Dead animals with missing organs found in mysterious circumstances. Beginning in 1973, in separate locations in Kansas and Minnesota, cattle ranchers reported the discovery of dead animals that apparently had had various body parts surgically removed. The cattle had commonly lost eyes, ears, lips, sex organs, rectum, and/or tail; often there was a seeming blood loss. Rumors circulated of Satanic cults and bizarre rituals. Some initial autopsies performed on the Kansas animals determined that the animals had died of natural causes. In spite of such prosaic findings, reports of similarly mutilated cattle bodies spread across the Western United States and Canada through the remainder of the decade.
In 1980 a documentary him by Linda Howe, Strange Harvest, brought together information about a number of the dead animals. It largely ignored the autopsy results and tied the phenomena to UFOs. Howe continued to cover reports of mutilations, and by the early 1990s proponents of the UFO theory suggested that some extraterrestrials had given the U.S. government advanced technology in return for permission to conduct biological experiments that included both cattle mutilations and the abduction of human beings.