Mauro says:

It’s curious to note that
It’s curious to note that the very first case of animal mutilation in the modern sense may have happened in Scotland in 1810!
We tend to see only the US part of the phenomenon because of language issues and because in the USA the cattle industry is such a big business, but it’s truly widespread all over the world. For example that hotbed of high strangeness which is Latin America has been heavily hit: cattle is probably an even bigger industry in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay etc than in the USA.
It’s also curious to note that in the forty-plus years that the phenomenon has been afoot not a single person has been convicted of any crime, despite the best efforts of many law enforcement agencies: during the aforementioned Vosges case the French authorities mobilized hundreds of gendarmes and policemen, plus scores of armed volunteers to keep a 24 hours watch in the area. At the height of the crysis, when sheep were being killed almost under the nose of the patrols, a whole infantry regiment (the 43rd) was rushed in to accomplish… absolutely nothing.
Who is doing this, why and how remains an unsolved mystery, though it must be made perfectly clear that right now mankind has all the technologies to do this. They may not figure prominently on the pages of "Nature" or "New Scientist" but rest assured we have them. Think that an helicopter needs to be noisy? Hughes already had an incredibly quiet version of their popular 500 series back in the ’60s that was probably a less sophisticated version of even quieter machines which were kept from prying eyes.
Of course it could be down to malignant fairies, aliens or interdimensional beings, but I’ve never heard of fairies using the Rokitansky procedure and if some space civilization is capable to travel million of light years I’d be much disappointed if they were still using needles and knives.

Mauro says:

I did the (bad) mistake of
I did the (bad) mistake of reading more on the subject and it’s litterally enthralling me.
While the main cause behind these disquieting happenings seem to be human (whoever they are and whatever their purposes are) there are quite a few very interesting stories.
The Zulus have talked for at least two centuries of "the Red Sun that comes at night and takes away the tribe’s cattle". Helicopters being unknown in the XIX century and Zulus being excellent herders (so able to tell at once if their cattle has been taken away by a leopard or a common cattle lifter), there has to be another explanation. I seriously doubt that Boer or British secret agents went around trying to scare the Zulus by staging unexplainable events.
Two curious facts of this tradition: first usually only one or two beasts are missing from the herd and they are never found again. There are no traces of struggle and the remaining beasts do not seem scared in the least. Second, a faint red light has been associated with cattle mutilations and disappearances all over the world. Nobody seems to has ever tried to investigate these lights up close and, to be honest with you, I cannot blame the startled herders and ranchers for not rushing in armed with rifles and pitchforks and waiting for the sun to be well up.
Law enforcement agencies have taken the matter very, very seriously for at least twenty years. In both France and the United States hundreds of patrolmen and teams of veteran detectives have been employed to track down the culprits as quickly as possible. Every possible lead, no matter how tenous and ridicolous, has been followed. Official meetings have been held, where police officers, veterinarians and patologists have confonted hundreds of cases.
In some cases patterns have been found but they are so incredible that they defy belief (a police detective from Nebraska told that in some cases it appeared as if the culprit wanted someone to find the mutilated animal). Not a single person has ever been formally charged with anything, not a single investigation or stake out held results.
In the ’90s law enforcement agencies started to lose heart: after at least twenty years of serious investigations the only thing sure was that something was wrong, very wrong. Formal complains are still filed at police stations around the world (mostly because insurance requires a formal police report) and many police department are still investigating as hard as ever, but the subject seems to have become a pariah even among the UFO community. The shadowy National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) published a good deal of excellent material, yet all of ths was ruined when an alleged former member published The Hunt for the Skinwalker, a book so badly researched and showing such signs of hasty composition that it almost seems a bad joke that the author claims a PhD.
After NIDS left the scenes silence fell once again over what happens at night in the American Midwest, in the Argentinian Pampas, in the South African Veld etc.

Mauro says:

The man who brought the “Red
The man who brought the "Red Sun" tradition to mainstream knowledge is a professional commercial pilot named Anton Fitzgerald. He became acquainted with this phenomenon while flying over the Veld but later became really interested in it after observing it from "close range" near his homestead in Natal in 1964.
Mr Fiztgerald had a large homestead, with a landing strip, an hangar and cattle.
One evening, before departing for Durban with an Aero Commander 500 (who was parked on the strip, ready for the customary preflight checks), he was standing on a small hill about 300 feet from the hangar with his farm manager, talking about some business matter.
All of a sudden they saw this "red glow" enveloping part of the landing strip and some sheep who were grazing nearby before being rounded up by the farm hands for the night.
A few minutes later the "Red Sun" shoot upwards without noise or any rush of displaced air.
Only a single sheep was missing.
A Zulu farm hand named Ndolwana later told him that he had seen the "’the Red Sun that rises straight up into the sky after devouring some of the tribe’s cattle". According to Ndolwana the tradition was "very old".
Given that Zulus, as well as other people of the area like the Xhosa, have been known to keep their cattle in stone kraals, often topped with branches from thorny bushes, to keep leopards and hyaenas at bay, and given the facts that kraals are so solid that have been used as forts, there’s little doubt that anyone getting in there to steal a single head of cattle while many armed men sleep nearby, it must be a pretty extraordinary occurence.
Fitzgerald was to see the Red Sun at least another time, this time while flying in Texas during a training flight. He investigated the matter (since he had written down the coordinates) and discovered that in the precise area a Hereford steer had gone missing and a rancher had observed the phenomenon from the ground. The case was reported to Project Bluebook.

Mauro says:

Strange Harvest is based on
Strange Harvest is based on the excellent Linda Howe book Alien Harvest, though of course it needs to compress the 400+ pages in a reasonable package. Linda Howe later got caught in a "counterintelligence" operation but this doesn’t make her work less valuable.