Page Content (OCR)
AREA 51 57 night to abduct ovulating American females is just about the most outlandish suggestion I have heard in some thirty years of UFO re- search. Why take such ridiculous risks, especially when flying around with a technology that is so unreliable that over fifty crashes are said to have occurred in the United States alone? And they are supposed to be a billion years ahead of us! The only hypothesis more ludicrous than the genetic manipulation of human females is Lear's idea that the U.S. government would give the aliens permission to mutilate our cattle: In order to sustain themselves they use an enzyme or hormonal secretion obtained from the tissue they extract from humans and animals. Cows and humans are genetically similar. In the event of a national disaster, cow blood can be used by humans. Any civilization billions of years in advance of ours should be able to synthesize such a straightforward thing as an enzyme essential to its survival. More simply, they should be able to cure the alleged genetic disorder that has atrophied their digestive system. But even if we set aside such obvious considerations, the aliens could be provided with access to all the cattle they could ever wish to mutilate while staying on government-controlled land. And the slaughterhouses of Chicago would be delighted to make a cash deal with any organization willing to buy from them thousands of animal organs. In my opinion there is a genuine, unexplained cattle mutilation mystery, as investigative reporter Linda Howe continues to demonstrate with her field research. But the puzzling fact in that mystery is precisely that it is not a covert operation; on the contrary, the perpetrators always look for publicity, avoiding the easy prey of animals grazing in the wild, deliberately killing cows and horses owned by civilian farmers near urban areas and on small ranches where they are certain to arouse public confusion and anger. The mutilations are calculated to create terror. Over lunch with a friend who is a leading researcher in hematology (the study of blood), I cautiously brought up Lear's claim that cow blood could be used in an emergency human transfusion.