Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies by Arthur Goldwag

Author:Arthur Goldwag [Goldwag, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-45666-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

And what about those cattle mutilations? Reports of mutilated cattle had begun to circulate in the American West as early as the 1960s; by the 1970s and 1980s they had become so widespread that, at the requests of two United States senators (F. Haskell of Colorado and Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico) the FBI and the ATF launched separate investigations. The presence of the helicopters undercut one popular explanation for the mutilations, which was that the cattle were being sacrificed in satanic rituals (rumors of satanic cults that systematically abused children and engaged in human sacrifice were also rife during those troubled years). But then the helicopter meme “jumped” from the realm of UFOs and the paranormal to the paranoid political fringe (much as viruses jump from animals to human beings) and a new idea began to take hold—that the cows were the subjects of secret, government-sponsored biowarfare experiments.

Jim Keith (1949–1999), a onetime Scientologist and a prolific writer on conspiratorial subjects, energetically promoted this view in two of his books, Black Helicopters over America: Strikeforce for the New World Order (1995) and Black Helicopters II: The Endgame Strategy (1998)—both of them written as the phenomenon had already begun to wane. Keith’s untimely death—the indirect result of a seemingly minor knee injury he suffered when he fell off the stage at the Burning Man festival outside Reno, Nevada, in 1999—has sparked its own share of conspiracy theories. Before he went into the hospital, Keith was said to have revealed the name of the doctor who reported that Princess Di was pregnant when she died (a rumor that is still active in the conspiracy community but which officialdom has strenuously denied). Given the House of Windsor’s prominence in the New World Order, many of Keith’s friends believed that he paid for his indiscretion with his life. One can only wonder what happened to the doctor, whoever he is (or was).

But to return to the murdered cows: sober statistical, forensic, and medical analysis revealed that the epidemic of “bovine excisions,” as investigators sometimes referred to the mutilations, never happened. Livestock had not been dying in unusual numbers or ways. The unfortunate few that did die were the usual victims of coyotes, mountain lions, exposure, and disease; their cadavers had been ravaged by predators, carrion eaters, and the elements, not scalpels and lasers. Reports of cattle mutilations came in statistical “waves” or “flaps”—not because the incidents were so widespread (they weren’t), but because the stories about them were self-propagating, each building on the one before. The only thing that was rife was rumors.

It wasn’t the first time that a thought contagion had swept through the heartland. In the 1890s (like the 1990s, an era of economic uncertainty and rural populist political ferment) small-town newspapers had been filled with stories about unidentified flying objects. One of them even involved cattle mutilations. On April 23, 1897, Alexander Hamilton, a leading citizen of LeRoy, Kansas, told the Yates Center Farmer’s Advocate that a three-hundred-foot-long airship, occupied by “six of the strangest beings I ever saw,” had flown over his farm a few nights before.

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