[Ted Oliphant III is a documentary journalist, videographer and researcher residing in Berkeley, California. Among his numerous credits is a fine 1991 UFO documentary called "UFOs: A Need to Know." For two years, starting in August 1991, Ted worked as a patrolman and criminal investigator with the Police Department of Fyffe, Alabama. During that time, he assisted in investigating 35 cases of cattle mutilation in northern Alabama, involving the deaths of more than 40 animals. He has remained concerned about the bizarre nature and mysterious purpose of surgical animal mutilation ever since.
Oliphant recognizes that some researchers, notably Linda Moulton Howe, regard at least some of these mutilations as the activity of non-human intelligent beings. Although he does not rule out a possible alien connection in some cases, Oliphant told CNI News editor Michael Lindemann that he did not see a likely alien component in the mutilations he investigated in Alabama. Instead, he says, he saw evidence of highly covert government or military activity.
Recently, Oliphant began to explore the possible relationship between livestock mutilation, unmarked helicopter activities, and so-called "Mad Cow Disease." He began circulating the following report in early November, 1997. It is reprinted here, edited for length, with his permission.
Ted Oliphant can be reached by email at: alkahest@slip.net. His website, UFO Chronicles, can be accessed at http://www.ufochronicles.com.]
Copyright 1997 by Ted Oliphant III
All rights reserved.
Part One: The Threat Posed by Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies
Recently the British Secretary of Health admitted that Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), or "Mad Cow Disease" may be a species jumper. This means that humans exposed to animals with BSE can also contract it. This announcement set off a panic, with many countries (most notably France, Belgium, Germany and the United States) announcing boycotts of all British beef. There was serious consideration given to destroying all eleven million head of British cattle. But how do you dispose of 11,000,000 dead cows?
Some projections for the year 2010 suggest that up to 200,000 people could be affected each year from Mad Cow Disease-related Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). This is in Great Britain alone. People don't die from Mad Cow Disease, but from CJD after BSE infection.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease ("CJD") is a rare, fatal brain disorder which causes a rapid, progressive dementia and associated neuromuscular disturbances. The disease is often referred to as a sub-acute spongiform encephalopathy because it usually produces microscopic vacuoles in neurons that appear "sponge-like". [ref: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Research Foundation] Under the microscope, you can see "holes" in brain tissue.
CJD, BSE and other Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies are now referred to as "Prion" diseases, but there is still much debate in both the medical and scientific communities. In addition to CJD, suspected human "Prion" diseases include Kuru, Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease and Fatal Familial Insomnia. Kuru was originally found only among the Fore tribe in Papua, New Guinea and has been significantly reduced since the cessation of the ritual handling and eating of the brains of deceased relatives. Gerstmann-Straussler-Scheinker disease and fatal familial insomnia are predominantly hereditary disorders with the former usually marked by progressive coordination and movement problems and the latter evidenced by sleeping problems preceding dementia. They all are variations of CJD.
The suspected prion diseases occurring in animals consist of: Scrapie in sheep and goats (the pre-cursor to BSE); Transmissible Mink Encephalopathy; Chronic Wasting Disease of mule deer and elk; Feline Spongiform Encephalopathy and Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.
On March 20, 1996, the British Government, in a complete reversal of its previous position, stated that there was a possible link between BSE and CJD. This new acknowledgment arose from the identification of an apparently new strain of CJD which was discovered in 10 people under the age of 42, including some teenagers. Additionally, five of the people were associated with the meat and livestock industry. Scientists advising the British Government decided that the most likely explanation for this unusual outbreak was the consumption of beef from diseased cattle before 1989, when regulations were adopted for the disposal of potentially infectious cattle offal, including brains, and the use of sheep entrails as feed ceased. [ref: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Research Foundation]
On November 10, 1997 in England, Professor John Pattison, Chairman of the British Government's Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Board, announced on BBC TV's "Panorama" program that the national blood supply could be contaminated with a "new" human strain of mad cow disease. "It's still impossible to say with any accuracy, but there could be quite significant numbers of people incubating new variant CJD, raising the possibility that these people could be donating infected blood to the national stocks," he said.
At the present time, the only proven manner for contracting CJD from an infected person has been through iatrogenic transmission, an unintended consequence of a medical procedure using tainted human matter or surgical instruments. There are new, strict guidelines for the handling of suspected BSE, CJD and Kuru infected tissues. Once a brain biopsy is completed, surgical instruments, scalpels and the like, are disposed of because sterilization will not kill the Prions, or proteins. This raises the question: how many times, before the new guidelines were instituted, were contaminated surgical instruments used from patient to patient?
BSE & CJD have the potential to become Doomsday Diseases. They are very hard to detect and there is no cure or treatment. Neither is it known how many different places it could pop up: blood supplies, food supplies etc.
How did this happen and where did it come from?
The main suspicion traces the unnatural practice of feeding vegetarian animals "Rendered" food made of contaminated animals who are found dead. Rendered foods come from "Rendering plants" like the Avon plant in Geraldine, Alabama. There are hundreds of these plants throughout the United States and the world.
Rendering plants act as an animal disposal unit for dead livestock. Instead of burning and disposing of dead animals, they are converted to animal feeds.
I visited the Avon plant in 1993 and witnessed this process, where nothing is wasted. Area farmers and ranchers are invited to drop off any dead farm animal. The animals are crushed up in large mulchers and poured into enormous high pressure vats where they are cooked into multi-animal stew. The stew is further processed until it is packaged and sold to area farmers as livestock feed. I've witnessed pigs, goats, cows and horses brought to rendering plants. None of these animals are checked for disease or illness before they enter the food chain. Many cows that been found "mutilated" (missing various glands, tissue and organs) were brought to these rendering factories and processed into food for their still living relatives. Unlike Great Britain, which has had protections against such practices since 1989, there are no such guidelines here in the United States.
The incubation period for BSE and CJD can range from six months to beyond 40 years. That means that if you ingested contaminated meat prior to becoming a vegetarian, you can still get sick many years down the road.
What is the prospect for Mad Cow Disease to appear in the United States? What does our government know and what aren't they telling us?
Quietly and secretly, the United States Army and the Center For Disease Control have worked together, off and on, for years. Currently another organization, the National Institute of Health (NIH), has been tasked with tracking and studying Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathies and other Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs). Much of the research has been conducted at Rocky Mountain Labs. Originally it was thought that a foreign power might be trying to contaminate the American food supply. Instead, they discovered a new variation of TSEs.
The funding for this research is hidden in the NIH's black budget for the study of AIDS. Neither AIDS or BSE are viruses; rather, they are the consequences of immune systems that have been thwarted. The research has been kept quiet to prevent an outbreak of panic. But every American who's ever eaten meat has potentially been exposed to Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies.
Part Two: The Helicopter/Mutilation Connection
Over the last ten years, law enforcement in dozens of states have been trying to track and identify unmarked helicopters sighted where area livestock have been discovered dead under suspicious circumstances. The helicopters are seen before and after these cows are found in pastures, missing certain organs.
The same things are always taken. Bovine jaws are stripped to the bone, reproductive organs removed, entire tongues, digestive tracts and rectums are "cored" out. There is little to no blood at the scene. Many tissue samples, taken by police investigators and analyzed at veterinary labs, show signs of exposure to heat, three hundred degrees or more. The tissue is cooked and the incisions are cauterized by the heat. This prevents blood and other fluids from leaching onto the ground. Everything taken has to do with input, output and reproduction.
In recent mutilation cases -- Alabama 1993 and 1994, California 1996 and Florida 1997 -- pharmaceuticals have been found in bovine blood. They are: Barbiturates, Anti-coagulants, Synthetic Amphetamines, Aluminum-Titanium-Oxygen-Silicon flakes, and Antimony. According to recent police reports, some investigating officers have claimed that the concentrations of drugs found are not of veterinary nature, that the pharmaceutical concentrations found would be more associated with humans. Among those law enforcement agents who have thoroughly investigated these bovine excision sites, there is a consensus that some kind of medical testing is going on. The additional presence of helicopters on scene, before and after cattle are found dead and missing specific organs, leads both victimized farmers and investigating officers to conclude that there is a connection.
In 1993, I got a call from a man who told me that if I went to a certain place on a certain evening, I would see several helicopters land and refuel. He was right. Well after dark, two Chinook helicopters (the large twin rotor type) landed in the field behind some trees, carrying black plastic fuel bladders. Minutes later several smaller scout helicopters landed nearby, shut down, and crews from the Chinooks walked over with large hoses and refueled each of a half dozen helicopters. The whole operation took less than 30 minutes.
The Chinook helicopters took off and headed across the border where we tracked them to their home base, Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Now we knew who they were but we couldn't figure out why they refueled on Sand Mountain. The next morning a reporter, Steven Smith from the Rainsville Weekly Post, called the Public Affairs Officer, Captain William Gibbons of the 101st Airborne, and asked if they might've been in our area the previous evening. "We have no aircraft in your area, it wasn't us," said the captain. It certainly was.
So we knew then that some kind of secret operation was being conducted, but we didn't know what it was. We still don't, but when you look at each piece of evidence and try to use them as puzzle pieces, these so called "cattle mutilations" might be associated with government studies of epidemiology. With BSE & CJD and many other diseases being so devastating, is it possible that many alleged cases of "cattle mutilations" are actually evidence of our tax dollars at work?
The 101st Airborne Division is not suspected of being directly involved in the cattle mutilations that occurred October 1992 through May of 1993. But it seems possible they may have refueled the other witnessed unmarked helicopters that we eventually traced to Maxwell Air Force Base.
When unmarked helicopters were witnessed by local farmers and law enforcement officers, Albertville Police's Chief of Detectives Tommy Cole called in the Federal Aviation Administration to investigate. Detective Cole had lost a cow to the phantom surgeons and his wife had seen an unmarked helicopter over their pasture on January 8, 1993, the day before they discovered one of their Black Angus steers mutilated.
An FAA investigator came to Albertville and Cole took him for a ride in his police car. The FAA investigator was skeptical until an unmarked helicopter flew near them. The FAA investigator couldn't believe his own eyes and pulled out a hand-held radio and hailed the helicopter. The helicopter pilot didn't respond and ignored demands that he identify himself. This infuriated the FAA investigator, who had now reversed his skepticism. He was able to trace the helicopter to Maxwell Air Force Base in southern Alabama. When he launched an inquiry at the base, he was immediately told to drop it and never talk about again.
(A week later, Chief Detective Cole received a call after midnight. It was the FAA investigator. It seems that while out in a boat on nearby Lake Guntersville, he and his family had witnessed a large triangle-shaped craft flying maneuvers above them. I wonder if he ever reported that to his superiors?)
I don't pretend to know the solution to either the bovine excision cases nor the appearance of the mystery helicopters. I don't know that America faces a threat from BSE, but I do feel that these questions deserve our attention.
Part Three: Secret Source Prompts Current Investigation
For the last seven years, I have had a very good source of information. His name is Phil. Strangely, he's been able to tell me what would happen next; and he shared prolific insights into the situations I'd placed myself in. It was Phil's idea that I research Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies and their connection to the investigations I carried out as a police officer in 1992 & 1993. When I checked out his statements, I found they fit in with several left-over puzzle pieces from the official investigations carried out by myself, the Alabama State Troopers and the Albertville Police Department. Additionally, a second witness was able to prove his direct involvement with the covert refueling of helicopters on Sand Mountain in 1993. It was that information, coupled with Phil's identical information, that allowed our investigative team to track some of the mystery helicopters back to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
I should state for the record that there is no proof the Air Force was involved, other than the fact that they allowed the helicopters to operate out of Maxwell. There is no indication that the Air Force knew what the helicopters were doing. There is no evidence to the contrary, either. I have to say the same about the Chinook helicopters from the 101st Airborne. Though they did refuel the helicopters and later lied about it, there's no proof they knew who they were refueling, or why. And again, there's no evidence to the contrary.
I have to protect the identity of Phil, because he told me recently that if his full name was used, he'd deny ever knowing me. That was coming from a friend. He told me to expect "a lot of heat" over my articles. We'll see what happens. Now, on with facts.
In 1993, Phil told me that some of the helicopters we were seeing were equipped with thermographic infra-red scanners. These scanners allow pilots to see in the dark and fog. Every living or moving thing produces a heat signature. Whether it's the exhaust from an automobile or a farmer hiding in the woods with a high powered rifle, they can be seen easily via infra-red scanners. I know the technology exists, because when I was in the Air Force, the B-52 bombers where I was stationed had similar units called FLIR (Forward Looking Infra-red) in pods that extended from below the fuselage. It allowed our pilots to fly in bad weather and at night.
Here's how and why this technology is used in the bovine excisions cases. Again, the information comes from Phil; the conclusions are mine.
When a cow is in trouble, sick or dying, the first thing it experiences is peripheral circulatory shutdown. This causes an immediate temperature reduction of the affected animal's outside skin, or hide. When a helicopter flies low and slow over area pastures and has the infra-red scanner operating, it will notice a cow with a lower thermographic reading than the others in the herd. Find the cold cow, and you've identified a cow in trouble.
Somebody wants to know why that cow is in trouble. Since the cow will probably die anyway, it's a good choice for sample extraction. It's also a good way to narrow down farms that might be affected by disease.
This answers the question everybody always asks: "Why wouldn't the government just go around and buy cows at the livestock sale? It would be cheaper than using helicopters. They could raise their own cattle on their own land and nobody would know about it." That was always a hard question to answer, until now.
There's no need to sample animals that don't appear to be at risk. If you are performing true epidemiology, you would go state to state and look for sick cows . You can't do that at a livestock sale, unless you marked the animals and came back and bought them after they were transported to the sales-lot. Even then, you'd have no assurance the cow you'd marked would be offered up for sale. Furthermore, time is of the essence. An ailing cow might not ever make it to the sale. True epidemiology requires scanning as many cows as you could, in as many different areas. You'd have to do this over the entire continental U.S. to make accurate studies and samplings.
The vast majority of the cows (female) that I found missing organs and tissues had calved (given birth) within 2 or 3 weeks before being found dead. That's significant when we remember that BSE and CJD can also be hereditary diseases.
In a couple of cases we investigated, the animal's blood had been thoroughly drained (exsanguinated) and there was no blood on the animals or on the ground. Early on in the scientific study of CJD and BSE, it was determined that body fluids were highly volatile and the scientists would drain the blood entirely after sedating the animal. A curare-like drug immobilized the animal, and the animal would die of blood loss. This may explain why no veterinarian or laboratory was ever able to tell farmers or police the animal's cause of death. That was always a big mystery. Now I believe some of the animals I examined actually died of shock from blood loss. A curare-like drug is necessary to immediately incapacitate the animal; this prevents any struggle so the work can be carried out quickly. You don't want to stick around a long time and get caught by an irate farmer with a high powered rifle.That's why helicopters are the perfect vehicle to get in and out fast. Because these cows identified through lower temperature signatures will probably die soon anyway, it's less of a moral issue for the teams performing the samplings.
Phil tells me that there are three different groups studying Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies. There is the public group, associated with Nobel Prize winner Stanley Prusiner. The second group is private and headed by a man whose name I will hold onto for the moment. The third is the government group, funded by black budget. The groups don't always share information, so each is trying to figure out what the other is doing.
By the 1960s, 112 different strains of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies had been identified. I don't have any information on how many have been identified today. I don't know if the strains identified here in the U.S. are more, or less, dangerous than those still threatening Great Britain.
I don't pretend to explain every bovine excision case that's occurred across the country. I can only speak to those cases where I was directly involved in on-site investigations, working as a police officer. In 90% of the cases we investigated, helicopters were reported seen over the affected pastures the day before or after suspicious livestock deaths occurred. Because of the foreign substances found at the scene and in the bloodstreams of the animals, we (farmers and cops alike) suspected at that time that there was some kind of medical testing being performed. With the new information I've been handed recently, described in this article, I am even more convinced that we were on the track [of] the covert surveillance and study of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies across America.
The author is eternally grateful to the following researchers and investigators for their many contributions, critiques and research presented in this article:
Ed Gehrman, The Sonoma County Free Press, Sonoma County, California
Roland Heynkes, a Molecular Biologist working in Aachen, Germany
Sgt. Ron Ogletree, Post Commander, Alabama State Troopers, Gadsden, Alabama
Tommy Cole, Chief of Detectives, Albertville Police, Albertville, Alabama
Officers Ken Mote & Mike Rice, Albertville Police
Corey Dobson, Ranger, Bucks Pocket State Park, Buck's Pocket, Alabama
Carey & Teri Baker. Rainsville Weekly Post, Rainsville, Alabama
Steven Smith, Rainsville Weekly Post, Rainsville, Alabama
Mayor Boyd Graben, Fyffe, Alabama
Chief Junior Garmany, Fyffe Police Department, Fyffe, Alabama
Chief Fred Works, Fyffe Police Department
Original file name: CNI - Oliphant.Mad Cow.final
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