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t : | | i ,and with the tip of its nose, its tongue, left ear, udder and vagina all removed with a knife. And on and on, from Texas to Colorado to Mon- tana. Behind them the mutilators al- -3 leave c county > sheriffs and vet- erinarians saying they have never seen anything like it before, and local authorities on black ritual discours- ing on the importance of always using fresh warm blood, if drinking the stuff is called for. A survey of newsclips and other literature on cattle mutilation seems to indicate that the whole business started with the mysterious death of Sninpy. Snippy was a horse whose mutilated body was found on @ ranch near-Alamosa, Colorado, eight years _ ago. Snippy’s throat had been cut and flesh from the head and neck re- moved. Also removed were Snippy’s brain and stomach. Snippy's owner was convinced that his horse had been “zapped by a flying saucer.” Snippy’s bones may still be viewed in the museum at Adams State College in Alamosa. U.F.O.'s are still being blamed for the cattle mutilations. Some students of the craze simply see no other ex- planation. Carl Whiteside, of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, evidentiy feit it necessary to contest this hypothesis, since he told me seri- ously, “We do not feel these people have any magical quality that puts thern in the realm of the supernatural or some alien planet civilization.” The occupants of U.F.O.'s have not so far appeared to refute slanderous allegations about their attitude toward terrestrial livestock. People associated with occult groups, on the other hand, have been vehemently trying to distance themselves from the unknown slicers. Back at the start of the year, after twenty-three mutilations in Texas, a self-professed witch in Dallas told a local reporter she thought they were the work of ‘a satanist group from Fort Worth.” These Texas cattle had been drained - of their blood, which the witch ‘thought was consonant with satanic addiction to blood. “They give. witch- craft a bad name,” she added. A writer in Gnostice was even more alarmed. “Despite the obvious illogicality of it,” said Isaac Bone- wits, a former member of the Church of Satan, “the favorite theory right . now among state and federal investi- gators is that occultists of some sort are involved. This of course is sheer scapegoating, since only a rank ama- teur would believe it possibie to get usable psychic energy out of such mutilations, and a rank amateur- would not be able to (a) levitate so on ta fanen wn fanteriotea ae dead without leaving evidence of a pump- ing machine, (c) make the neat ‘sur- gical’ incisions that were used to re- move organs and extremities, or (d) teleport so as to be able to perform two such operations on the same night, hundreds of miles apart.” It would be interesting to know what Bonewits would consider the talents of a professional; but he was right in thinking that at one point federal and state investigators did think that occultists were involved. For a time, indeed, they thought a solution to the great mutilation wave - was at hand. Early i in 1974, 2 student at Kileore aw ny SS Sew eee Sew Se ee Junior College in Texas wrote a paper on “The Sons of Satan," which eontained detailed descriptions of how this group would mutilate cattle between midnight and sunrise. The ritual would be completed just as sunlight started to filter down on the animal through the branches of a tree. (In the absence of trees, the adepts would hold a branch over the beast and proceed aa usual with this substitute. y The teacher at Kilgore Junior Col-” lege was sufficiently revolted by the theme's details to destroy it forth- with. The student said he had heard the story from a friend familiar with the sutanists. An English professor from Pennsylvania told John Makeig of the Fort Werth Star-Telegram that he was familiar with the Sons of Satan group, had some of its mem- bers in his class, and had seen “some girls who'd cut off their fingers and pieces of their ears and things like that.” Their “primary thrill,” he added, was to eat their own flesh. All this information was passed on to Don Flickinger, an Alcohol, To- bacco and Firearms agent in Minne- apolis. Early this year Flickinger be- came the main federal investigator of the mutilation phenomenon, for somewhat bizarre reasons. Cattle mutilation is not, as a spokesman in the Justice Department stiffly in- formed me, a federal offense. Flick- inger became involved because three prisoners in federal institutions sud- denly wrote to various authorities EM blvd SEL announcing that not only did they know the satanic cult practicing the mutilations, but that this same group had compiled a “death list” of in- tended assassination victims. Among the alleged targets were Senator Hu- bert Humphrey and a federal judge _in Minneapolis. *. ~ The U.S. attorney in Minneapolis, Robert Renner, put A.T.F.’s Flick- inger on the case hecange, as he put it to me, “We thought it was the only agency freewheeling enough really to do something.” The informants con- tinued to pour out their stories: a ‘small city near the Gulf Coast would have its water deliberately poisoned: two people in another Texas town ‘would suffer dismemberment in the near future. Just enough of the in- formants’ stories checked out to cause Flickinger and investigators in sev- _ eral states to continue the hunt for the allegedly -four-hundred-strong band of rich cattle-mutilating satan- ists. Reputed leaders of the group in Texas were polygraphed. Allaurvived such examinations. One of the claims was that the group was escalating from animal to homan mutilations and police earnestly scanned all éases of ritualistic murders that occurred. Flickinger himself was threatened and his door daubed with blood. Sometime in the summer of this year the federal investigation came to an abrupt end. All that a person in the Justice Department associated with the case would teli me was, ° were looking into alleged threats to elected officials from the same type of people involved in cattle mutila- tions and we were unable to come up with anything at all.” This was not particularly illuminating, but John WIDOW PRICE Oscar Price died with a hunk of steak in his throat, dining among friends eat Top of 21,a restaurant “ « for peeple on top of it all. His friends thought 7 him laughing, then mildly miffed, red-faced at his wife, who salted her potato and missed his going. Where she lives now (on top of a hill), she wonders about choking. This is on days then rocks shift place and daisies are spineless with west wind at their backs. She watches birds, how flycarchers take food and are gone. Ie is frightening: all this shifting and bending and flying. The thing about choking, too. She misses Osear, she says.