A friend recently told a group of us that the county I live in, out here in eastern Colorado, was a hot-spot for crop circles and cattle mutilation back in the 1970s. Let me tell you, nothing derails a perfectly mundane writers’ discussion about passive voice like UFOs.
“You mean, seriously? Or were they hoaxes?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Seemed pretty serious at the time.”
She should know. Her family has lived in and around this area since the 1880s. East of Denver, we live in a landscape of rolling hills, few trees, ranches, and little else.
About a week after this discussion, I was flipping through TV channels when I heard a narrator mention my county’s name. I paused, thumb on the clicker. Sure enough, the narrator was talking about a spate of cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and other weird phenomena in this county that occurred back in the 1970s.
You ever have one of those experiences where you learn a new word or concept for the first time, and then you hear it repeated 1,467 times in the next week? Yep, happens to me a lot.
So here I was, watching a retired cop describe how he’d been called out to ranches to look at weirdly mutilated cow corpse after cow corpse. (“Mutilated Cow Corpse” would make a good name for a punk rock band, no?) He dismissed the usual explanations: these cattle weren’t mutilated by coyotes, mountain lions, bears, maggots, rambunctious ravens, evil prairie dogs, or wayward British-accented killer rabbits. The cuts were too precise. The missing organs had been removed too neatly. The damage appeared deliberately cruel.
About a week after I saw that TV show, I mentioned it to another friend whose family has long, deep roots in the southern part of the state. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I remember that. It happened in our valley, too.” She explained how it was particularly devastating to ranchers to find dead pregnant cows and discover that their unborn calves had been removed.
Apparently this rash of cow mutilations that spread across a wide swath of Colorado 40 years ago was caused by either despicable humans or, you know, despicable non-humans.
I like to read and often write stories with supernatural aspects to them. But I prefer to believe that these tales are soundly on the fictional side of the page. I don’t particularly like it when the supernatural reaches its bony fingers out of the page into my reality.
I have to admit, though—I am very intrigued by such stories, especially when they’re supposedly “true.” They get my brain and my creative energy hopped up and ready to dance.
Story ideas are everywhere. The trick is just to lasso one and ride it out. Of course, that’s probably a lot easier when the aliens aren’t coming for you with scalpels, scythes, and evil intent in hand.
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