In 1979, the US government spent $44,170 funding a 297-page investigation into cattle mutilations across the American Southwest. The report — produced by retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration — opened with its own estimate: 10,000 head of cattle mutilated in the United States by 1979. Its conclusion: primarily natural predation. Its recommendation: close the investigation. The mutilations continued.
The Political Pressure
US Senator Floyd Haskell of Colorado contacted the FBI in 1975. His message: 130 cattle mutilations had been documented in Colorado alone, with reports across nine additional states. He was asking the federal government to take it seriously. The FBI declined — arguing no federal jurisdiction because there was no evidence of crimes crossing state lines. This was technically correct and operationally convenient.
Haskell kept pushing. Eventually a compromise was reached: a federally funded but state-administered investigation. The LEAA grant was issued in May 1979. Rommel, a career FBI agent who had recently retired, was appointed to lead it. His jurisdiction: New Mexico. His mandate: determine the cause and scope, and recommend whether law enforcement resources should continue to be deployed.
What the Report Said
The report’s opening admission — 10,000 mutilations estimated by 1979 — is the most significant sentence in the document. It acknowledges the scale of what was being investigated. What followed was a systematic effort to attribute as many cases as possible to natural causes. Rommel applied a rigorous skeptical standard: if predation and decomposition could account for the observed characteristics, it was classified as natural.
The problem acknowledged in the report but never fully resolved: some cases contained anomalies that natural causes did not explain. The presence of anti-coagulants confirmed by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in tissue samples from multiple animals. The fluorescent chemical markers on pre-selected animals. The absence of blood and absence of tracks in conditions where both should have been present. Rommel classified these as anomalous without providing an alternative explanation.
The final recommendation: no further law enforcement investigation be funded. The investigation closed June 1980. No charges were ever filed. No perpetrator was ever identified. The mutilation wave continued into the 1980s. Thousands more cases were documented after the report’s closure.
The Los Alamos Connection
The New Mexico Livestock Board seeking assistance from Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory is the detail that most clearly signals the seriousness with which official agencies treated these cases. Los Alamos is America’s primary nuclear weapons research institution. It has the deepest expertise in radiation effects on biological tissue of any institution in the world. Its involvement was not accidental — investigators believed radiation may have played a role in the blood cell damage observed in mutilated animals. The Los Alamos analysis confirmed anti-coagulants, not radiation, as the cause. This ruled out a natural explanation for the bloodlessness. Something administered pharmaceutical anticoagulants to these animals.
The FBI vault holds all three parts of the Animal Mutilation file collection at vault.fbi.gov. Field reports, laboratory results, inter-agency correspondence, and law enforcement documentation spanning the investigation period. The files are publicly accessible. They have been publicly accessible for decades. They have not resolved anything.
Sources: Kenneth Rommel, “Operation Animal Mutilation,” LEAA-funded report, June 1980. FBI Animal Mutilation files, vault.fbi.gov. Senator Floyd Haskell correspondence with FBI, 1975.