TRANSCRIPT Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Ep. 405: Ross and Carrie Don’t Mutilate Cattle: Strange Harvest Edition

[00:00:00]

Carrie Poppy: Hello! Happy MaxFunDrive, listeners.

Ross Blocher: I know you’re about to enjoy this episode of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, but did you also know it’s Maximum Fun Drive?

Carrie Poppy: That’s right. This is such a great time to support us. MaxFunDrive only happens once a year, and that’s when we ask you to give us just like five bucks a month. And what do they get, Ross?

Ross Blocher: Hundreds of hours of bonus content, fun incentives. Listen to our latest episode to hear all about it, or you can go straight to MaximumFun.org/join to join, to boost, or to upgrade.

Carrie Poppy: Happy MaxFunDrive!

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Carrie Poppy: Hello! Welcome to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, the show where we don’t just report on fringe science, spirituality, claims of the paranormal. No way! We take part ourselves.

Ross Blocher: Yep, when they make the claims, we show up, so you don’t have to. I’m Ross Blocher.

Carrie Poppy: And I’m Carrie Poppy. And it is my favorite time of year!

Ross Blocher: Maximum Fun Driiiive!

Carrie Poppy: MaxFunDriiive! Woop-woop! Woop-woop-woopwoop-woop!

Ross Blocher: Yay! And it’s probably your favorite time of the year as well, because it’s the best time to contribute to all of the amazing content at Maximum Fun, which includes Oh No, Ross and Carrie!. That’s where we are. We’re on that podcast network.

Carrie Poppy: That’s right! And every year we say, please, please, join us if you can. And we only do this for two weeks a year, so you gotta put up with it, people. But if you haven’t joined yet, this will be the time that we beg your asses.

Ross Blocher: Two weeks, roughly 1/26th of the year, about 4% of the year. Is that so much?

Carrie Poppy: Is it?!

Ross Blocher: And I know we always tell you at the end of the episode, you can support us at MaximumFun.org/join. But this is where we really say this is the best time to do it. You get a lot of extra incentives. So, we’re going to be telling you about that throughout this episode, which is going to be great in and of itself.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god. It’s going to pepper this episode with just a little bit of extra something. And you know what I’m looking forward to as well this week, Ross?

Ross Blocher: A live stream?

Carrie Poppy: Yes! So, we have a big surprise for our listeners.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, listen up.

Carrie Poppy: So, if you listen to Oh No, Ross and Carrie! and you think, “Man, it seems like they put a bunch of work into this.” Guess what? It’s even more than that! So, we thought it would be fun if you could see us record an episode and you were kind of a fly on the wall. You get to see what an episode recording is like. You get to see us pause and look things up and edit, maybe.

Ross Blocher: Now that you say it, it sounds incredibly boring. But! Maybe you’re interested in seeing behind the scenes on our process.

Carrie Poppy: I think that’s interesting! (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: Absolutely. I’m teasing. It’s gonna be at Drew Spears Productions.

Carrie Poppy: Yes. Yes. But don’t show up there. They’ll be streaming it for us.

Ross Blocher: And the place you can show up is at YouTube.com/@onrac. O-N-R-A-C. So, YouTube.com/@onrac. Yeah, the @ symbol is kind of awkward. You just have to say “at symbol”.

Carrie Poppy: Anyway, it’s Friday at noon, from noon to five.

Ross Blocher: At symbol noon to five.

Carrie Poppy: Will we take up the whole time? We don’t know. We don’t know! Listen, this is a real-life experience—you’re just showing up. You’re just seeing what the process is like. We’re not talking to you. You get to be a spy. You get to spy on the process.

Ross Blocher: We’ve never done this before. And weren’t we going to have Drew or somebody keep an eye on the chat?

(Carrie confirms.)

We can take comments and stuff as relevant.

Carrie Poppy: We’re not talking to them, Ross! We can’t talk to them!

Music: No? Oh—no?

Music: That’s the whole gimmick!

Ross Blocher: Ignore the people. Okay. Got it.

Carrie Poppy: But if there’s some emergency or something, yes, Drew’s there.

Ross Blocher: Someone’s like, “Carrie, your hair is on fire.” That message might be conveyed to Carrie.

Carrie Poppy: I’m really gonna hope that someone there in person has also noticed.

Ross Blocher: It might be on a part of your hair I’m just not seeing from my vantage point.

Carrie Poppy: Then I’ll risk it.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Join us. And that’s this Friday, March 22nd, and that’s 12 to 5PM Pacific time. So, you’re going to have to do whatever conversions that you do for your part of the world.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, today let’s talk about Linda Moulton Howe. ‘Cause we never stop talking about Linda Moulton Howe.

Ross Blocher: Right. So, our last episode was a lunch that you attended with Linda Moulton Howe. And she gave one main keynote at this year’s conference, and I was confused originally—because I remember seeing the listing on the website originally and in this printed, lovely schedule that they make for us—that she was giving a talk called, “Holographic Universe?”, question mark. And then when they were printing DVDs later, they were labeling it “Holographic Universe?”, question mark, because that was originally going to be her talk.

But I have a theory here, and you and I have both experienced this. Like, sometimes you sign up for a conference to give a talk and they’re like, “Hey, what would you like to talk about?”

And you’re like, “Well, these are four talks that I have prepared. Would you like one of these? Or should I come up with something new? I was thinking about this, but it would take more prep time.”

[00:05:00]

So, I’m guessing this is one of her kind of go-tos, and I think she pivoted for another go-to. But originally the talk was going to be about this. “Astrophysicists are reporting increasing data that our universe is a projected hologram, but by whom?! In what other dimension? And why?! Join Linda as she uncovers her latest findings and shares exclusive revelations from scientists who have come to this fascinating assessment in their research.” That would have been interesting. But! She did a flex. She went for a totally different talk. For all we’ve talked about Linda Moulton Howe and her discussions of tall whites and Trantaloids and whatever else, we haven’t talked about what really got her started. The first topic that brought her into this high strangeness world of aliens, alien abductions, all of that related alien phenomena.

So, at whatever time right before the conference, she said, “You know what? Let’s do the high strangeness in animal mutilations and human abductions talk.” And that’s what she gave at the conference.

Carrie Poppy: Mm! Cool. Okay. So, yeah, cattle mutilation is kind of where she started all of her journalistic—well, at least her most famous journalistic work.

Ross Blocher: She gave a little bit of a bio. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to kind of set the stage for this talk that she gave, but then we’ll keep jumping back to this documentary that she made that I guess kind of put her on the map and won her an Emmy. We’ll talk about that.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, she got a daytime Emmy for this coverage. So, cattle mutilations, should we set up what that is?

(Ross confirms.)

So, it’s one of those phrases like crop circles that’s like, well, first of all, it’s literally true. You know, cattle literally got mutilated somehow. The circles in the crops appeared somehow, but the phrase is mostly used by people who think that there’s some otherworldly phenomenon involved. In the cattle mutilation claim, the idea is that there are all of these farmers and ranchers who have found their cattle dead on the ground with no explanation, often the blood is completely drained from the body, parts of the innards that you wouldn’t expect to be gone are gone. It’s just so precisely manicured that it almost looks like the coroner came and took the animal apart. And that’s so inexplicable that Linda Moulton Howe and others have gone all the way to outer space to explain it.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a good point, because many of these phenomena that we talk about, that Linda talks about, are based on things that you can’t really back up. Like, even the aerial phenomena is not particularly reproducible. But crop circles, yes. There are crop circles there. Were they done by pranksters with boards? Maybe. Were they done by aliens? Maybe. But yeah, like you say, we raise a lot of cattle on this planet, because us humans like to eat cattle. But sometimes other things get to them first. And as you might guess, we’re going to be talking a lot about dead animal bodies. But I don’t think we’ll be too graphic. She’s not too graphic about it. I don’t know. Is that a correct warning?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I don’t know. I might talk about how gross animals are. I don’t know.

Ross Blocher: Well, she even said herself, “I’m not focusing on the gore.” Because Linda Moulton Howe will admit that sometimes cows and other creatures get eaten by predators. And cows aren’t the only ones either. Like, every now and then she’ll be like, “Oh, and here’s a bunch of goat photos. And this is a case with a kangaroo.” So, it’s not just cows, but they are kind of like the primary subject here.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. So, the obvious counter explanation in most cases is a predator, but there’s also the possibility of a prankster—someone who’s heard about cattle mutilations sees a dead cow and decides to mutilate the cow. So, those are going to be our two main explanations, but they are not Linda’s two main explanations. So, those—in fact, prankster seems to not even occur to her.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. If anything, it’s a side consideration. But yeah, she really doesn’t raise  it. But speaking to her credentials, we were talking about her making this film. She did give a little bit of her background that she graduated from Stanford in 1968 with a master’s in communications. She did a film for a medical center about using computers to analyze particular bombardments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. That all sounds very interesting and cool. But she ended up at a CBS station in Denver, and she would make small documentaries, live studio productions, about issues specific to Colorado. And at the time she was married to Larry Howe. That’s how she got Howe who worked for Time Incorporated.

But she just happened to be there when the cattle mutilation thing kicked off. This was becoming a local story. It really did seem to start with Colorado. And so, she produced a TV documentary about that, for which she won an Emmy. So, let’s go ahead and talk about that film. And every now and then I can shoot forward to her kind of present attitude about these issues that she kickstarted in 1980 with this documentary.

[00:10:00]

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, we had never actually gone back and watched this. So, we found it on Amazon prime for $15.

Ross Blocher: If you want to rent it, you can do it for just six bucks. But if you want to own it forever, like we do, 15 bucks.

Carrie Poppy: So, this was first broadcast in May 1980, but it’s worth pointing out that four months before—in January 1980—the FBI had already closed their investigation of cattle mutilations. And they had come to the conclusion that this was mostly predation and occasionally what I would call pranksters.

(Ross confirms.)

Yeah. But you know, they just said—and occasionally, yeah, knives. Occasionally some kind of human activity. So, this was already outside of the established opinion when she launched this.

Ross Blocher: Of the FBI, no less. By the way, before we get much further, I keep mentioning that it won an Emmy, and she keeps talking about how she won an Emmy for her work on this. It won a regional Emmy for audio design.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, audio design. Oh, I remembered it as editing. Okay. Wow. Audio design, good.

Ross Blocher: It’d be better if it was editing, ‘cause she did work on the editing with her cinematographer, but no. It was for the audio design.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, she didn’t even design the audio? It’s not even her?

Ross Blocher: I mean, she played a role, but there’s a very prominent track of this music, this synthesizer music. And they had a credit at the end for the synthesizer, which I love. (Chuckles.) So, I hope she shared it with that guy.

Carrie Poppy: Interesting. Okay. Oh, wow. Huh. Well, so she tells us that cattle mutilations have haunted ranchers and law enforcement for a decade in the US and Canada. And even though it’s been three years since she first released this movie—she’s telling us this in a voiceover—that mutilations continue, but there’s just been almost no media coverage. She acknowledges that the usual explanation is predator attack. She’s not trying to say otherwise, but she just doesn’t feel like that totally adds up.

Ross Blocher: The version that we’re watching on Amazon Prime is clearly a later rebroadcast, because it includes footage of her from 1983. And at the end, there’s another copyright for 1988. But as far as I can tell, they re-released this version in 1983 and kind of all the newest examples in it are from then. Essentially, I think the first five minutes was newer material added on, and then it went mostly back to the previous version.

Carrie Poppy: That’s right. It seems like it was three years had passed between the airing and this newer footage.

Ross Blocher: And I’ll just say now, she does go on to produce a 1993 version where she comes back to this and kind of retells the story of Strange Harvest.

And speaking of Strange Harvest, I can’t help but think that was obviously a reference to “Strange Fruit”. Which is a civil rights song, sung by Billie Holiday famously, that is about lynching. And you know, the metaphor should be apparent there for people not familiar with it. You know, an incredibly haunting, powerful song. And I feel like by calling this Strange Harvest, she was—I don’t know—just kind of latching on to this framing in a way that makes me a little uncomfortable.

Carrie Poppy: You’re getting the stolen valor heebie-jeebies?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. That she’s saying that this issue is just as important as race relations in America.

Carrie Poppy: If she’s even thinking that. But this is also the woman who’s like, “Tall whites, tall whites!” She may just be like so clueless she doesn’t see that.

Ross Blocher: And she does write a book in 1989 about this phenomenon called An Alien Harvest: Further Evidence Linking Animal Mutilations and Human Abductions to Alien Lifeforms that had a foreword by Jacques Vallée. So, maybe at that point someone had been like, “Uh, maybe don’t use that,” but then she used it in her later film. So, anyways, just some thoughts on that.

Carrie Poppy: So, in this hosting footage of her walking around a cattle field in 1983, she says that since September 1982, “I have received 12 mutilation reports from sheriff’s offices, all relating to bizarre cuts, not predators.”

Ross Blocher: Wow. What a bold move just to kind of proclaim that these are definitely not predators. Predators could not have done this.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. And okay. So, she’s gotten them directly from sheriffs’ offices. We have 12 specific reports. Okay! Let’s roll right through those, Linda! Tell us about those!

Okay, so the first incident she talks about happened in 1982. It was Bill and Linda Zuris from Calhan, Colorado.

Ross Blocher: And Colorado will be a theme here. This is very much a Colorado documentary.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, and the area that she’s from, or at least the area where a lot of these things were happening, is very LDS heavy. And I’m curious how that played into the whole cult thing. ‘Cause that—you know, the LDS were very big in Satanic Panic.

Ross Blocher: I’ve also gotta say, a month before this footage was filmed, I was born! So, this is kind of just fun thinking between her first releasing this and releasing the updated version, I came into the world!

[00:15:00]

And you, not far afterward.

Carrie Poppy: Well, in 1983— Yeah, in 1983, when she’s walking through a literal field of bullshit, I was born!

Ross Blocher: Yeah! Though it was February. You came later.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, that’s true.

(Ross laughs.)

Okay, so here’s what done happened with Bill and Linda. At 12, they go and check on their cattle as they always do. Everything’s fine. They go about their day; they live their lives. Then at 5PM, Bill had to go to the store for a load of hay. So, he’s in his semi, he’s up high, and he can see over the highway. And he sees a dead cow a street away, still on his own property. So, he tells his wife, and she’s like, “Oh gosh, I’ll go look.”

So, she goes and checks on this dead cow, and she sees that half of the cow’s udders are gone. She could see into the stomach cavity. The rectum’s partially removed, the eyes are bulging out. And she says, “I was horrified by the thought of what could do this in broad daylight.”

Ross Blocher: Bum, bum, bum!

Carrie Poppy: Ba-ba-ba! Ba-da! So, I have a guess. Coyotes? Coyotes hunt during the day.

Ross Blocher: Oh, they might do that, yeah. ‘Cause—

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. They’re opportunistic hunters. They just wait ‘til you leave.

Ross Blocher: They want to eat cows that you’re not around to see. Yep. Okay, case solved.

Carrie Poppy: Asked and answered.

Ross Blocher: Oh, well, the FBI already ruled that most of these are predation. Okay. But yeah, they’re convinced that this could not happen, as is the next sheriff that Linda talks to. There’s going to be a lot of sheriffs on screen. And I got to say, it’s a fun documentary just to get the slice of life in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And so many people are wearing cowboy hats and talking with a twang.

Carrie Poppy: These people are right out of Central Casting for like a UFO movie that’s being too on the nose making fun of, you know, like people from a certain economic class in a certain area. It feels like that, and then you’re like, “Oh no, these were real people.” But yeah, the woman in this movie first bit, Linda, I really—oh, actually, yeah, they’re both named Linda. But Linda Zuris, I was so curious what was going on in her head, because as she’s talking, she’s just—she’s thinking so carefully about each word that I was like, “What instructions are you following?”

Ross Blocher: Oh, right. Like, yeah, you were told to not say something that would sound obvious one way or the other. Quite possibly.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. It was just like too carefully plotted.

Ross Blocher: Another thing I was thinking as I was watching both of these documentaries was that probably a lot of these people, I would guess, are just excited to be on camera. Like, “Hey! Someone with a camera wants to talk to me. Oh, about animals? Okay, sure.”

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) “Yeah, oh, about cattle mutilation stuff? Oh, she thinks they’re aliens?! Woah.”

Like, by the time you get all the way there, you’ve already signed up.

Ross Blocher: And it is a little ways in before she actually mentions aliens or UFOs. Like, at this point, she’s just setting up the mystery. Something’s not right here! But yeah, she talks to this first sheriff.

Carrie Poppy: Theron Wilde.

Ross Blocher: Wilde! What a great name. Theron Wilde.

Carrie Poppy: Amazing name. I went and looked for him in the newspaper archives, and he did not make the papes! So, he must’ve been thrilled when Linda shows up and is like, “You’re the star!”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, totally! He was in front of some kind of parking lot, like staring into the camera. Again, with like the wide brimmed hat and the twang.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, and she has him do that thing where (adopting a country twang) he pulls the car in and walks out and puts one foot up on his hood.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) And he says, I just, “I don’t feel a predator can do these things. He can’t just eat part of the penis and then just stop.”

And both Carrie and I thought unless he gets scared off! Or it’s a small creature and it got just what it wanted.

Carrie Poppy: Or it’s a human, and then—many things could make that happen. But this guy, Theron Wilde, he has a plan. He wants the crime lab in Cheyenne to put their resources into it. But in order to get them to do it, he’s gonna have to get them to investigate this like a human murder? Which they can’t, because it’s not a human murder.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, what does that mean?

Carrie Poppy: You know, if a human is dead and we don’t know why, we put all this money into figuring out why. But if an animal is dead and we don’t know why, then the necropsy is really just the responsibility of the person who owns the animal and however much information that person wants or doesn’t want. You know, when I worked at Farm Sanctuary, when animals would die, sometimes we’d order necropsies just to make sure they weren’t sick with something the other animals could get. But then you’re just saying, “Tell me these five or six things, and then we’ll figure it out.” No one’s like sitting there with a detective magnifying for you, being like, “HOW DID THE ANIMAL DIE?!” That’s just not how it’s treated.

Ross Blocher: Right. So, what does he think he means when he’s saying that?

Carrie Poppy: Well, I think he’s trying to use the resources of the criminal justice system, knowing that the criminal justice system doesn’t protect animals.

Music: He’s like, “Let’s get homicide on this.”

Music: So, he’s going to have to ask them to use their human resources toward this.

[00:20:00]

But this higher agency is like, “Well, no. We’re not going to use our murder money on how your dang cow died.”

Ross Blocher: Right, right. We keep jumping back and forth between other cases. They show us a couple animals from Wyoming. It’s always like related but never quite the same. So, it’s some combination of the private parts, maybe teats, part of an udder.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, half the udder being removed seems to be a calling card for someone.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. The eyes being attacked, the jaw, but they’ll show these photos and usually, most of the animal is intact. You’re not like looking at just a skeleton or this big mess. Usually it looks like an animal and just little parts of it have been cored out, eaten away.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. There’s a lot of talk of the rectum in this, whether the rectum was pulled out or not. And I kept thinking, well, if it’s an animal, I guess I would assume that they would avoid the rectum. And if it was a human, I would think they probably wouldn’t, right? ‘Cause you’re using your mouth if you’re an animal, and you’re using your hands if you’re a human.

Ross Blocher: Interesting. Yeah. I hadn’t thought about that. And over all of this is creepy synthesizer music playing.

Music: Unsettling, chiming synth.

Music: Which, you know, it’s just amazing audio design. Really, it should have been recognized.

Carrie Poppy: (Chuckles.) It actually was!

Ross Blocher: Oh, really?

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah. It won an Emmy.

Ross Blocher: Oh, a local Emmy?

(Carrie confirms.)

That’s great. Okay.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.

Ross Blocher: You’re welcome, Linda.

Carrie Poppy: So, then Linda, at some point, starts interviewing this veterinarian who works for the state and has looked at some of this footage and these photographs that Linda has taken. And this veterinarian—I mean, bless his heart. He’s being so patient with this. He’s like, “Yeah, you know, I don’t think the mutilation was done by an animal here.” And of course to her, that’s like—it seems like that’s some sign of big admission to her.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Like, “Ha-ha! This one informed person said it doesn’t appear to them like that. So, I can now jump to any other theory, and it is credible!”

Carrie Poppy: Right. He doesn’t think it was an animal. Okay. That still doesn’t mean an alien! Like, we’ve skipped all over humanity to get there. Then she talks about a Carpenter, Wyoming case where the front and rear mammary glands were missing, and the vulva was partly missing. So, I think the implication there was that there was some like sexual purpose.

Ross Blocher: This is the first time that she starts actually mentioning some of the other theories. She says, “Could it be cults, predators, helicopters, UFOs, deranged individuals, secret government projects? Could any of these be the answer?” Which, you know, I thought was interesting, because that was ten minutes in. That was the first mention of UFOs. But certainly not the last.

(Carrie confirms.)

She also introduced what was kind of the inciting incident. I think it’s sort of recognized as the first animal mutilation. And this one wasn’t even cattle; it was a horse. She refers to it as an Appaloosa mare named Snippy. And since then, I’ve read multiple sources saying the animal was actually named Lady. And Snippy was either Lady’s sire or—I don’t know. There’s various theories about who Snippy was, or maybe it was just another name for Lady. But I want to make sure we give Lady her due. And her skeleton is now preserved at one of these local spots, because she’s sort of a local celebrity for being the first mutilation.

Carrie Poppy: Alright. Okay. I see that also she mentioned that one of these animals had a hole in the center of the skull about two millimeters deep from an unknown object. And then of course there’s da-da-da music.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that was interesting. That was the only time we heard that, and that’s like one of the very few injuries that actually sounded interesting to me. Like, oh, I want to know how that happened.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, I want to know how it happened too. I was thinking about it, and I was like—the first thing I think of is a captive bolt, which is how cattle are killed often. It’s like this little, tiny gun that they put up to their forehead, and then a little bolt goes straight into the brain. But usually the bolt goes much, much deeper than two millimeters. So, that would still, you know, suggest an error or something.

Ross Blocher: Okay. And I thought that was the size of the hole, which I would imagine larger for the bolt, but—

Carrie Poppy: Oh! Oh, oh, oh! Maybe it was.

Clip:

Music: Eerie synth.

Narrator: … hole in center of skull, approximately two millimeters in diameter on the surface of the skull and 1 millimeter in diameter on the inside of the skull.

(A cow moos.)

No evidence of gunshot. Cause of death? Possible injection of material into brain with unknown object. Lab analysis found nothing.

 

Music: Wow. Well, anyway!

Ross Blocher: Well, we don’t get photos of that or X-Rays or anything else more detailed.

Carrie Poppy: I mean, yeah, exactly. Because it’s not a human—(laughs) it’s not a human murder, so someone has to pay for all that. The state won’t.

Ross Blocher: All throughout this documentary, but especially near the beginning, she’ll just flash newspapers.

[00:25:00]

And much faster than you can actually read them or even their titles; it’ll just be newspaper headline, newspaper headline, and you’ll get just enough look at it to see, “Ah, there was a mutilation.” And I was writing down the dates and I got 1975, 1975, 1975, 1975, 1975, 1977, 1979, ’79, ’79, ’79, ’80, ’75, ’79, ’75, ’78. So, apparently like the big year of this, or two years, was ’75 and ’76. It was enough that it was like considered sort of a—like a panic, something like a satanic panic, where this was in the news and everyone’s like, “What’s up with the cattle? What’s going on?”

Carrie Poppy: I can see that! Yeah. She even says partway through, she says, “Most everyone in the Western US heard about cattle mutilations in 1975.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah! And I have to wonder, is this just sort of like a reporting thing, an availability bias? You know, you have ranches all over the place. I didn’t look up statistics for the time, but I looked up statistics for now. And there’s something like 34,000,000 cattle raised in the US every year. Just our country alone. So, you have to assume that some are just naturally dying off for all kinds of reasons all the time, but nobody’s necessarily comparing notes or making news stories about it. Maybe it just caught the zeitgeist, and now people are talking about it.

Carrie Poppy: But it’s interesting. She says Western United States. It sounds like it didn’t get that far over, if she’s correct about that. I was thinking the same thing about like number of cattle versus where these reports are, and I looked this up. Three of the places that she listed as sources—Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas—are beef producing states, but the other ones that she mentions are Iowa, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Arkansas. And they are also beef producing states, but they’re not big ones. So, we wouldn’t just expect them to make the list out of sheer volume.

Ross Blocher: Right. And I think she mentions this in the documentary. She definitely did during her talk. Like, it was a big moment for her when stories did start cropping up from England and overseas, as soon as it became like a worldwide phenomenon. Her conclusion there was, “Oh, this isn’t just a copycat thing. This isn’t just a local phenomenon. This also points to aliens.” She kind of saw that as a data point for aliens. And during her talk at this Conscious Life Expo, she mentioned that there’s never been a reported case in India. And she wondered, “Is it because the aliens understand the reverence that people have for cattle there, and so they don’t kill them?”

Carrie Poppy: Okay, uh, I think she’s close to right. (Chuckles.) I think probably there’s a lot less pranksterism of cows in India. Yeah.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. They certainly keep mentioning in this documentary the possibility of sick people getting their jollies off of this. There’s even one guy who comes later, named Pat, and he says—oh, under hypnosis, by the way. We’ll get to hypnosis, but he’s under hypnosis when he’s recounting him encountering one of these animals. And he kind of mutters, “Must’ve been the sex cult from the university coming out here messing around.”

So, we’ll get to the hypnosis piece, but I just thought it was very funny that he kind of jumped to sex cult. So, I mean, that’s up there, and maybe that does account for some of this. But geez, people, what are you doing? If that’s the case.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, well—I mean, okay, so if it’s a cow who’s already dead, and then someone goes and mutilates the carcass for media attention, I don’t care that muuuch.

Music: That’s much different than torturing the cow.

Carrie Poppy: Right, exactly. Than killing a cow or even raising it for food I’d object to more. But it’s funny to think of these local journalists who just take it at face value and just say like, “Yep, I guess so! I guess that’s what happened! I’m not even going to consider any other possibility. It’s exactly as you say, Rancher Dan.”

Ross Blocher: But you mentioned the copycat effect earlier. There’s just another phenomenon where, if you mention something in the public, if you talk about an abduction experience, guess what? You’re going to hear more abduction experiences. People are going to hear that. That’s going to become a narrative that they can possibly latch onto. Won’t be everybody, but there will be some people who will make that part of their story. I would say probably in the same way, this got attention. So, there might’ve been people out there who said, “Ooh, I want to get attention. How about I do something with a cow and make another one of these stories happen?”

I don’t know what the percentage is. It’s probably a low percentage, but I’m sure it’s part of the story.

Carrie Poppy: And that’s just looking at pranksters and not looking at mental illness or confabulation or any of those fun complications.

Okay, then Linda says, “By 1977, most people thought cattle mutilations had gone away.” So, it’s just like you were saying, just like a couple strong years of this. And then I guess that government report must have really put it to bed for people.

Ross Blocher: Right. And I mean, good on the FBI for investigating, looking into it.

[00:30:00]

And I haven’t read the—I don’t know, it’s like a 280-page report or something like that. I haven’t looked at this, but you know, they obviously went over examples, and they had explanations for why animals were responsible for this.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. And in some cases humans, but then they were just like, “Oh, this one appeared to be mutilated by the rancher himself. Oh, this one appeared to be mutilated by a teenager.” You know, pretty terrestrial explanations.

Yeah. But in spring 1979, Senator Harrison Schmitt of New Mexico held a conference in Albuquerque to talk about cattle mutilations. And that’s when Linda saw this happening again and was like, “I got to return to that story!”

So, that’s how Linda decided to travel to Wyoming, New Mexico, and Colorado to explore the mystery. Which is so interesting to me, because she did not pick the big cattle producing states!

Ross Blocher: Oh, yeah. I mean, obviously they’re going to have stories. At one point she gives us a representation of this examination that was done and said that Colorado received 35 carcasses for examination and 19 were good enough quality—like preservation, I guess—for them to perform a lab test on. And nine were ruled to be cut with a sharp instrument. And the rest, meaning the other half, were ruled the activity of predators. So, even by that reckoning, at least half of these cases are animal predation. But I feel like other places we heard even higher estimates.

Carrie Poppy: But interesting that like half and half! So, I’m starting to see a picture where the media ecosphere itself is doubling the original effect.

Ross Blocher: She has another guy who shows up a couple times. Tex Graves, another great name.

(Carrie agrees with a chuckle.)

And he’s investigated 93 carcasses in Colorado, and he was pretty confident that these are not natural deaths, what we’re looking at.

Carrie Poppy: ALL 93. He feels all 93 were not natural deaths. “It is impossible! It is impossible to kill a cow and do this without leaving behind evidence, like a cigarette butt, matches, handprints, footprints. But there was nothing! And the animal had a horrible look!”

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yes, and one of the bodies that he presents—they show a lot of photos here. So, one of the photos, you can see that there’s like disturbed ground underneath its head. And he’s saying that, you know, clearly it was like moved around enough to like kind of make an indentation under its head. Yeah. And I mean, it seems pretty obvious that the poor cow was in agony and thrashing around and made that indentation.

And then they shoot to this guy and he’s my favorite person in the whole documentary, Albert McChesney. And he’s a pathologist and coordinator in Fort Collins, Colorado. And he keeps giving her rational explanations for things. And then you say like, “Well, Linda?” And at least she’s including it, but then she’ll kind of move on. And at one point later, like she even asked him kind of a ridiculous question after he gives her a solid—well, actually here, I’ll just—I’ll tell both of these pieces.

So, he refers to an agonal death saying, “Yeah, well, that could be responsible for the indentations.” That oftentimes you’ll have this rapid motion, bucking around.

Carrie Poppy: Agonal death. Does that mean like dying in agony?

(Ross confirms.)

Oof! What a phrase. Okay.

Ross Blocher: You know, and that it involves like maybe some uncontrollable motions, breathing patterns. And I wrote here, “He’s not making the point that she wants, but she includes it. Interesting.” And a little while later, she comes back to him, and he’s addressing this issue that comes up all the time, that she keeps saying it’s bloodless. There’s no blood. These are surgical. There’s no blood anywhere. First of all, many of the photos obviously are surrounded by dried blood. And it’s like why are you—? Do you realize this does not support your bloodless theory? Do you agree this one is not done by aliens, because there’s blood there?

But he addresses this very, I think, sensibly and says, “Well—”

Music: With gravity.

Music: Right! “It would be hard to remove all the blood, yes. But a closer examination would probably show that the blood has moved to deeper organs or just drifted with gravity to the downside of the animal.” So, Linda Moulton Howe I don’t think picks up on that at all. And she follows up—

Carrie Poppy: Yep. She ignores that.

Ross Blocher: She says, “Well, do you know anything on earth today that could drain the blood from an animal?”

And he says, “I have no knowledge of that.”

Carrie Poppy: He’s like, “No…”

Ross Blocher: But he just gave you the answer, Linda! Things happen when a body dies, and blood kind of pools to one location. And no, we shouldn’t necessarily expect it to shoot out any which way when there’s an opening in the animal.

Carrie Poppy: I wonder if she was even following his reply, and she truly was ignoring it, or she wasn’t hearing it in the moment. And if so, did she hear it later when watching the tape?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, it’s not what she wanted, but she left the answer in there.

[00:35:00]

And one thing I don’t think they addressed at all, but you know, when you read elsewhere about animal mutilations—and this makes perfect sense—one of their major claims is that there are these surgically precise cuts. They’re just so clean. And you’ll see just this one area, and it’s split on the hide, where you can see through to the internal organs. Well, that’s because things dehydrate, and also you’ve got the interior building up gases and starting to expand, and you’ve got this tight dehydrated skin, and at some point something has to give, and it will create a clean rip. And I’m thinking that explains 100% of what we saw there.

There’s another point they make about like serrated edges, that sometimes there’s like a patterning to the cuts. And again, that’s not consistent. It’s not like when they see a clean cut without serrations on it that they say, “Well, that couldn’t have been aliens.” But also, insects will also attach to a carcass when they find it. So, that can also create cuts within a body or take out soft organs, like eyeballs.

Carrie Poppy: I guess I’ve never cut into anyone’s flesh, but I also just hear that and think like is it that hard to make a clean cut? Like, so hard you need to go to Mars?

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, that’s true. They’re like—they’re treating it like this amazing technology. Did you get to the laser demonstration?

Carrie Poppy: Yes! Oh my god! She gets so distracted as a filmmaker. So, yeah. Here’s what happens, you guys. Someone’s like, “I saw one wound on these mutilated cattle that looked like a laser!”

And she’s like, “Got it! Lasers are involved! I’m gonna go to the medical hospital, and I’m gonna ask them if I can look at their laser, and then they’re gonna show me their laser, and maybe I can watch surgery! And now let’s talk about lasers for five minutes.”

Ross Blocher: Hey, I gotta say I like that. And I think—

Music: (With genuine shock.) What?!

Music: And I think that was actually really effective filmmaking that she had someone demonstrate with a dead chicken here’s what a cut with a laser looks like. And she has this guy. He’s dressed in his scrubs. And so, he takes the chicken, and he points a laser at it, and he makes a circular incision, and then he keeps going. And it burns farther and deeper, and he kind of cores out this hole. And yeah, it creates a clean edge, and it’s cauterized around the edge. And then he does the same thing on another chicken, but tries to cut it out with a scalpel. And you see the difference between the two cuts. I thought that was actually a really brilliant move on her part to kind of have this live demonstration. Does it make the point I think she was trying to make? No.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it just seems like she distracted herself to me. It’s just like, oh, one person said the word laser, and then you like went and bothered a whole hospital of people. And you were like, (mockingly) “I’m a journalist. Can I come in and record this?” But like I just was wondering do all these people even know what your purpose is? Because they’re going to think you’re just here to look at their tech, and they’re going to be like, “Yeah, the journalist wants to see the lasers!” And she’s not saying it’s a UFO.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, you always have to wonder what conversation happened that gave her access or got someone to come onboard with her project. I do think that was effective filmmaking. And then at the end, she asked him, “So, if this were to happen in the wild, how would you do that?”

And he said, “Well, that would be too inconvenient to try to like get this equipment out there. You’d probably have to bring the cow here.” And for her, then she’s just made the point like, well, this has to be advanced technology from somewhere else, because we can’t do that. The sex cult from the university can’t do that. Yeah.

Carrie Poppy: Right, QED. Yeah, I wrote down about that guy, Albert McChesney: “He tries to explain things to her that she doesn’t understand.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I like that. I don’t know, every—I don’t know, seven minutes or so, they would just freeze on one of the speakers at the end of a little segment, and then the logo would come up, A Strange Harvest, in kind of a vaguely Star Trek like logo, and the synthesizer music—(sings a warbling note). And you know, that’s where the commercial break was, but it makes for funny watching.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, I forgot that it was TV for the first like half hour. And I thought it was so funny how the title card kept reappearing.

(They laugh.)

They should do that in movies.

Ross Blocher: She had another guy who was an undersheriff. He looked vaguely like George W. Bush—BillWaugh. And he was telling the story about this UFO that had come up behind, I guess, their squad car or something. And he had a whole story about how it had lights that he could see inside of it. Which reminds me, he described them as a red light, a white light, and one that was either green or blue. And in the second documentary she did in 1993, there was another person who described a UFO as having red and green lights. Those are the light colors on airplane wings. So, that tells me both of those were airplanes.

Carrie Poppy: (Titters.) Or it was Santa.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Christmas colors. Anyways, yeah, he was telling his little UFO story. The second documentary focused a lot more on light spotting and UFOs, but there’s plenty here as well.

Carrie Poppy: Ross, question.

Ross Blocher: Yes.

Carrie Poppy: Is it your favorite time of year or no?

[00:40:00]

Ross Blocher: I would say yes, it is my favorite time of year. Probably because it’s Maximum Fun Drive.

Carrie Poppy: Ah! MaxFunDrive. I love MaxFunDrive.

Ross Blocher: Me too.

Carrie Poppy: It is MaxFunDrive, the best time of the year, the time that we ask you if you will support this show—which has been going on for 13 years.

Music: 13 years!

Music: And this is our 10th anniversary on the network, isn’t it?

Ross Blocher: Yes, it is. That’s right! We started in 2014! Heeey! Alright!

Music: Happy Birthday!

Music: Happy MaxFuniversary. So, MaxFun membership pays for shows, and you get to choose who gets your contribution. So, let’s say you listen to Oh No, Ross and Carrie!, but maybe you also listened to another one of the amazing shows on Maximum Fun. Well, you can not only sign up to contribute monthly, but you can choose the shows that you listen to, so that they get the money.

Carrie Poppy: It’s true. And your support is so important to us. It is how this show gets made at all. And if you’ve noticed over the years, we’ve tried to take on more and more challenging stuff and things that are farther away and things that take more resources. And we feel so lucky that we get to make the show just according to our passions and what you guys want to hear. And yeah, if you’re able to support financially and keep this thing going, please, please, please join us.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And to that point, Maximum Fun never says, “What are you talking about? And can we review this before you release it?” Nothing like that. They’re just supporting us with a network and resources, but we get to—with your support—tackle these investigations, report on them. And we get suggestions from you all the time. We always have tons of ideas. So, yeah, help this keep happening.

Carrie Poppy: So, if you upgrade—if you boost, you can also still be counted in the numbers for MaxFunDrive, with just whatever you can do. If that’s adding $1 to your membership, that’s awesome. If it’s adding $100 to your membership, well, that’s also awesome. And I’m really curious about your situation.

Ross Blocher: (Chuckles.) Yeah. And at higher levels there’s additional incentives. Explore what’s best for you and what works for your ability to contribute.

Carrie Poppy: And you could also pay all at once if you’re like, “Ugh, I don’t want this thing coming out of my bank account every month, and I don’t remember that it’s there. And then at the end of the month, I have this big charge.” You can pay the whole year up front if you like.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, that’s a great new option. And if you support at or upgrade to $10 a month, you can also get our enamel pin. And I think if you’re already at $10 and you upgrade, that’ll also make you eligible for that. Our pin this year, super fun. It says Carrie’s catchphrase.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) “That’s not how this works!”

Ross Blocher: So, you can wear that around and then explain to people what that means.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Yeah. People have pointed out to me that I’ve said this a few times in interviews. It wasn’t intentional. But you say things three times and guess what?

Ross Blocher: That’s a pattern.

Carrie Poppy: It’s your catchphrase. So, you can wear this anytime you want. Tell people that no matter what they are saying, it is not how it works.

Ross Blocher: (Giggles.) Or just save it for when it’s really, really cutting.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Pull it out of your pocket, take the back off, put it on your lapel. Point at the person you’re talking to.

(Ross clears his throat pointedly.)

So, if you like that option and all the options, go to MaximumFun.org/join—J-O-I-N. And be sure to list Oh No, Ross and Carrie! as a show you love.

Ross Blocher: Alright.

Linda cut to these two guys, Steve Benavides and Arnold Valdez, and they were examining a cow carcass, and flies were everywhere. You could hear the flies and the amazing audio mastery. The audio is so good in this film.

(Carrie chuckles.)

But you could also see the flies everywhere. And I’m thinking like, “Yeah, I think we know what’s happening to these cows.”

Carrie Poppy: You mean like they’re decaying?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. Like, nature’s doing its thing. It’s breaking down this gigantic animal.

Carrie Poppy: Right. And they’re like, “Where do these strange flies come from? Are they from another plaaanet?”

Ross Blocher: And they’re looking at just this one little section of extruded interior that’s kind of popped out from the interior. And they’re saying, “Why wouldn’t an animal eat this soft portion after cutting it?” And I thought, well, why would the aliens cut it and reveal this and do nothing else with it?

Carrie Poppy: There was a lot of this where I’d be like, oh, okay, you’re making an exception to this scenario that you found, but it doesn’t help you in this other scenario that you also addressed earlier. But okay, I guess we’re evolving that rule now. But okay, so now how does that change the first one? UGH.

Ross Blocher: Yes! Yeah, multiple times they would point out some strangeness—and I think often for Linda Moulton Howe, she’s just collecting oddities. But the strangeness with an animal explanation also makes no sense for the aliens! Why would they just make the surgical incision and then just leave it all there without cutting into it? So, yeah, why wouldn’t an animal eat it? Or maybe it was that same thing with gases expanding and the skin shrinking and dehydrating.

[00:45:00]

I think that’s the better explanation in that particular case.

Carrie Poppy: We also haven’t mentioned helicopters, which come up a couple times. And it’s so weird when they come up. Like, the first couple times it’s mentioned, they act as if like we all get what’s implied there. Maybe it’s just a helicopter. And I’m like what?! Maybe it’s just a helicopter—what?—chopping up a cow? What do you mean?!

Ross Blocher: And maybe in the late ’70s, early ’80s, maybe helicopters felt a little more bleeding edge technology, right? But yeah, that was introduced along with the sex cults and UFOs at the beginning. Helicopters, all by itself, and government programs. Those were other categories.

Carrie Poppy: Cows can move, y’all. They hear a helicopter, they walk. They’ll walk away. It’s not like you just land and chop up a cow!

Ross Blocher: One of the eyewitnesses was a woman who was reporting that she saw a dark helicopter with a sling underneath it. And I thought, well, again, that’s not a feature of a UFO. How many UFOs have slings hanging under them? And this is where Linda Moulton Howe does another one of her little field trips, where she’s established that helicopters can’t really be that silent. And so, she goes to Fort Carson and finds William S Dalby from the 4th Aviation Battalion. And boy, she found a winner in that guy, because not only does he say, “No, I mean, every helicopter makes some kind of noise, even the ones that are called, you know, quote/unquote, ‘silent helicopters’.” Fair enough. But then he says, “I don’t know, of all the possibilities, I think aliens are more likely.” And mm, just a perfect clip. Just what Linda wanted, I’m sure.

Carrie Poppy: It’s also so weird, the jump there. Like, not even maybe it’s an interloper from one town over, or your neighbor, or even someone from a neighboring state. Why go all the way outside Earth for this explanation? Like, there’s no reason for it.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, even looking into that first 1967 occurrence with Lady, the horse, I saw multiple explanations where in one telling, there were local boys who later admitted to having shot the horse. And then there was another pathologist, veterinarian, who had looked at the horse and said it had a bacterial infection. That’s probably what killed it. So, don’t know how to weight those two, but there are other explanations for this. Speaking of things that made me ask like, well, why didn’t you ask that about aliens? She featured this guy who’s a deputy director at the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. His name was Carl Whiteside. And he didn’t have—

Carrie Poppy: The names! The names in this movie are crazy.

Ross Blocher: These are great names. He says, “You know, this is absurd. Why would the CIA or FBI be mutilating cattle?” So, that was kind of ruling out the government hypothesis. But again, we have to ask, yeah. Alright. Good question. But why would aliens be mutilating cattle? As far as I can tell, in this documentary, that question is never actually addressed. Like, what is their motive for doing this?

Carrie Poppy: Right, right! Like, tell us about this hypothesis. Stop telling us about how it’s the only one that hasn’t failed yet and tell us what it predicts!

Ross Blocher: Oh yeah, now prediction. Okay, yeah, that would be another hallmark of scientific thinking. We don’t get there. But I will say in the second documentary and in her talk at Conscious Life Expo, she does propose a reason why aliens are doing this. It’s pretty good.

There’s another recurring figure that she has, named Lou Girodo.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah, that guy.

Ross Blocher: He’s a Chief Investigator at the District Attorney’s Office. And she really likes him. She keeps coming back to him. He’s on her side as well. And she even mentioned this particular moment in her 2024 talk. She said that there was a sheriff who looked her in the eye and said, “Linda, I’ll save you time. The perpetrators are creatures from outer space.” And I’m pretty sure that she’s referring to this Lou Girodo guy, ‘cause that’s essentially what he says in the film here. And she says now that that moment gave her an electric charge like never before or since, and “that I knew what he told me was true”.

Carrie Poppy: Mm. Oh, the feeling of certainty.

Ross Blocher: Yep. She’s just going with it. How could he lie about that?

Carrie Poppy: One of my favorite Ross Blocherisms is “the feeling of certainty is still just a feeling”.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, it is! And I’ll have a story in just a little bit about how Linda sometimes can be misled. But let’s talk about—

Carrie Poppy: What?! Linda can be misled?

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) Yes. Well, I have a more concrete example of this where she admits that she was misled by somebody.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay. Okay, good. Oh, is it Doraty? Is it Doraty?

(Ross confirms.)

Okay. Okay. I can’t wait.

Ross Blocher: So, then we get to this rancher named Pat McGuire. He’s a great character, and he’s got a wife and eight children. He lives in Wyoming. And they found two mutilated cows.

[00:50:00]

Out of nowhere, we decide to see if we can recover his memory about what happened to these mutilated cows. And Carrie, how do we do that? How do we recover a memory?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Real answer or the answer Linda Moulton Howe—?

Ross Blocher: Linda Moulton Howe’s answer in this documentary.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Okay. Yeah. The way you recover memories is to lay down and have a hypnotist walk you through your memory and unlock its darkest corridors, the parts that you didn’t remember before.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I feel like at this moment, any pretense of neutrality we had at this point has just been cast aside, because we’re talking to Pat McGuire, seeing footage of him around his farm, and then suddenly we’re in a hypnosis session with him. And we are introduced to Professor Leo Sprinkle. (Laughs.) Again, these—

Carrie Poppy: Professor! Leo! Sprinkle! 100% the name of a lion who is a teacher in a children’s book. (They laugh.)

Ross Blocher: It’s amazing. I don’t know how they did it, but he is introduced twice. He’s given this credential twice, as one of the leading authorities on cases involving UFOs and human abduction. Woah!

Carrie Poppy: Mmm. One of the leading.

Ross Blocher: And he is director of counseling and testing with over 40 cases. Pat was his 28th.

Carrie Poppy: Over 40?!

Ross Blocher: They might’ve said the actual number. I wrote over 40. They might’ve had a specific number, but they have Pat just kind of there. He’s very sedate, and he’s talking about finding the cow, and that’s where he says his thing about—

Clip:

Pat McGuire: It must’ve been from the sex cult from the university.

 

Ross Blocher: And he talks about a light that he sees that goes from being pure white to orange. He sees them picking up a cow, and he can’t see the cow, but he can hear it. And he says, (with a drawl) “Worst I ever heard a cow. Terrible sound.”

But my favorite moment is when the camera cuts to Professor Leo Sprinkle, this very like austere, almost skeletal man with a bald head and just sharp features. All of a sudden, the camera is up close to him. It’s at an up angle. He’s lit intensely. It’s good cinematic lighting and framing, but it’s—

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, it looks like Rosemary’s baby.

Ross Blocher: It’s jarring! And right behind him is an alien mask, like a gray alien bust. And I’m thinking, you know, they’re always claiming up and down like, “Oh, there’s no way we could have primed people or that they would have expected this,” but there’s a freaking alien behind him! Like, give me a break. In his office!

Carrie Poppy: (Laughing.) Oh my god. Yes, you can see—and it’s like the full-on shape of the alien head on the front of Communion, et cetera.

Ross Blocher: It’s so absurd.

Carrie Poppy: And it’s so funny, because later they show a drawing that one of the patients does of her alien, and it’s just exactly that. It’s that face, that shape, the scream mask shape.

Ross Blocher: So, then we also see Pat outdoors, and he’s got a drawing of the saucer as he remembers it. So, he’s showing his, you know, amateur drawing. But yeah, it really feels like this documentary has run away from us if it hadn’t already. But then we have another subject of Dr. Sprinkle’s hypnosis, and it’s a woman!

Carrie Poppy: A woman?!

Ross Blocher: A woman! The first and perhaps only account of someone witnessing an animal mutilation happening.

Carrie Poppy: Can you believe it? And she didn’t even remember it until asked if she might have witnessed it.

Ross Blocher: They tell us early on that this happened in 1973, but she’s now recalling this in 1980, seven years later.

Carrie Poppy: In those seven years, she hadn’t been thinking about it. So, her name is Judy Doraty, D-O-R-A-T-Y, and she was driving from Houston one night when she saw a strange light in the sky. And she started getting really bad headaches and anxiety after that day. So, she gets her hypnosis with Dr. Sprinkle. (Chuckles softly.) Sorry, it’s such a crazy name.

(They laugh.)

I have a friend named Jay Frosting, and that’s still not as crazy as Dr. Sprinkle.

Ross Blocher: Oh, they could collaborate.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) They should. They should.

Ross Blocher: Cupcake shop.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, so she sees an animal taken up in her vision. Like, she—you know, she just complies, basically is what I’m saying. Like, he hypnotizes her, and she’s immediately like, “Yes, uh-huh, I see a cow.”

Ross Blocher: Right, and she’s got this whole story about like getting out of her car and seeing this light that has kind of substance to it, and it picks up a cow. But I’m still picturing her next to her car. But then she tells us that I see them operating on the cow on a table.

[00:55:00]

There’s tissue laid out flat and smooth, and they’re putting probes on it. So, she’s got all these details. There’s tubes, there’s probes. And I’m all flustered thinking like, wait, the last you told us about you, you were still outside watching this cow get taken up. How are you watching this happen? And thankfully, Dr. Sprinkle (chuckles) thinks of this as well. And he asks, “Are you standing by the car?”

And Judy says, “I feel like I’m in two places at once—standing in my car, but somehow I can see the inside of the craft.” Okay, sounds like a good dream story.

(Carrie agrees.)

Not a logical, actually-happened kind of story. And then she notes that she doesn’t see her daughter in the car, and now she’s worried that her daughter is also on the table, and she doesn’t want to think about that. She’s all worried they’re going to do the same thing to her daughter that they did to the animal. And boy, Leo really pushes her into talking about it.

(Carrie confirms.)

She doesn’t want to go there. But then he just keeps saying, “Okay, well, just relax deeply.”

Carrie Poppy: And then she starts crying.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, she really doesn’t want to do this, and she’s really horrified by the thought of these operations on her daughter. But she keeps saying something I think is telling. “Well, they put her to sleep, I guess.” I thought that “I guess” says a lot. Like, okay, you’re asking me to describe what happens next. So, I’m just going to kind of insert what I think might happen. And then he prods her again. She says, “They just examined her, I guess.” Those “I guess”es to me felt very much like someone like, “I don’t know, what do you want me to say?”

Carrie Poppy: “I’m running out of steam.” Yeah.

Music: “I don’t want to go.”

Music: Okay. Now that you say that, I think that’s right. I’m remembering now when I was doing hypnosis with Dr. Friesen for the book, that I would hit those points where I would just be like, “I guess this?” And it probably did kind of come out vocally as like, “Well, uh, I guess blank.”

Ross Blocher: “If you’re gonna push me.”

(Carrie affirms.)

Yeah. So, then she says that they’re taking samples from her daughter. Cindy is the daughter’s name. And Leo says, “What kind of samples?”

And she’s like, “Uh, like inside her mouth.”

And Leo says, “Any other samples?”

Carrie Poppy: “Anywhere else?!”

Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. He’s really pushing for, you know, give me something juicy.

And she says, “That’s all I can remember.”

Carrie Poppy: It feels gross.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. It felt violating to me just watching that exchange.

(Carrie agrees.)

And then we’re told after the session is done that Leo testified that she is a sincere, honest, and credible person. Well.

Carrie Poppy: Right. Yeah. The hypnotist says she’s credible. Okay, great. Thank you.

Ross Blocher: That means a lot coming from him. And then we get a final thought from Lou Girodo, that guy that gave Linda chills with his assurance that aliens are doing this. And then the movie ends with—I’ve heard this guy’s name before, Richard Sigismund? Well, I’ve seen it written. I’m not sure how to say it, but he’s listed as a UFO researcher. He just starts speculating about the aliens’ motives and what they’re doing, and the credits kind of run underneath this.

Carrie Poppy: This is so weird. Yeah. It’s like bonus content of talking to him. It’s unedited, just kind of free-flowing his thoughts. And it really like peters out as a result.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, it does. He does say that the aliens shouldn’t be leaving carcasses. And that would just invite speculation and investigation. So, therefore, they must want us to find them and ask these questions!

Or! It’s not aliens. That’s another possibility.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah, but I guess it is fair to say that this version of events doesn’t allow for like they’re super secretive. I guess that’s right. They’re willing to like abduct this many people and let their presence be known to this many people. Yeah, I guess the aliens are kind of inconsistent about that. On the one hand, it seems like they’re very far reaching, but they still don’t want us to like talk to each other about it for some reason? Why?

Ross Blocher: Yep, this is always the issue. Like, they definitely want us to know about them; that’s why they reveal these things and appear to us. But they definitely don’t want everybody to know about this. And those are at odds. If they wanted us to know, there’s nothing we could do to stop them. But let me give you some highlights from Strange Harvest 1993.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, but first! Ross, do you like bonus content?

Ross Blocher: I think bonus content is pretty much my favorite thing ever.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, me too. I like to call it BonCon. Some people call it BoCo.

Ross Blocher: And some of us freeze up thinking about those abbreviations and just say, “Not worth it. I’m just going to say bonus content.”

Carrie Poppy: (Giggles.) It is what you can get if you become a MaxFun member during MaxFunDrive—or any other time, frankly. But that allows you to get even more of the shows you love. So, Oh No, Ross and Carrie! has a bunch of fun bonus content in there over the years. We have like somewhere around like a dozen, right?

Ross Blocher: Oh, even more than that! Look at all these.

[01:00:00]

Carrie Poppy: More than that. More than that! 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah! So, we’ve got extra episodes you might not have heard yet. Well, definitely, because we’ve got some brand-new ones coming. We just released a talk that Carrie did.

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah! On creativity and madness.

Ross Blocher: You learn a lot more about Carrie in that talk! Check that out. And we’ve got a new one coming. That’s right. We’ve got part two in our Creation Museum walkthrough. It’s finally here. I know you’ve been waiting for it. It’ll be dropping this week. And then all these other great pieces of bonus content that we’ve released over the past 10 years with Maximum Fun.

Carrie Poppy: Ten years! And all the other shows also. So, like Sawbones is one of our favorite shows on the network. You can go and hear them.

Ross Blocher: There’s some other shows that do feature us in their bonus content. We’ve got a new episode with Secretly Incredibly Fascinating. Go Fact Yourself has—

Carrie Poppy: Go Fact Yourself!

Ross Blocher: —has a great show with us where Carrie is tested on her knowledge of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and I’m tested on my knowledge of the number pi.

Carrie Poppy: It’s really fun and really sweet.

Ross Blocher: And we’ve got our firewalking episode and our MaxFun dream date with the Miracle Berry and Sweet Defeat. We’ve got us singing Disney songs. We’ve got us singing Christian songs that we grew up with.

Carrie Poppy: We have some commentary tracks. I think there’s Star Wars and Midsommar.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. And Cars.

Carrie Poppy: And Cars. (Laughs.) Why these movies? No good reason.

Ross Blocher: I wasn’t involved in that one, but it’s very good. And we’ve got a sleep track where I read to you passages from L. Ron Hubbard’s A History of Man, but very slowly, that’ll make you laugh, but also make you sleep.

Carrie Poppy: That’s the idea. And we are announcing some goals for Oh No, Ross and Carrie! in particular that could! Bring! You! More! Bonus content!

Ross Blocher: Okay, people should sign up right now. What might they get if they help contribute to these bonus goals for 2024?

Carrie Poppy: Okay, if Oh No, Ross and Carrie! gets 250—

Music: We can do it!

Music: —new, upgrading, or boosted members, we will release another episode of Flavor Babies!

Ross Blocher: Everybody loves our weekly show, Flavor Babies, and they’ve just been waiting for this!

Carrie Poppy: Everyone loves it! It’s always on demand. Everyone’s always asking for it. And we’re like, “Calm down! It’ll come. It’ll come.”

Ross Blocher: And at 500 new upgrading and boosting members, we’ll create a video that’ll be a Ross and Carrie’s Cribs, where we’ll show you all of the pieces of our investigations that we have laying around our respective living spaces. And just—

Carrie Poppy: That’s right. Do you want to see my little picture of Harold Klump that’s still out there trying to interfere with my dreams? I’ll show you.

Ross Blocher: All the stuff that you hear us talk about but may not have seen. We’ll make a fun video about it. What happens if we hit 1,000 new, upgrading, and boosting members, Carrie?

Carrie Poppy: Okay. I’m stoked about this. At 1,000, we will have the Communion Communion Bonbon BonCon with John Hodgman. So, here’s what I found out, Ross. Our friend John Hodgman is also a fan of Whitley Strieber’s Communion!

Ross Blocher: That’s amazing!

Carrie Poppy: And has agreed—I know! And he says that if we get to 1,000, he will join us on Oh No, Ross and Carrie! to talk about Communion, eat bonbons, drink red wine, eat bread, and call it the Communion Communion Bonbon BonCon.

Ross Blocher: Man, you had me at Bonbons, but you definitely had me at John Hodgman. So, everybody help get us there! We need enough new upgrading and boosting members so that we can record that and put it on the feed. That’s going to be amaaazing!

Also, we’ve got an extra big goal! Or should we save that for next time?

Carrie Poppy: Sure!

Ross Blocher: And we’ve even got some exciting goals beyond that. So, help get us there. And we’ll tell you about some more fun ideas we’ve got.

Carrie Poppy: So listen, if you haven’t become a member yet, and our show means something to you, and we add something to your life, then would you consider paying for it? You don’t even have to pay what it’s worth! Just like some money, just some money!

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) And we’ve got that new option to pay up front for the year now, which may appeal to a lot of people who before didn’t want to do the monthly payments. So, yeah, you know, this kind of content doesn’t happen because of massive commercial deals or big companies or anything. We’re with this awesome cooperative group and you, the listeners, are our main support. So, help get us up to the next level. Help us prepare for the next year by going now. MaximumFun.org/join.

Okay, Carrie, you ready to hear about Strange Harvest 1993?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, okay, yeah!

Ross Blocher: I watched the first one on Amazon Prime.

[01:05:00]

And then it showed me a preview. There’s a Strange Harvest 1993, and I was like, “Gosh darn it, Linda Moulton Howe! You put out too much content. Now I have to watch this.” So, I rented it for $5.99. And this one was done, well, about a decade after the original, but it does feel like a new documentary. She doesn’t just completely reuse all the old footage or anything like that. And it feels very early ’90s. So, all the clothing styles have changed. Linda Moulton Howe spends a lot of time in a big, bright red jacket with, you know, shoulder pads and everything. So, that’s pretty entertaining.

Music: Well, that sounds fun.

Music: You know, it’s fun watching these, ‘cause it’s younger Linda Moulton Howe. And she’s got a very like Mary Steenburgen look to me as a younger Linda.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, nice. You said that it’s not a repackaging of the same cases, but is it still the same basic argument? Same structure?

Ross Blocher: Same basic argument. Yes. Yes, vaguely. There are lots of flashes of newspaper headlines. It’s just now newspapers have a slightly different style. There’s lots of talking heads. There’s lots of analyzed footage. I’ll say this one has a subtitle—An Investigation of Strange Aerial Lights and Unusual Animal Deaths. So, this one focuses a little bit more on like UFO sightings, but I would say animal mutilation is still the pithy core of this thing.

Whereas the first documentary happened in Colorado primarily, even though we hopped around a bit, this one takes place primarily in Fyffe, Alabama. F-Y-F-F-E. Interesting spelling.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. What kind of animals do they raise in Fyffe?

Ross Blocher: Oh, cows.

Carrie Poppy: Cows. Okay.

Ross Blocher: Again, we’re occasionally treated to other animals. But it starts with us riding alongside this police officer, and he’s responding to a UFO sighting by this young man. And so, they come out there. They talk to the young man, and then they quickly tell us, “You know what? Turns out it was a false alarm. It was Venus, just kind of spotted in a bunch of thunderclouds.” Okay! (Chuckles.) Well, at least we admitted that. But the police officer tells the young boy—well, I say boy. He was old enough to drive, I guess. He says, “I’m glad you reported—I’d rather you report, and it be a false alarm, than you not report at all.” So, that’s very nice.

Okay. So, now we’re talking to this woman who had this sighting of a UFO, and she’s talking about it, and she said, “Yeah, it was something like right out of Star Wars.” And they cut to her son.

Carrie Poppy: Telling thing to say.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly, admitting the media influence there. They cut to her son. It’s the same boy who had the false alarm. (Laughs.)

(Carrie “wow”s.)

So, this family is just generating a whole lot of sightings. So, they talk about their craft, and there’s the lady who saw the red and green lights.

She tells us, “I do know that it was not an airplane!”

And—do you?! Do you really know that?

Carrie Poppy: How do you know? Say more.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, exactly. She didn’t say more.

Carrie Poppy: Do you work for Air Traffic Control?

Ross Blocher: Right?! One nice thing that Linda does—again, kind of like going to the Air Force Base to see the helicopters or going to meet with the laser guy, she will go to the locations where people had their sighting, and then ask them, “Okay, show me—was it below the tree line?”

I really appreciate that. I like that.

Music: Yeah. It’s good.

Music: Usually when you hear these stories, you like hear that it was a lake or whatever, and you just have nothing really to build in your mind except the skeletal details that you add. She also has a veterinarian that she talks to and gets him to admit that “I couldn’t perform cuts like these. I don’t have cauterizing equipment that I carry around.” So (gasps) big reveal. Wow.

Carrie Poppy: Okay, this one guy couldn’t do it.

Ross Blocher: Mm-hm. She does another chemical analysis, I guess, in one of the cow’s ribs. You know, whoever discovered it found these metallic flakes. They have them tested, and there are traces of aluminum, silicon, titanium, and oxygen. That sounds very interesting, but they show us like a few photos of tufts of hair. But I’m left wanting way more than what they’re giving me. Like—

Carrie Poppy: Right. What’s the oxygen?

Ross Blocher: There could be contamination here. I would need to know a lot more about this.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. That feels like it’s supposed to imply something, but I don’t know what it is.

Ross Blocher: Right. You know, I think just having the words aluminum, titanium in there makes us think like, “Ooh, alien craft, maybe.” And I don’t know.

Carrie Poppy: Silver! Vaguely silver things I’ve seen on The Jetsons!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah. What does that even mean? Did it rub off from the instruments? Who knows? And then they tell us there was another cow in 1978 where they found a putty-like substance. Okay?!

Carrie Poppy: Okay. Was it putty? Was it silly putty? (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: What am I supposed to do with that? Goodness.

Carrie Poppy: They found a putty-like substance.

Ross Blocher: They do show a chief investigator—well, just quoted in a newspaper, but there’s a guy named Mike James, and he’s quoted as saying, “Cattle mutilations are just not happening.” And you could tell Linda Moulton Howe is very disgusted by this. Like, ugh, that’s so dismissive to say that! But he concludes that they were predator attacks, but at least that’s included.

[01:10:00]

I gotta give her credit for that. They show a 1993 mutilation. So, like brand new, the year that the film came out. That photo looked—

Carrie Poppy: When you say they show it, they show like video, or they show—?

Ross Blocher: A photo.

Carrie Poppy: A photo, okay.

Ross Blocher: A series of photos, and they look so messy. It reminds me of like standing with the Flat Earthers by the beach and watching like the sun go down below the horizon and the circle being bisected, cut in half, and them telling me that it’s just getting farther away; it’s not disappearing beneath the horizon. And I’m thinking like are we looking at the same thing? And they’re showing me this really messy photo of a dead animal. And it’s everything that they told us these things aren’t supposed to be, which makes me mistrust how they’ve categorized these other ones, you know, that they rule out as being not predators.

She talks about 20 domestic house cats going missing in Texas, Alabama, and Virginia. And I’m thinking what? Now you’re extending this to house cats? Really? Is that how wide—

Carrie Poppy: Wait! Wait a minute. Why is she not interested in the cat/dog hypothesis?

Ross Blocher: Oh, this may be another way to bring it up!

Carrie Poppy: I guess. Ugh! I don’t understand what she gets interested in. She loves cats, but she’s on these like insect creatures? When I was talking to her, she seemed to want me to recall insect-based life forms.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, I guess your cat/dog hypothesis is just a step too far, even for Linda Moulton Howe.

Music: (Chuckles.) I guess.

Music: At one point, she does say that “eyewitness links between animal mutilations and UFOs don’t prove anything”. I was like thank you, Linda! Wow, good job. “But we should pay attention to them.” And alright, I’m okay with that.

Carrie Poppy: Sure, I’ll give you that much. Sure. We’re doing that.

Ross Blocher: Okay. They decide to hypnotize someone again, and this time it’s Cindy D Tindall.

Carrie Poppy: Oooh! Wait.

Ross Blocher: These names, where are they coming from? Yeah, what are you thinking?

Carrie Poppy: There was a—oh, okay, I was thinking of how there was a Cindy earlier, and there was also a Dr. Sprinkle. So, I was wanting to combine them, but—

Ross Blocher: This is Cindy Tindall. And she was being hypnotized on my eighth birthday, August 6th, 1990. I’m also watching this going wait a second, Cindy—she describes under hypnosis how she saw like a cattle dropped from on high and hit a bunch of tree branches. And she described the aliens as being cartoon bug characters. Interesting. Not quite consistent with everything else, but okay. So, then in the documentary, they cut to clips of Judy Doraty being hypnotized from the previous documentary.

Carrie Poppy: She’s back. Okay.

Ross Blocher: And we realize It’s Cindy’s mom! So, the Cindy that was the daughter that she was worried about the aliens operating on in the first documentary is now adult Cindy, also being hypnotically regressed so that she can tell her story of being abducted.

Carrie Poppy: So, this whole family—this is all just sort of about one family.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. We have one family that’s reporting this stuff. So, I’ll give Linda Moulton Howe credit for raising one more good rhetorical question. She says, “Why would something from out there keep taking parts from animals decade after decade?” Yeah. Good question.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Mm-hm. Why would it do that?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. We might understand how predatory animals might keep attacking cows decade after decade, but yeah. Why would aliens do that?

Okay. Next thing we hear is Linda telling us:

Clip:

Linda Moulton Howe: One woman in Missouri named Jeanne Robinson says she has encountered non-human entities who have communicated about animal mutilations.

 

Ross Blocher: That’s all we hear about her! That’s it!

Carrie Poppy: Oh! Okay. Okay. Well, she’s not alone. That’s a lot of people.

Ross Blocher: So, she knows something! We get—and I’m gonna show Carrie this drawing. Her account is written on top of this.

Clip:

Music: Surreal, warbling synth.

Linda Moulton Howe: Here are some excerpts from her notes. “We use substances from cows in an essential biochemical process for our survival. The material we use from cattle contains the correct amount of protein substances needed for biochemical absorption. While we respect all life, some sacrifices must be made for the preservation of other species. Continued sampling will increase as the need increases.”

 

Ross Blocher: We don’t see this Jeanne Robinson. We don’t hear why she has this connection to aliens that they’ve told her this, but now we know it’s because they need these animals for sustenance—that something in the animals is food for them, apparently.

Carrie Poppy: Hm. I wonder why that would make you take only cows. Yeah, I guess the cow was just special that way.

Ross Blocher: Primarily cows, because we have heard about other animals here and there. yeah. But oftentimes, it’s just the eyes, or it’s just the genitals.

[01:15:00]

Or it’s just the teats, or it’s just the udders, or it’s just part of the penis. There’s no rhyme or reason.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, that doesn’t sound like food scavenging from an intelligent being, unless the intelligent being was scared off mid-scavenge.

Ross Blocher: Right, and there’s this assumption that somehow all the blood gets taken away. But as far as I’m concerned, the blood’s still there, it’s just pooling where we’re not seeing it.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Like a bedsore. I mean, that happens like if you’re just in bed for six hours.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, yeah. Blood pools. That’s what it does.

So, I looked up Jeanne Robinson and found a MUFON page about her, and it mentioned that she had been connected with a hypnotherapist by guess who? Guess which figure in ufology?

Carrie Poppy: Barbara Snow.

Ross Blocher: Not the therapist, but who made the connection? It wasn’t—

Carrie Poppy: Bud Hopkins.

Ross Blocher: Yes, Bud Hopkins. That’s right.

(Carrie chuckles.)

Yeah. So, I thought, oh, there he is again, Bud. Making things complicated.

Carrie Poppy: He’s come up a couple times in our previous episodes.

Ross Blocher: Indeed. Yeah. He’s definitely a mover and shaker in getting people to get hypnotically regressed and come up with these stories. He was all about it! And he worked with Whitley Strieber as well. Yeah. I found a video that featured Jean Robinson, and she was talking about how the aliens—when she was initially abducted, back when her mom had this recollection—she said that she was impregnated by these aliens. And it’s sad on its face, but also it’s an abduction recollection through hypnosis. But she is convinced that she has alien children out there somewhere.

And yeah, Linda’s just blindly quoting her about the alien’s motivation. And I just have to think like, Linda, is it that you’re like so gullible? Or is it that you—I don’t know—that you think we are? I don’t know. What’s going on here?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, she’s so gullible. It’s the first thing. Yeah. (Laughs.)

Ross Blocher: So, in that vein, very near the end of this documentary, she talks about whether the government is involved or knows about this. And so, she mentions Richard Doty. ‘Cause at the time, she was on good terms with this fellow.

Clip:

Linda Moulton Howe: Perhaps that is why Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent Richard C Doty told me on April 9th, 1983, at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “That documentary you did, A Strange Harvest, upset some people in Washington. They don’t want animal mutilations and UFOs connected together in the public’s mind.”

 

Ross Blocher: This made me want to look into the Richard Doty thing, and I keep hearing this name in connection with Linda. And there’s also a documentary about him from 2013.

Carrie Poppy: Mirage Men.

Ross Blocher: Mirage Men, right.

Carrie Poppy: I’ve read that book.

Music: Oh, really?!

Music: I read that book many years ago.

Ross Blocher: Oh, okay. So, you’ve heard about Richard Doty.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, but so long ago, I don’t remember anything. What I remember of Mirage Men is like that there was a kind of person who positioned himself as a government whistleblower going around kind of pranking people.

Ross Blocher: Exactly. And it turns out he really did have a position with the Air Force Office of Special Investigation. So, that much was true.

(Carrie “wow”s.)

But though the Air Force will confirm that he worked for them, they won’t say anything about what he did. And Richard Doty is just a source of confusion. And he’ll—he’ll just say things! And you just don’t know what to do with his testimony, because he’s an unreliable narrator! Now and then.

So, he’s been involved in leading a lot of people on rabbit chases, and he helped propagate the Majestic 12 documents, the ones that Stanton Friedman was standing behind is accurate, but were kind of shown to be active misinformation. Like, the government actually trying to throw UFO believers off of their trail by giving them something to waste their time.

(Carrie “wow”s.)

And Bill Moore, who coauthored books with Charles Berlitz on like the Roswell Incident and the Philadelphia Experiment. He was also led to spy on the UFO community by and for Richard Doty. And Richard Doty also connected with Linda Moulton Howe and took her to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. And he showed her like a bunch of pictures. paperwork and told her, “You can’t take any notes,” which I think we’ve heard her say before.

Carrie Poppy: I wonder if this is what she got regressed to remember.

Ross Blocher: Could be! Totally could be. And maybe that’s why she didn’t want to talk about it.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Oooh, interesting.

Ross Blocher: In the documentary, Mirage Men, she actually shows up visibly kind of frustrated by this guy and how he misled her, because she did realize later that this briefing paper for the President of the United States that he showed her and all these other things, these confirmations of the government knowing about grays and them coming from Zeta Reticuli, all of this information that she got was unreliable. And that he was just—

Carrie Poppy: Oh wow! And she knows that, and she says that? Okay!

Ross Blocher: Yeah.

[01:20:00]

I don’t know if I can say she says it flat out, but you can tell like she regrets having met him and that he jerked her chain.

Clip:

Richard Doty (Mirage Men): And I gave him to her, and it was sanctioned. I gave her—I did what I was told to do.

Linda Moulton Howe: When you look back at it, they must have had meetings about how do we stop a persistent and dogged reporter who has already demonstrated that she’s going to go after a really, really difficult subject. How do we stop her? When you look back, it all makes sense.

 

Ross Blocher: So, I’m just kind of hoping she was able to make the connection and say, “Okay, the things that he told me are incorrect. And I’m going to separate those out from the other things I know.”

Carrie Poppy: Mm. Mmm! That’s asking a lot of Linda.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Knowing Linda, she may have decided that she independently verified pieces of it.

(Carrie agrees.)

So, I don’t know. Yeah. I can’t say to any granularity how she resolved that in her mind, but fascinating how she’s been wrapped up with that whole story and that she was one of the targets even back in the ’80s of this sort of counterintelligence.

But you know, was it just him doing something that he enjoyed doing? Or was it at the direction of the government? Hard to tell. He’s a really tough nut to crack.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I remember talking to John about this. Jon Ronson. I remember he had an opinion on that. I want to say that his opinion was that he was like a free agent playing hijinks, but I might even have that wrong.

Ross Blocher: Okay, I’d believe either one at this point.

Carrie Poppy: Jon Ronson has an opinion is my news. (Chuckles.) What is it? Ask Jon Ronson.

Ross Blocher: Hey, that’s news. I like it. So, that was a wild little rabbit trail to follow down, and I definitely want to learn more about that. And then, you know, the next thing is a bunch of other talking heads, just people she’s interviewed giving their little takes on what they think is going on. Like, a woman she talked to earlier says, “I think the government knows more than they want us to know!” Sure. Sure, alright!

Carrie Poppy: Well, that’s true. That’s definitely true. Yeah. There’s secrecy in government operation. That’s true.

Ross Blocher: Alright. Margaret Pope of Alabama, you win this one.

(Carrie chuckles.)

And then she poses the question, “What’s the next step? Everyone’s afraid, because they don’t know the next step.” And the end! That’s the end of the documentary. Yeah. Fascinating to get into the mind of Linda Moulton Howe on, you know, what I think is kind of her longest running story in this world. And just shooting forward to her talk at the Conscious Life Expo. I’ll share a couple other highlights. Jimmy Church, of course, introed. And he told us that Ancient Aliens was there recording.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, interesting! Okay.

Ross Blocher: And Linda Moulton Howe’s long been like a producer/writer on Ancient Aliens, so that shouldn’t be too surprising. But he also had everybody in the audience sing “Happy Birthday” to her. Which, again, we’ve established, it was three weeks later.

Carrie Poppy: Oh my god! Why!? (Laughs.) That’s so funny. I wonder how many times he did it that weekend.

Ross Blocher: Seriously. Yeah, it sounded like from your lunch that she was a little miffed by it. One story that she told, going back to like what initially got her into this, was that was that there had been a TV crew who went to film something about these cattle mutilations, and their battery packs on their cameras died! And she just thought that was so significant, that like there was some kind of hijinks there that needed to be investigated. Why were their—because they’re on top of it! They would—that would never happen by accident. So, what was happening there?

Carrie Poppy: Oh, that happens. That does happen.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. As we’ve learned during this recording, sometimes technology doesn’t play along.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah! That’s true. I had a friend who was undercover at a factory farm, and his submerged video didn’t work.

Ross Blocher: Wow. Yeah, after putting yourself in a high-risk situation, to not have the goods afterward. Oof, that’s rough.

Music: Sucked.

Music: It was interesting to hear Linda’s thoughts on this 40 years later. Because I gotta say, in these two documentaries, she didn’t once mention the tall whites or the Nordics, which is almost kind of surprising not to hear Linda talk about those. But maybe those are a more recent acquisition, because she was definitely doing that this time. And as always, Linda just keeps introducing other pieces of data that you think like, “Maybe cut that out, maybe edit that out. ‘Cause it makes your position look scattered.” I’ll say what I’m thinking of. She mentioned that many people had sighted around these mutilations strange creatures resembling bears and gorillas. And Linda Moulton Howe tells us, “The connection with Sasquatch has always been there very strangely.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh no! (Laughs.) Oh nooo.

Ross Blocher: Linda, what are you doing? Keep it simple! Keep it simple.

Carrie Poppy: We’re going to add all of those people into this now. Wow!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. And she’s got like a sheriff’s report about a man who saw a hairy gorilla and shot at it. It’s like this—

Carrie Poppy: Oh, wow! Okay. She’s going for it.

[01:25:00]

Ross Blocher: This is not simplifying your mystery! It’s making it sound crazy.

Carrie Poppy: Okay. So, in 2024, Linda Moulton Howe went Bigfoot! Yeah, it sounds like it!

Ross Blocher: Yeah. I mean, she just says there’s a connection there, and it’s always been there. Amazing, right?

Carrie Poppy: Aah! I love this. I love this development for her. She’s never gone Bigfoot before. Good for her. 2024 should be the year we all go Bigfoot. You know?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Yeah, why not?

Carrie Poppy: Let’s just do it. Of the weird myths, that’s one of the more believable ones. Like, at least there are nonhuman primates, and there are human primates. And I can imagine something that’s in between but hasn’t been taxonomized yet. Can do! Got it!

Ross Blocher: Hey, you’re even onboard with Jane Goodall. She’s widely reported as having said that she’s sympathetic to the idea of Bigfoot.

Carrie Poppy: Aw. It’s still unlikely. But maaaaybe! Certainly better than aliens have been here.

Ross Blocher: That kind of megafauna, yes, very hard to have hidden all this time—especially for how wide it’s supposed to span, but sure. As she also mentions that in 1995, in Orlando, Florida, two men saw a cow lifted into a craft. They were abducted too, and they saw standing up lizards! That was the quote. Standing up lizards!

Carrie Poppy: Okay, lizard people! Okay.

Ross Blocher: Linda! Okay. Sure, letting that in.

1993, two brothers were abducted by a 7- to 8-foot-tall blonde alien where mutilations had happened recently. Alright, now we got our blondes. And she said that you can’t really tell apart the Nordics and the Scandinavians. And she quotes someone—I’m having a hard time for my notes telling who—but she said that there was a guy who said that we have proof—“And he used the word proof!” She said—that 278 million years ago, there were three civilizations fighting each other, and they’re still fighting each other now through genetic manipulation.

So, 278 million years ago. Now she’s kind of looping us in with like this whole Billy Carson, Ancient Aliens—I mean obviously we know she’s into Ancient Aliens, but this like idea that you had the Anunnaki, or these aliens who came here millions of years ago and that they’ve been genetically experimenting to create life on earth.

Carrie Poppy: Like the Elohim.

Ross Blocher: Right, yeah, very similar to that. She said that in 1981, Ronald Reagan was presented with the five major types of aliens that we’ve been interacting with.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, I’ve heard her say this before. I wonder what he thought.

Ross Blocher: Yeah, if that actually happened. And then, yes, what he thought, if that actually did happen. (Chuckles.)

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, ‘cause then he’s supposed to then like debrief the next president, et cetera, on this matter. So, why did it stop with him? What do you mean by this story? What do you think? Where’d this start? That’s not the whole story, Linda!

Ross Blocher: Yeah, and with each president, we see some late-night host ask the president what they can say about aliens. And I feel like every single president, we have them giving some kind of joking response. But presumably they all know. This is an interesting note, just about this whole topic in general. She said, “I would love to be giving you a talk about love and light. But it’s important to talk about these issues as well.”

Carrie Poppy: I wonder what she means by that. So, she’s like, “It would be great if there was no suffering on earth, and then I’d talk about that. But because there is suffering, I need to focus on something I can change.”

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Well, this is, you know, some indicator of what’s going on in the world. “I’m a journalist. I’m bringing this to you. I’d love to be talking about happy things, and this is clearly not a happy subject, but we gotta talk about these things too.”

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. Okay. Sure.

Ross Blocher: There are multiple times where she says something to the effect of, “I don’t even really think about the gory aspect of it anymore; it’s a higher-level narrative for me, it doesn’t ick me out.” And she even says, “Animal mutilations are not gory, they’re the opposite. They’re pristine.” That’s how she separates them from predatory behaviors, that these are supposed to be clean and bloodless, even though half her slides have blood all over the place.

Carrie Poppy: Right, are really bloody.

Ross Blocher: So weird. She says something else that I think is really telling.

Clip:

Linda Moulton Howe: So, I stand before you today with a tremendous amount of data without having proof of the big picture.

 

Ross Blocher: After 40 years of following this topic!

Carrie Poppy: There’s really some self-awareness there, like some uncompleted self-awareness.

Ross Blocher: Right. Right. Yeah. That really stuck out to me. Okay. So, near the end, you can tell she just wants a little love from the audience. So, she said, “Show of hands, how many people feel that what I shared with you today should be introduced to everybody?”

Carrie Poppy: Oh yeah. She’s been doing this lately.

Ross Blocher: She said, “Okay, most of you.” It’s like, yeah, what are you going to say? You’re going to go, sure. Yeah. Yeah. This is really important.

Carrie Poppy: “I, a person at the Conscious Life Expo, personally think that you should shut up about it!”

[01:30:00]

“Go back to your normal job!”

Ross Blocher: Right. “I paid $60 to come hear you say this. I don’t think this is important. I was here for the hologram talk.”

(Carrie laughs.)

So, then she asked the leading question, “Do you think the government should lie to protect citizens?” Not too many agreed to that. And then she said something that I mentioned in a previous episode. She said, “I really do think you always lead with the truth.” Yes, Linda, that would be nice.

Carrie Poppy: (Laughs.) Yeah. I mean, I’m glad that’s how she’s thinking, and I believe that’s how she’s thinking.

(Ross agrees.)

She’s just missing big things. She misses the big picture.

Ross Blocher: Yeah. She asks, “Do you think if the US led with a worldwide simultaneous announcement,”—she paints this out like exact same hour of the day and night—some places in this daytime, other places—“But let’s say there was a simultaneous announcement to all citizens, and we introduced the tall whites as our friends. Do you think humans could take that?” And that one got the audience muttering. Like, I don’t know.

Carrie Poppy: Not really! Like, I’m picturing—yeah, I’m picturing those, like mega horns on sticks that go off at the same time in North Korea.

Ross Blocher: (Cupping his hands around his mouth.) “Attention citizens, the tall whites are your friends.”

Carrie Poppy: “The tall whites are here.” Yeah, it’s not a reassuring picture.

Ross Blocher: So, I guess not too many people are into that, because she says, “Okay, well, who thinks it would be better to have this announcement made, but with UFOs in the sky, like visible?”

Carrie Poppy: Why are we voting on this?! Are you going to arrange it?

Ross Blocher: Yeah. Maybe she’s like trying to pitch this like, “Hey, I talked with all these completely neutral folks at the Conscious Life Expo, and they all felt that we should have UFOs make this announcement in the sky.” Yeah. I don’t know how she’s going to make this happen.

Carrie Poppy: Who’s she gonna tell, though?! She doesn’t even talk to aliens.

Ross Blocher: So, people were reacting to that and saying like, “Actually, that sounds really scary. Maybe let’s not do that.”

Carrie Poppy: Oh, good! Okay. Good. Good.

Ross Blocher: Okay. So, then she’s got one more leading question. She says, “Show of hands, how many of you find this valuable?” As you can guess, most people raised their hands. Yeah. Okay, Linda. Very valuable.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah. I’m not going to tell you your job sucks.

Ross Blocher: And she said, “Well, that’s good. ‘Cause you don’t know how hard it is to write these scripts at 2AM trying to anticipate your reactions.” Which—

Carrie Poppy: Oh! You know, you don’t have to write it the day of.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) You could have written it earlier.

Carrie Poppy: You can write it another day. Yeah. (Laughs.) Or even like the months leading up to the talk.

Ross Blocher: Right. So, something tells me that the day before, she thought she was going to be talking about the holographic universe. And then decided that night, “You know what? Let me update my high strangeness in animal abductions and mutilations.”

Carrie Poppy: Gotcha.

Ross Blocher: And then there was a very brief Q&A, but most of it was filled with this one woman who couldn’t get to actually asking a question. She was just telling stories about her alien experience with good and bad aliens, and people were like, “Ask a question!”

So, the woman kind of clarified, “Okay, I guess my question is why don’t you talk about the good aliens?”

And Linda Moulton Howe was like, “Uh-uh-uh, I have made four books documenting good aliens! And there are nine species of Nordics, maybe just three of them are collaborative and supportive.” Woah! Okay, so we’ve got nine species of Nordics, and only some of them are here to help us. Might want to get that sorted out before we make the big megaphone announcement.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, yeah! The tall whites are only like one third helpful? Ugh! Ugh, it’s not even a good tip anymore.

Ross Blocher: And she had one more really good quote. She said, “It’s been said to me, but I have no proof for it, with our explorations aided by the blondes, there are 168 civilizations in the small band that our solar system is in.”

Carrie Poppy: Okay, that’s been said to her?

Ross Blocher: Yeah, it’s been said to her, and she has no proof for it. But now we know!

Carrie Poppy: (Exhaustedly.) Okay, yeah, I believe those things to be true.

Ross Blocher: (Laughs.) 168 civilizations. So, there you go. That brings you up to speed with Linda Moulton Howe’s thoughts on animal mutilation.

Carrie Poppy: You can say anything to Linda Moulton Howe, and she might just make it part of her worldview from that day forward. And there’s something mysterious and beautiful—

Ross Blocher: If you have a sufficiently strange name, like Sprinkles or Poppy, she’ll listen to you.

Carrie Poppy: Captain Dap-Digger, Deputy Sheriff Han Shmenmen!

Ross Blocher: It’s amazing. Well, thank you for joining me on this journey, Carrie.

Carrie Poppy: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for watching the updated one. I would have needed a break before more harvesting.

Ross Blocher: It was sitting there in front of me, and I was like, “Ugh, I don’t want to watch you, but when am I going to watch you otherwise? Alright.” This is the time in Ross’s life when he watches part two of a cattle mutilation documentary.

Carrie Poppy: Well, similarly, I just got books two and three of the Communion trilogy.

[01:35:00]

By Whitley Strieber.

(Ross “wow”s.)

So, I’m sure we’ll be going back to Whitley too. We’ll be dragging you back and forth between Linda Moulton Howe and Whitley Strieber for the rest of our days.

Ross Blocher: Well, and hopefully with John Hodgman! So, get us to that next level. MaximumFun.org/join.

Carrie Poppy: Yeah, there we go! And then—oh yeah! Okay, yeah, get us there, and I’ll tell Ross and John about books two and three.

Ross Blocher: Hey, I’m eager to hear about them. Also, what should you be doing this coming Friday, starting at 12 Pacific time?

Carrie Poppy: You should be going to YouTube.com/@onrac, O-N-R-A-C, and watch us like a little tiny fly on the wall. Like you’re not even there!

Ross Blocher: Do it. See our process. Talk to other listeners. It’ll be fun.

Music: Talk to Drew! He’s so cute.

Music: Yeah. Talk to Drew. Ask Drew questions. Hey, also, if you happen to be in the LA area and want to see a free conference this coming weekend, I think all the main programming is happening on March 24th, the Sunday—but you can sign up for this. I’ll be hosting as the MC. I’ll also be giving a talk on how these various folks that we look into avoid criticism, just some various tactics.

Yeah, I think that’ll be a fun thing to present on. So, you can attend SkeptiCamp Los Angeles. And the URL is SkeptiCamp—just one C joining those two words. So, camp gets a C, and skeptic gets a C. SkeptiCampLA.fmtpo.com. And yes, that stands For Me To Poop On, because our friend Paula put this together. It’s on her website. So, SkeptiCampLA.fmtpo.com. And that’s where you can find SkeptiCamp. If you want to join us in person, it’ll be fun. Come say hi to me. And also, I’ve been meaning to mention, if you want to send your kids to summer camp, our local camp that I’ve told you about before—we’ve branched out now as CampOmni.org. So, we serve California. So, you can find us—I’ll be at SoCal, but we also have a campsite in NorCal. You can find those at Camp Omni, O-M-N-I, dot org.

Yeah, if you’ve got a kid ages 8-17 that you’d like to have try out an awesome experience full of hiking and swimming and archery and rock wall climbing and a zip line—we’ve got a zip line at our new location in Southern California this year. That’s going to be great—and science education and singing and all kinds of fun stuff, check it out at CampOmni.org.

Carrie Poppy: Well, while we’re talking about cool things you could do, you could also go to your local MaxFunDrive meetup day on March 21st—if you want to go to MaximumFun.org and find out where your local meetup spot is. You can go to the ONRAC livestream on March 22nd. You can go to the Jordan, Jesse, Go! live show on March 24th with special guest Carrie Poppy, in the Cavalcade of Stars! Yes, it’s going to be both live and live streamed. So, whether you’re in LA or not, you should go to ElysianTheater.com/shows/JordanJesseGo.

Ross Blocher: Amazing.

Carrie Poppy: And on March 29th, there will be the MaxFunDrive finale event. Which we can’t say too much about, but we’re both going to be in, and we’ll tell you more about it in a bit.

Ross Blocher: Woohoo! Okay. So, we’ve kicked off MaxFunDrive. We keep telling you this is the best time of the year to support us. Please do. MaximumFun.org/join. And remember:

Carrie Poppy: Just kidding, we’re back! I just wanted to remind you that you should join or upgrade or boost, and also if you do $10 or more, you can get our pin.

Ross Blocher: And if you’ve never been a MaxFun member, you can try it out at just $5 a month and enjoy the bonus content.

Carrie Poppy: That’s right. And our particular pin, really cool, it says, “That’s not how this works.” You can confuse your doctor with it. Maybe confuse a lover, if you pull that out mid-coital. Just a few different things.

Ross Blocher: You can say it to Carrie when she says it to you and open up a rift in space time.

Carrie Poppy: Mm-hm! These are all things you can do if you get our pin. So, go to MaximumFun.org/join!

Ross Blocher: Thank you, everybody! MaximumFun.org/join.

Carrie Poppy: Yay!

Ross Blocher: And remember:

Clip:

Linda Moulton Howe: With many other extraterrestrial types that our own government studies that include Nordics—blonde, blue eyed, nine species. Three allegedly—I guess you would say supportive or collaborative with the tall whites and humans, and six of them not. Reptilians that want Earth, and they don’t want Earth with us on it. Hostile insects, Trantaloids.

Ronald Reagan was presented with this in Camp David after his election in 1981. And that is where Ronald Reagan was given five types.

[01:40:00]

The EBENs, Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, is the acronym for those that would be somewhere near the Whitley Strieber face. But Whitley Strieber, it comes down like this. The EBENs, classically, have a shape like that—a U instead of a point. There were Quadloids—four fingers. Trantaloids, the dangerous insects from Epsilon Eridani that is only ten and a half light years from Earth. The Heplaloids, H-E-P-L-A-L-O-I-D. I’ve had a lot of people tell me, “I know what the Heplaloid is, but I have never seen proof, and I’ve never seen a document that showed the face of a Heplaloid,” but it might be that video that floats around on the internet of a brown, peanut butter colored being on camera in a dark space, and human nurses are coming and going helping this being.

Music: “Oh No, Ross and Carrie! Theme Song” by Brian Keith Dalton. A jaunty, upbeat instrumental.

Transition: Cheerful ukulele chord.

Speaker 1: Maximum Fun.

Speaker 2: A worker-owned network.

Speaker 3: Of artist owned shows.

Speaker 4: Supported—

Speaker 5: —directly—

Speaker 6: —by you!

Download transcript (pdf, 330.29 KB) ↓