• Vol 19.2 • April/May 2004 •

Believe it or not, that’s an orb poking out from under the plant in the photo. Or maybe it’s a dust spot that got caught in the flash of the digital camera. It depends on who’s right or whom you want to believe. Personally I’m glad that in this issue you’ll find a response from Bruce Maccabee setting forth his description of how the mysterious orb-like objects find their way into flash photos. And you’ll find Ken Levin’s response along with an orb photo from publisher Ann Miller. This is the kind of debate we relish and we hope we receive much more of it in future issues.

The same kind of debate has been heating up our phone lines regarding the John Lear briefing and the Steve Bassett response in the previous issue.So to add another debate to the pot, in this issue you’ll find a comprehensive article on cattle mutilations, along with some telling photos. Cattle mutilations have purportedly taken place all over the globe, from the American southwest to Europe. And it’s always inspired the same kind of questions: who’s doing it, how are they doing it, and why?

Years ago, however, there was a different take on cattle mutilations from English documentary filmmaker Bruce Burgess. Bruce had interviewed a number of experts not only on cattle mutilations themselves but related subjects about the areas of the southwest where they had been taking place and came up with an interesting set of links. Working from insight or just on a hunch, Burgess asked one of his experts about the nuclear testing the United States had done in the 1950s in Nevada. This was also an article that we’d done in UFO Magazine way back in the 1980s. Tracing the prevailing wind patterns from the nuclear test sites, Burgess found that, indeed, radioactive fallout would have been carried to the very areas where there had been reported cattle mutilations. A link, perhaps, but not an answer to the questions of how and who.

Might there have been a way, Burgess asked, or a technology that would have allowed mutilators to lower themselves without a sound from a hovering silent or “black” helicopter, complete their task, and get back without being noticed? Burgess found just such an interesting possibility looking at an advertisement for a silent helicopter in which the chopper lowers itself within camera range of a sleeping dog who is not even roused by the aircraft. It would allow an urban commando unit to deploy from the hovering aircraft and get back without any noise.

Now for the who. What if the extent of radioactive fallout had been so substantial that the government wanted to find out the toxicity levels in the ground and how those poisons might still be processed through animals that took their nourishment from the ground? Cattle. Maybe to test the soft tissue for radioactive presence you’d have to look at the orifice where it comes in—the mouth—and, similarly, where it goes out—the rectum. And that’s exactly where many of the excisions have taken place.

A secret plan to test for radioactive fallout in the soil over decades?A dust mote or a sentient globe?

What do you think?