gomez, of six animals; forensic veterinarian Richard Prine of Los Alamos attributed the cases he had examined to predators; and investigator Carl Whiteside of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation reported that of 203 complaints in his state only 19 carcasses reached the laboratory fresh enough, that nine showed deliberate mutilation and that two of those turned out to be pranksters.

On April 24, 1979 the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) granted $44,170 to the First Judicial District Attorney's office, and former FBI agent Kenneth Rommel ran the investigation from May 28, 1979 to May 27, 1980. The FBI, for its part, wrote in April 1979 that the carcasses in the fifteen cases had been destroyed, and in January 1980 that those reports, all from 1978 and although surrounded by suspicious circumstances, did not allow it to positively determine that the animals had been mutilated, because no agency had preserved evidence or written complete reports; it closed its file in December 1979. On April 15, 1980 Rommel told a press conference that the cause was "Mother Nature acting as the great ecologist"; his June report, "Operation Animal Mutilation", reviewed 90 earlier cases and 27 new ones and concluded that none could be confirmed as a "classic" mutilation. At the press conference he admitted that human hands might have been involved in "less than 25 cases", with cuts always made after the animal's death, and Schmitt said the conclusions did not satisfy him and that he would ask the Justice Department to keep investigating.

This is the case that led to a federally funded investigation, and the comparison between what was reported and what remained in the files is the valuable part. The tripod marks in the four cases Rommel reviewed and the clamp and broken-bone reports he analyzed were all signed by the same policeman (game warden Bob Johnston described other animals with broken bones to the press, as if "picked up by a vise"); Rommel pointed out that the reports were written months after the visits (the June 1976 one on December 15), that he had no information that anyone took impressions of the tracks and that nothing showed whether the radiation reading was compared with a background measurement. Valdez admitted to him that the cow he had described "in the branches of a tree" was at the base of the tree. The flakes collected in Taos after an orange light in July 1978, which the press linked to the fluorescent substance at Dulce, turned out, according to the FBI laboratory, to be white exterior enamel paint. In the Torrance County steer of January 1979, the Los Alamos chemist who had detected chlorpromazine later said there were only traces with no effect and that the citric acid was normal; the inspector found dog tracks and bite marks. On the April 8 aircraft, Rommel said the FAA had tracked a company plane that night between Durango and Albuquerque, at 11,500 feet and 35 miles from Dulce, and used it to dismantle the rumor linking the CIA to the mutilations; Valdez replied that "the plane Longmont picked up was not the aircraft in question". The headstone that "glowed" in the Gomez family cemetery turned out, according to several officers, to be the reflection of a nearby light.

The evidence against that reading is in the papers too. Rommel never examined a Dulce case: on October 11, 1979 according to Valdez, who himself cancelled the State Police laboratory's trip, the owner of the only Dulce animal reported to his project refused the inspection; Valdez told him he did not notify him of cases he did not consider "classic". In the fifteen cases he visited he did not seek the cause of death: as he writes, once he saw jagged edges or teeth marks he saw no reason to determine it. Of the 90 earlier cases, 21 lacked the data to judge them, and in the whole earlier period he found only two animals with knife cuts made by people, one of them outside the 90 (a burro and a cow killed by lightning), far from the described pattern. In Dulce, Valdez answered that Rommel "hasn't seen a classic mutilation", livestock inspector Jim Byrd doubted he had seen any, and game warden Bob Johnston and Gomez complained that he never talked to them; Gomez lost twenty head between January and June 1979, and when the laboratory spoke of locoweed, Valdez objected that it was winter and there was none. Those objections bring no new physical evidence, and according to the Rio Grande Sun the Rio Arriba investigators did not dispute that the animals Rommel saw had died of natural causes. But the analyses of Dulce cases on record are few and do not agree (the sharp-instrument cut that Valdez's report attributes in 1976 to the state laboratories, the inconclusive Los Alamos result of 1978), none was repeated under Rommel's criteria, and that gap is the real limit of the explanation.