1967 Animal Mutilation Alamosa Original AP Story

Although there is some mention of this story in the archives here is the original AP story as it was posted October 5th 1967 in the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch. This is said to be the first such story of its kind. Whatever the case here it is. Also I am just posting this dont have an idea about it one way or another.

ALAMOSA, Colo (AP)- Snippy, a 3 year old Appaloosa horse, didnt return to the Harry King ranch for her usual evening drink Sept. 7, and her owner is blaming a flying saucer-or at least a radioactive surgeon.

The bizaree event, just one of many that has been plaguing the sparsely populated San Luis Valley in the past six months, began Sept. 9 when Began a search for the saddle pony.

He found snippy just a quarter mile from the ranch house. There were no tracks about the dead horse, but the animal had been completely skined. All that remained of the neck and shoulders were bleached bones, but they were still intact and attached to the rest of the body.

The cut around the neck was completely smooth, not a jagged edge. No blood remained in the horse's body and there was none on the ground.

King returned to the site the next day with the horse's owners, Mr and Mrs Burl Lewis. Nothing had changed except a sickening sweet odor prevaded the area and the exposed bones were a bright pink.

After a search of the immediate area they found what appeared to be 15 circular exhaust marks. They covered an area about 100 by 50 yards.

A hundred yards north of the carcass they found a three-foot bush squashed to within inches of the ground. The area within a 10 foot radius of the bush had also be flattened to within 10 inches of the gorund.

Near the area Mrs. Lewis found a piece of the horse's flesh encased in a piece of the skin. It was very sticky, she said, and dropped it. Her hand began to burn and turned red and continued to burn untill
she washed her hands.

On another check of the area they found more flattened brush but this time there were six indentations forming a circle three feet in diameter. Each undentation was two inches across and four inches deep.

By Sept. 23, the neck and head bones had turned black.

Mrs. Lewis tried in vain to get the authorities to check the incident but most of them told her the horse had been struck by lightning. None of them had visited the area.

A check of the area by a forestry offical with a Civil Defense geiger counter found the radiation count to be high.

The exhaust marks were radioactive as were the areas where the brush had been flattened. The count lessened however as readings were made closer to the dead horse.

Many residents of the area have reported sighting unidentified flying objects. One man said his car was
followed by a top shaped object and a student at nearby Adams State College said both his rear tires blew out as he approached an object as it sat in a field.

Kudos for putting forth this early report. It had not occured to me personally to examine the first report. While that does not mean much; it does not detract from the importance of examining first finds. All of the evidence seems to indicate a high degree of radiation. That radiation was found and that "authorities" failed to investigate seems to idicate for this story its own degree of "high strangeness'. Again ; its a good idea to examine first finds - especially with regards to a seemingly "old" story.

I don't know if anyone has read how the gods "Aliens" during the Egyptian times claimed to bring animals with different body parts that they used as a type of mount. Could it be the fact that they are mutilating the animals and removing certain parts of the animal in order to genetically recreate and make new types of animals for different parts of the universe?

reply to post by liquidself


Thanks Liquid. I have had a copy of this article for a number of years now. Got it off a microfiche at the public library. They have every page of every daily going back some time. I never did cross ref it to the New York Times of same date but should as sometimes these articles are shortened and NYT may have a longer version.

What would really be golden is to have the wire copies of stories that were never published.

The earliest report of the "Snippy" mutilation case — arguably the first such livestock mutilation attributed to UFOs — was a flawed report from the outset. This account above, with "circular exhaust marks" and squashed bushes inclusive, was not the "original report"... This one appears to be a much later account, heavily influenced by UFO hysteria.

The entire story was initially skewed by errant reportage as well as its unfortunate timing, within a few days of a UFO sighting elsewhere in Colorado. There was no apparent UFO connection in the original "Snippy" case, but the two stories occurring within days of one another were somehow merged into the longstanding UFO-livestock-mutilation account.

While the 1967 Snippy Mutilation Case is well known — a classic, in fact — the story was far too convoluted and corrupted with contradictory and flat-out bogus information over the decades.

For one example of how the story was skewed in the press, the horse that was mutilated in Alamosa, Colorado, in 1967 was not named "Snippy" at all — the name of the grossly mutilated 3-year-old mare was "Lady," but her real name was quickly lost to history. Not sensational enough, I guess. While the name "Snippy" was not exactly invented by the news media, it was borrowed, shall we say, from another horse that was living on the same Alamosa ranch as Lady... "Snippy" was just too good a name for the news media to pass up, so it stuck.

As the story goes, poor old Lady, in addition to having all the flesh melted off of her head and neck, endured no less than 4 autopsies and/or physical examinations by different "experts," who variously described her death as everything from truly bizarre to nothing out of the ordinary. When NICAP investigated an unrelated UFO sighting in Colorado at about the same time in 1967, Lady's case spun wildly out of control and came to be remembered as the first known instance of cattle mutilation by UFOs. Needless to say, the nut jobs were coming out of the woodwork proposing all the sort of fantasy and unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that you might find at... well... the expected places.

Supposedly, several months after Lady's death, a local fellow procured her carcass, boiled all the remaining schmutz off of it, and wired it into a standing skeletal display, which changed locations and ownership numerous times in the long years that followed. The present owner rescued the skeleton from a dilapidated shack where it had been stored for many years, and then tried to cash in on the find in a big way, marketing it on Ebay a couple of years ago as the original "Snippy"!!

I do not know if the owner ever realized the $50,000 bid he was expecting.

However, according to Jim Brandon (author of the classic "Weird America"), the actual skeleton of Lady the horse disintegrated "like shredded wheat" within a very short period of time after her death.

— Doc Velocity






[edit on 3/12/2010 by Doc Velocity]

Well these sort of things are always debunked by famous debunkers. They have debunked so many things in so many fields that I take what they say with about the same salt as what the government says. I have several famous debunkers books right here.

Look what they did the the Kensington Runestone and its discoverer for years. Called the guy every name in the book for years.

As far as the Lady and Snippy thing it is hardly of consequence but is the sort of things debunkers make hay over. The deal about the original bones turning dust or whatever just sounds like the sort of deal closer that debunkers are good at making up.

If one could come up with testimony from the forest agent that took the geiger readings or testimony that is not in this AP story ect well then. If there was really a broader story developing around there as reports indicate you can be certain that as many wrenches will be thrown into the works by the MIB as can be thrown. I have seen them work in person watched them and heard them with my own ears. They know how to bury a story.

Well, I wouldn't call Jim Brandon a "debunker" so much as a collector of odd information in the tradition of Charles Fort. Brandon (which isn't his real name, BTW) traveled around the country in the 1970s, personally investigating those unusual stories that had already undergone investigation and debunking by various other sources. Brandon would simply collect data first-hand and present it without judgment.

Which is what introduced me to the field of epistemology in the first place — epistemology is the study of how we collect data and offer it as "knowledge"... Charles Fort, probably the most famous epistemologist, used to sit in the great libraries for 8 hours a day for years on end, collecting these articles on various phenomena from the most reputable sources — science journals and the like — and he would present this data to you, compiled in his books, so that you could make up your own mind.

He didn't "debunk," but he presented the data and asked you to think, which is basically the same thing Jim Brandon did, except that Brandon did so even more objectively than did Fort, in my opinion.

— Doc Velocity

Charles Fort an epistomologist? really? So he is going toe to toe with guys like David Hume and Kant? Not to mention Wittgenstien? This is brand new information.

Originally posted by liquidself
Charles Fort an epistomologist? really? So he is going toe to toe with guys like David Hume and Kant? Not to mention Wittgenstien? This is brand new information.

I would say that Charles Fort, branded an anti-intellectual in his time, stood out more so than Hume or Emanuel Kant or Wittgenstein by virtue of the fact that Fort picked up a mirror manufactured by Science and held it up to the face of Science.

Then he said, Explain this, and explain your method of explanation.

I mean, here was a guy who collected some 65,000 individual articles and news stories and scientific blurbs from a variety of sources on both sides of the Atlantic (not an easy feat in pre-Internet days), but usually from the most respected science journals — Nature, for example, or The New England Journal of Medicine — and he'd index them. And this volume of data was all about various phenomena, from the supernatural to the very natural.

Much of the time, Fort was showcasing the absurdity of the quintessential Scientist, standing in a cultivated field with a block of limestone fallen from the sky, intoning, "There is no limestone in the sky, therefore, this limestone did not fall from the sky."

Fort's life work was about stabbing Science in the eye with a sharp stick, and he USED the sticks provided by Science itself.

In the absence of sound Scientific explanations for some really profoundly baffling phenomena, Fort manufactured absurd explanations. But he knew they were absurd.

The dig was intended to get scientists off of their asses and into the investigation of these really bizarre phenomena that take place in the world all around us every day.


— Doc Velocity







[edit on 3/13/2010 by Doc Velocity]

reply to post by Doc Velocity


Well basicaly thats why this article is posted.