Cattle Mutilations, UFOs & Alien Contact At A Ranch In The Rocky Mountains, Colorado.
An amazing account of extraterrestrial encounters, cattle mutilations, and a government cover-up, told by the people who claimed to have witnessed the events first hand.
For decades people have associated the phenomena of cattle mutilations with extraterrestrial life, the thought of alien beings coming down and killing livestock for research purposes has been a heavily discussed topic throughout the UFO community and even with the wider public. This particular case we are going to look at was investigated for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization by Dr Leo Sprinkle, a University of Wyoming psychologist, Dr Peter Van Arsdale, an anthropologist, Dr John Derr, a seismologist, and his wife Janet.
As a prerequisite to discussing their experiences, the witnesses detailed in this account requested that their true identities remain anonymous and the exact location of their Colorado ranch remain hidden. The main witnesses to this account were, "Jim", a former US Air Force security officer and public relations officer with professional training in physical and biological sciences; "John", who at the time held a management position in a large corporation; his wife "Barbara" and their teenage sons, as well as a law officer.
Prior to any strange happenings, John and Barbara along with Jim had combined their finances together to purchase a ranch situated in the Rocky Mountains area. As well as the ranch house, the property consisted of woodland, grazing area, and springs that fed into a pond close to the ranch house.
Once they had got settled into their new home, unusual, and unexplainable events began to occur. They experienced strange humming sounds, electrical failures, sounds of something or someone walking around outside of the property, they witnessed UFOs in the sky, and even humanoid type creatures were seen in the surrounding woodland, strange "messages" broadcast on the home stereo and radio systems - and even cattle mutilations.
On 16 October 1975, during the night, Jim noticed that the cattle were braying loudly and went outside to see what was disturbing them. "We have a large coonhound that was watching the property," Jim recalled, "and the dog was extremely afraid of something. He was on the porch and wanted in, and I grabbed a gun and went out." "Range cattle do not usually come close to you, but they were packing me so tight that I could hardly get through the middle of the herd. I walked about halfway to the dam and above the dam was a large lighted object. It was orange and trapezoidal-shaped. I was going to see what it was and I got about halfway there when I realized that whatever it was, I didn't need to know! That was during the cattle mutilation days and I had a small-calibre rifle and I decided to leave well alone."
Later it was brought to Jim's attention that a large reward was being offered for the capture of the cattle mutilators, with this in mind, one night he decided he would take a 12-gauge shotgun and go and try and hunt them down himself. However, before he could leave, he reported that he found himself unable to move from the couch he had been sitting on, "It was like paralysis, like I was drugged," Jim explained. Barbara suddenly experienced an increase in her heart rate, followed by a sense of panic, a change in her "thinking pattern", and a flood of memories. Barbara later said, "I remembered things that I had completely forgotten, and that frightened me, and for that time I was screaming and Jim came to from whatever his problem was - he couldn't seem to talk. Shortly after that, John showed up. I started to tell him what happened but I couldn't talk about it. Every time I started to, I would stutter. Jim then started telling him what happened, and then I was able to talk about it. That was the first strange thing... it had never happened to me before in my life."
The First Cattle Mutilation On The Ranch
Sometime later (no exact date given) Joe, the eldest son, together with some of his friends, found a mutilated cow, only 200 yards from their home. Jim explained, "They came back in a panic, it was snowing heavily and we decided the first thing to do was get into town and get the law officer. The boys were pretty upset... because they felt that something was following them. I assumed it was a natural paranoia. We went out and followed the route and we found huge footprints that had followed them all the way from the cow to the horse barn, and the footprints were even in the soft manure inside the horse barn. They were, I guess, 18 inches. I didn't measure them but they were quite large - what I guess you would call a "Bigfoot" footprint."
Jim recalled the mutilation, "the udders were removed surgically - the sac under the udders wasn't perforated, one eye was missing. One ear was missing. And that was it. There was no blood - all the blood had been removed. And there were no tracks in the snow around the cow... the rectum was also removed."
Jim reported the incident to the local law officer, who gave him his word that he would come out in a few days and investigate what had happened, however, he never showed up.
It was just two weeks later when they discovered a second mutilation, this time it was a bull. The bull's head had been twisted back and various body parts and organs had been removed, again in a very surgical manner. Jim drove down into town and found the law officer, the officer suggested that he met with him in a local restaurant. "I asked why I hadn't heard from him and why he wasn't trying to solve this," Jim recalled. "He explained to me that they knew what the mutilations were and they had known for some time. They only report one in four, and in this country alone there had been over 400 reports by that time. It was being done by extraterrestrials, and they had spoken to the FBI about it. I told him that I couldn't believe it, that if he couldn't solve the crime, at least don't blame it on something like that. I made an enemy of the man and I frankly didn't care because we had lost two cattle."
An Unknown Species
It was around 10 p.m. one night, two visiting friends and a rancher heard a strange noise coming from the cistern southeast of the house and about 60 yards up a slope.
Jim recounted how:
All of a sudden, after listening to this noise, a huge, dark object pushed its way through the barbed wire and came straight at them down the hill. They all came running into the house... We subsequently went back and traced the route and sure enough, there were some footprints. "I removed some hair from the fence, noticing that it had pushed its way through the barbed wire: it didn't jump the fence but just by force alone spread it and went through. There were long strands of hair."
Jim took photographs of the footprints and collected the hair, which he sent samples of to a bio-geneticist in Denver, who confirmed that the hair matched "no known species".
"By then I was getting more and more upset about the activities, one law officer was encouraging me to keep my mouth shut about it because he didn't want a full-scale panic in the country. I told him I wasn't interested in panics, I was simply interested in finding out who was mutilating my cattle." Jim explained.
Did He Shoot An Alien?
By this point, tensions were high in the house and everyone started to get depressed and were constantly living in a state of fear. Jim started to sleep near the front door, with a gun beside him, staying awake for most of the night, hoping to catch the "culprit". He said, "I was beginning to suspect that somehow the real-estate man was involved; that he was trying to make us break the contract so he could resell the house."
At around 2 a.m. one night, Jim claimed that he was woken up by a loud humming sound, upon looking out of the window, he saw a disc-shaped object flying slowly past the front of the house and up the gully. On different occasions, Jim said that he witnessed a hairy creature running close to the ranch house. "I was tolerating it to a certain degree. One night I didn't. I went out and one was running beside the corral and I shot it. Barbara came running out, and when Harry and Roger came back from town we went tracking to see if we could find what I had shot. It didn't seem to hurt it at all. There was a little flinch - I'm a good shot so I know I hit it. There was no blood, no traces, no signs. We pursued it onto the property next to us. Then I heard this most unusual sound, like a double sound: it was a whine with almost a beeping noise intermixed."
Nothing was found, however, "We returned to the house and I notified the law officer that I had shot one. He gave me hell and told me I was lucky this time and he didn't want anybody getting killed."
More Intrusions At The Ranch
Eventually, following more disturbances, Jim lost his temper and stormed outside the house in a fit of rage. "I don't remember exactly what I said but most of it can't be repeated. I think I threatened that if we can't have the land, then you won't either - I'll blow the whole thing away. I meant it too: I would have destroyed it before I would have moved right then."
Jim went back to the house and calmed himself down, then later went outside again. "While outside," he said, "this voice just came out of nowhere and said four words, "Dr Jim, we accept". I think that was the first time I was really shaken rather than it just angering me or disorienting me. That was all. It was just like FM stereo; it came from everywhere." "There were many smaller incidents that were unnerving. We had several friends come out who were harassed one way or the other and terrified. I went in and talked to the law officer again. If he really felt we were in any danger, I would move the boys. He said that nobody he knew of had been hurt. They had lost horses, a lot of cattle, and animals of one kind or another, and people had been terrified. The mutilations were going on at a much heavier rate during this period - This was 1976, and they were occurring weekly.
Also during that period, two airline pilots came out to the ranch, asking if they could put an airstrip on the land, and in exchange offered Jim the use of their plane. Jim agreed with the proposal but about three weeks later, one of the pilots and two others were killed in a crash nearby. Others who had enquired deeply into the mutilations, Jim learned, had disappeared mysteriously, including the editor of a magazine.
Jim was also informed that two Air National Guard interceptors, sent up to pursue UFOs in the area, had crashed. The following night, two squadrons of interceptors circled the area. "I wish I was with Air Defence Command," Jim said, "and I know that when they bring them out, they are nuclear-armed and they don't fly them around for games." He counted twenty-six aircraft, which appeared to be surveying everything, presumably in an effort to locate parts of the crashed planes.
"All this was a little unnerving so I decided I was going to stop my inquiry", Jim told investigators. "I was going to just quietly mind my own business."
On another night, again at about 2 a.m. allegedly, nine discs landed in the front yard of the ranch, these were all witnessed by Jim, Barbara, and Harry, a friend. David, another friend, was asleep upstairs but did not respond when called. Jim went outside and started to approach the objects. Interestingly, although Jim and Barbara described seeing disc-shaped objects, Harry saw "large, dark football shapes, as if they were blocking part of the view." As Barbara watched on, with her face pressed close to the window, she was suddenly struck on her forehead by something, knocking her to the floor and rendering her senseless briefly. Whilst the others rushed to help her, the objects vanished.
"I thought about it subsequently and wondered why they didn't do it to me since I was the one walking toward them", Jim commented. "But then I began to understand that they did the most practical thing that could be done to get me back inside and get both people away from the window. And I think I really began to respect how clever they were. Then I began to suspect that maybe the Government was doing it to us. Except that there were a lot of unusual things. For instance, David had been paralyzed during the incident: he could hear us calling but couldn't get up until it was over. But then he went out walking with me, and what we call ultrasonics - the extremely high-pitched sounds - were going on out there and continued through the night. David was sick for three days. The sound would sometimes give us headaches but never all of us at once - to different individuals at different times."
The ET's Speak Through The Radio
On a different night, whilst in the presence of guests, the lights went out in the house and a mechanical-sounding voice was heard coming from all the radio and TV speakers. "We were sitting right in front of a console stereo," Jim recalled, "and the voice came out of it. I can almost recite the words exactly. They are burned in my memory.
"Attention. We have allowed you to remain. We have interfered with your lives very little. Do not cause us to take action which you will regret. Your friends will be instructed to remain silent concerning us."
One of the guests that night, a man named Dan, who was a computer and electronics specialist, was determined he could find a rational explanation for the mysterious broadcast and dismantled the stereo set.
Jim said, "He went through the whole united and said he couldn't figure it out, he checked and the stereo was off; the phonograph was on when the lights went off, but the radio receiver part was off - it was on phono. We found that the type of transmitter it would take, from even close range, to cause a signal of that intensity to go through the house would be beyond our means to ever put up."
The Mystery Of The Black Box
In another conversation that happened between Jim and the law officer, Jim learned about a bizarre incident involving a strange "box". "He said he was out on patrol one night and he saw, in a group of trees, this box that was blinking. He didn't want to go in alone so he raced back to town and picked up another law officer colleague. When he got back, the trees were gone, the box was gone - everything was gone. He thought they had gone into the ground; he had seen things go into the ground before. I've never seen that happen." But Jim did see one of the boxes.
Together with the older son, Joe, Jim, on a compulsion, drove up one night in January 1977 to the top of a hill to where a 35-foot circle had been for some time and nothing had grown. In the trees, a yellow light could be seen, apparently shining on the car.
Jim said of the incident, "We got out and walked over, and there was a box on the ground, I told Joe to stay back about 10 feet. It was making a buzzing sound and there was a light, like inside it but not on it - hard to describe. It was night but there was a full moon, and as I walked to about 4 feet from it, it changed its tone entirely. It sounded like a bunch of angry bees. The sound went up so I backed away and told Joe to go back to the car and watch me as I walked up to the box. We then walked back to the car and I told Joe, whatever happens, do not leave the car. Then I walked back and the box was gone!"
Contact With The Aliens
Later that same night, Jim claimed to see another light in the trees. "I told Joe to go on to the house, and I walked down into the trees. And I think that's the closest I ever came to being afraid. I had to force my legs to take me down because I didn't know what I would see. "I walked down to the light and there were two individuals waiting for me in the light. The light didn't come from anywhere - I can't describe it - it was just light. They obviously weren't nervous and as soon as I walked up, they spoke to me by name and told me - I can quote exactly: 'How nice of you to come.' It was just as though I had been expected. Down below, possibly 50 to 60 feet from us, was a disc on the ground. It was lightly lit, just light enough to see."
"And I had no doubts that these were two men. They were approximately 5 feet 6 inches tall, I would say. They had on tight-fitting clothing, you know, like a flight suit. I noticed the clothing changing colours, from brown to silver, but I don't know-how. They were very fair, had large eyes, and seemed perfectly normal, completely relaxed. They had blonde hair with something over the head, but I could still see their hair. The hair was obviously blonde and wasn't long; it didn't make much of an impression. The thing that impressed me the most was the eyes... Their facial features were finer. They were almost delicately effeminate and completely self-assured." "I was up there maybe five minutes. They apologized for the inconveniences they had caused us and told us that a more equitable arrangement would be worked out between us, whatever that means. I wanted to ask a lot of questions but found that I didn't - you know, like, 'Where are you from?' I didn't ask any of that. There are several things they asked me not to repeat that have no significant meaning at all. I think maybe they were just checking to see if I would keep my mouth shut. I told them that if they were mutilating cattle, it was very foolish to do so and draw that much attention to themselves. They didn't give me any earth-shattering information or even admit they were mutilating the cattle. The only thing I found out for sure is that the big fuzzy thing, "Bigfoot", obeys the commands." "They mentioned the box and that I did the right thing backing away from it - it was what I called an implied threat. They nodded, and approximately 20 to 30 feet away, 'Bigfoot', as I called him, got up and walked toward the box. The box changed tone and he dropped. They said, 'As you can see, they are quite lethal.'
"They said that they would come back and talk again. There were no goodbyes, I just somehow felt it was time to go. They did tell me that my memory wouldn't be tampered with. I thought about all of the things I would have liked to have asked... I hadn't decided they came from space and I'm still not sure of that. They looked enough like people... that was my first thought; that somehow the Government was trying to do this. They were completely self-assured; they spoke vernacular English."
"I was pretty rocked, because I did see the disc and it was quite clear. I walked on back to the house... I was excited over the 'more equitable arrangement', I guess I had some illusion that they were going to give me the cure for cancer or a billion dollars or something... I couldn't figure out why they had even bothered to talk to me. It was obvious that I was supposed to come. They didn't say anything that would indicate why, except 'a more equitable arrangement'."
The Purpose For The Contact
Jim was convinced that some kind of permanent alien installation was located on his ranch. "Our ranch overlooks a military installation: we have a perfect view," he explained to the investigators. "I can only assume that they are watching us - watching our military potential." "I'm reasonably sure that they play rough. It's not big brothers from space who are interested in us as spiritual beings or whatever. I am absolutely convinced that they couldn't care less if we live or die. We're nuisances, although I think they may be more humanitarian than we are. I have no doubts that they are mutilating the cattle, none at all. The cattle are being lifted into the air, they are being drained of blood, they are being mutilated, and then they are being lowered. If they wanted to do just biological research on cattle, they could have disposed of the remains without them being found. It is obviously some intent to instill fear and it was been quite successful." "I figured out early in the game that the government is sending in helicopters in large numbers from several sources, but they are doing it to cover what is really happening. I'm absolutely sure that the helicopters have nothing to do with the mutilations. And the helicopters are not of sufficient size to lift a 2,600-pound bull. Also, you could hardly carry a bull away in a helicopter in a manner so that it wouldn't be seen." During a conversation with an officer at the nearby Air Force base, Jim discovered that the base had had its own share of troublesome UFO incidents and that directives existed on how to deal with them. The officer also asked him if he had experienced any trouble with "Bigfoot". Around twenty different people had claimed to witness them at various different locations on the ranch and surrounding areas, apparently, the Air Force had directives on these elusive creatures too.
Could there be a rational explanation?
"It is possible it could have been a totally subjective experience," Jim rationalized, in summing up these and other extraordinary experiences at the ranch. "Even with all of us, it could have been hallucinations. It could have been a lot of things. Maybe none of it happened. Maybe, everybody there was deceived in some way. I can't picture how, but just because I can't picture it, doesn't mean it couldn't happen." When Dr Leo Sprinkle was first asked about his initial impressions of the witnesses, he said:
"My initial reaction was one of doubt, the witnesses seemed so cautious, even evasive. However, later, I viewed them as reliable and sincere. Perhaps the initial meeting with three PhDs was intimidating... The wife worried about their experiences being publicized and affecting her husband's business relations... I conducted no formal psychological testing: however, my impressions - and those of the other investigators, John Derr and Pete Van Arsdale - support the view that the witnesses described the events as accurately as they could: they truly were puzzled by the events - as were we."
The investigators that worked on this case all agreed that the witnesses were intelligent, articulate, and perceptive. "The intellectual and emotional doubts which are experienced by these witnesses are apparent in their conversations and in the way they have conducted themselves in the interviews."
This is an exceptional case report and incorporates so many facets of the UFO enigma that it lends itself to any number of interpretations. Many may simply shrug this off as mass hallucinations or as simply lies. It is important to remember that the witnesses involved in these claims requested that their identity and exact location remain anonymous, they did not attempt to gain fame nor financial reward for telling the story of their experiences. Let us know your thoughts on this case in the comments section below. Now you have read about the alien encounters in the Rocky Mountains, make sure you check out the story of Otis Carr, the man who invented a real flying saucer.