Chasing Helicopters in the Dark

Cattle mutilations, government lies, and my mama's midnight rides through 1970s Texas.

The 70s. Most of you probably remember them like a CNN special—the music, the political upheaval, gas lines, Charlie’s Angels.

No one who lived during the 70s can forget the commercial where a Native American cried when he saw the polluted highways and a passing car threw a bag of trash at him. (The actor, Iron Eyes Cody, was Italian American, but nobody knew that then.) Or the “Aye, Aye, Aye Aye/I am the Frito Bandito”, which was retired in the early 1970s after complaints about stereotyping. There were wonderfully violent Saturday morning cartoons, and Mr. Peppermint.

Those were the days.

But what I remember about the 70s so vividly is that it was the decade my siblings all left me by myself with Mama. Not all at once. Just one by one, until it was only us.

We were living near Prairieville, having just moved from Oak Cliff, some 60 miles away. Mama wasn’t happy. Her friends and family were in Dallas, and Daddy moved her to the country, where her only entertainment was drinking and loading my friend and me up in the car to chase the slow, low-flying helicopters that were circling the area at night, supposedly carrying satanic doctors that were mutilating cattle in the area.

Or, it could have been UFOs. No one knew. That was part of the appeal.

Let me back up, because this story is a doozy.

It was the summer of 1975. Around Kaufman County, Texas, the news and neighbors reported that nearly a dozen cattle had been mutilated with surgical precision. Their eyes, sex organs, and lymph nodes were removed, but no blood was left at the scene. No footprints. Nothing except the mutilated bovine carcass. The men in overalls at the Dairy Queen whispered how natural predators and buzzards wouldn’t touch the cattle. The county was in hysterics.

In the midst of the hysteria, ranchers were also reporting strange lights in the sky days and weeks before a mutilation. And this phenomenon wasn’t just happening in Kaufman County. It was happening all over the Southwest.

In 2002, I was teaching the newspaper class in Scurry-Rosser and told the kids about this phenomenon and how I cowered in the back floorboard of my mother’s Ford Galaxy 500 as she stepped on the gas at 2 a.m. following the low-flying helicopters. That was the part that got me, even then. The plan was always just… keep going.

The next day, one of my students brought in photos of the mutilated cattle his grandfather had taken on their farm. So we started digging into the story.

The reports ran like a fault line across the Southwest and the Plains—thousands of animals mutilated, depending on who was counting, and nobody ever agreed on that part. When we started digging, we didn’t have to go far. The Federal Bureau of Investigation had already done the filing in neat little folders entitled “Animal Mutilations” (FBI).

Among the FBI material were secondhand UFO sightings, which the government seemed happy to let the people and the press believe. That, or sinister cults of doctors flying around at night to find cattle to remove their organs surgically. Either way, it kept the questions pointed away from the men in charge.

In September 1976, Ed Sanders—who’d written that lurid book about Charles Manson, The Family—published a piece in Oui claiming the Hopkins County sheriff had linked the mutilations to a cult calling itself the Devils Disciples (Duke) (The Black Vault).

Sanders report noted that a cult intended to poison a city’s water supply. The threats were taken so seriously that in one small town, city officials warned the citizenry that two unnamed people had been targeted for slaughter by the mutilators. They never revealed which two.

Between the satanists and the UFOs, the state was whipped into a frenzy. Everybody picked a villain.

One of the most interesting FBI files in the Vault release includes a report by New Mexico State Police Officer Gabe Valdez about a man named Manuel Gomez, of Dulce, New Mexico. In April 1978, Gomez was checking his cattle when he came upon a mutilated white bull, drained of blood—but with no blood stains, and no visible blood on the ground beneath it. Valdez wrote that a suspected aircraft had landed twice, leaving three 14-inch “pod” marks in a triangular shape. Smaller four-inch marks followed the animal for about 600 feet. Tracks showed the animal had struggled and fallen. The report also notes scorched grass around the marks—and later adds that the scorched areas were determined to be radioactive (FBI Vault: Animal Mutilation files).

In another of Valdez’s reports, the Gomez family herd was hit again when another Hereford-Charlais cross bull was mutilated. “The bull sustained visible bruising around the brisket, seeming to indicate that a strap was used to lift and lower the animal to and from an aircraft” (FBI).

The report notes that four-inch tripod marks followed the animal for about 100 feet. “These animals are picked up by aircraft, mutilated elsewhere, and returned and dropped from the aircraft. This is indicated by bruised marks and broken bones on the cattle…One has to admit that whoever is responsible for the mutilations is very well organized with boundless technology and financing, and secrecy” (FBI).

A report referenced in the files from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory determined that atropine, a tranquilizer and a blood anti-coagulant, was used in high doses on the mutilated animals (FBI).

Despite there being thousands of cases of livestock mutilations reported in the 1970s, the federal government dismissed the cases as merely animal predation.

The trouble with that explanation is history. In 1968, the Army’s nerve gas testing at Dugway Proving Ground in Skull Valley killed thousands of sheep outright (Smithsonian). A year later, Richard Nixon announced the end of America’s biological weapons program—officially (Nixon),

Unofficially is where it gets interesting. During the Church Committee era, reporting and disclosures showed that intelligence agencies had continued to pursue and stockpile poisons and toxins, even while the public line stayed safely tucked behind the phrase defensive only (CIA Report). Turns out that word can stretch a long way in the dark.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh’s book Chemical and Biological Warfare—America’s Hidden Arsenal, botulinum toxin is so potent that tiny quantities—measured in grams, not barrels—can be catastrophic (Hersh).

And here’s the part that won’t stay in the 70s. In April 2023, Texas authorities investigated six dead cows in Madison, Brazos, and Robertson counties—tongues removed, clean cuts, no blood spill, and no obvious tracks (KSAT). In Oregon, a separate string of “surgical” cattle deaths drew national attention beginning in 2019 (NPR). And the story resurfaced again in 2025 with new reporting and a documentary (OPB).

Still, no definitive public answer, just theories ranging from predators to people to the paranormal.

But none of those headlines explain the real reason. Mama chased helicopters because she was bored, stuck in the country, and watched too much TV.

When I think back to that summer, I can still see the pale glow of the Ford Galaxy’s dash lighting up her hands on the wheel. Cigarette dangling from her lips. Smoke hanging in the air. A beer tucked between her thighs. My friend and I huddled on the back floorboard. Mama leaned forward, squinting into the dark, tracking that slow chop-chop-chop over the tree line.

She never told us what she planned to do if we found the thing. Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe she just wanted to see if she could lasso it.

That’s what those mutilations did to people out here. They made folks stare into a black pasture and pick their poison: the government, the devil, or the sky. Mama chose the sky. And I’m still down there on the floorboard, years later, listening for the rotors.

—Carol

Note: In 2002, the Scurry-Rosser Reporter, the student newspaper of Scurry-Rosser High School that I sponsored, ran a version of this story.