Snippy the Horse Mutilation (1967)

Background

In the 1960s, unexplained livestock deaths were mostly a local matter, handled by sheriffs, veterinarians and ranchers. That changed in autumn 1967 when a horse from the San Luis Valley in southern Colorado was found with its head and neck stripped of flesh. The case was reported by the Pueblo Chieftain and picked up nationally, and it became the template for what later became known as the cattle-mutilation phenomenon. Mainstream accounts treat it as a case of ordinary death misread through the lens of the day's UFO enthusiasm; ufologists treat it as the first sign of a pattern.

The case

The mare, named "Snippy" in press coverage, was kept at the Harry King Ranch near Alamosa. She failed to return for her evening drink on September 7, 1967. Rancher Harry King found her carcass about a quarter mile from the house two days later. According to the Wikipedia account, which draws on the Amarillo Globe-Times of October 5, 1967, the skin and flesh of the head, neck and shoulder were gone, leaving bleached bones, and the cuts were described as unusually smooth. Witnesses reported no blood at the scene and no tracks around the carcass. On a return visit on September 10, the owners reported a sickly sweet odour, and the bones were said to have turned pink or later black.

The local sheriff, Ben Phillips, reportedly attributed the death to lightning without visiting the site. Later accounts also say that two Alamosa State College students confessed to shooting the horse in the rump, which could explain the death but not the other details that were reported. Linda Moulton Howe, whose 1989 book An Alien Harvest revived the story, was told by sources that the dead mare was actually named Lady and that Snippy was her sire; the press name stuck regardless.

Investigation and competing explanations

The case was looked at by a University of Colorado study requested by the Air Force, which was part of the Condon Committee's work on UFOs. Its conclusion was that the horse had died of an ordinary infection and that there was no evidence of abnormal causes. Condon reportedly called it the most bizarre report the group had handled. The veterinarian who later mounted the skeleton, Dr. Wallace Leary, reported two small-calibre bullet wounds in the right flank, a detail the Denver Public Library treats as a mundane explanation for the reported discolouration.

The skeptical reading is straightforward: decomposition, bloating and scavengers such as blowflies and birds can strip soft tissue in ways that look surgical once the carcass is found days later. Amateur investigators of the era offered more exotic claims, including exhaust marks, landing-gear indentations and elevated radiation, none of which were independently verified. The DPL author concludes that "unidentified" does not mean "extraterrestrial," a point that the case's later admirers often skip.

Legacy

The Snippy case is cited as the starting point of the 1970s cattle-mutilation wave: Kansas in 1973, Nebraska in 1974, Colorado in 1975 and Dulce, New Mexico in 1976. In 1979 a federally funded inquiry led by retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel produced a 297-page report in 1980 concluding that most cases were natural predation and scavenging, with some anomalies left open. Hynek publicly rejected any UFO link in 1974, while the 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest popularized the alien explanation.

The skeleton was passed through several owners and was acquired in the early 2020s by the UFO Watchtower, a tourist attraction in the San Luis Valley, where it is displayed. Its listing on eBay in 2006 at around $50,000 went unsold. The case remains a useful study in how a single unexplained death, reported with vivid and unverifiable details, could seed a national mythology decades before the evidence was examined carefully.