The Colorado X-Files: Why I’m Done Writing About What Divides Us

In September of 1967, on a ranch outside Alamosa, a three-year-old Appaloosa was found dead in a field. She’d been stripped to the bone from the neck up — no blood on the ground, no tracks leading in or out. The papers called her Snippy. Her real name was Lady, and nearly sixty years later, nobody has ever explained what happened to her.

I want to tell you about Lady, and about a goat on a hillside outside Glen Haven, and about a man who’s spent thirty years chasing this exact kind of impossible. But first I have to tell you something true about myself, because it’s the whole reason this project exists.

Not new, but truer than ever

I’ve told you before, so this isn’t a new confession: I don’t write about politics anymore. I’ve spent years writing about the things that are tearing this country apart — the daily grind of who’s right and who’s the enemy this week — with bylines in Salon, Newsweek, Westword, good outlets all. Somewhere in the last couple of years I burned out on that kind of writing in a way I don’t think I can fully come back from, and like a lot of freelancers right now, I watched the budgets for that kind of work shrink across the board too — Westword included, after their freelance budget got slashed this past year. Between the two, stepping away wasn’t a hard call.

What I haven’t said as plainly before is why I’m finally willing to point my energy at the stuff I used to be embarrassed to admit I loved. For as long as journalism has existed, writing seriously about UFOs, Bigfoot, ghosts — any of it — has been something close to a career killer. Editors stop taking you seriously. Sources start talking to you differently. You get quietly filed under “the guy who believes in aliens,” and it follows you. I knew that risk for a long time, and it’s a big part of why I kept these topics at arm’s length even after I’d burned out on politics — filed under crazy conspiracy, not real journalism, same as everybody else filed them.

That’s changed, and not because I had some personal revelation. It changed because the evidence did. We’ve had actual document dumps out of the current administration, including material released out of the Department of War on UAP programs. We’ve had congressional hearings, on the record, with sworn testimony about unidentified aerial phenomena. We’ve had legitimate scientists and research institutions publishing findings that don’t fit neatly into “swamp gas” or “weather balloon” anymore. Whatever you make of any single case, the subject itself has been dragged out of the tinfoil-hat corner and onto the floor of Congress. So I went back and took a second look at a whole category of stories I’d always loved and always dismissed. Turns out maybe I was wrong to dismiss them.

And honestly — who doesn’t like a good UFO story, a good Bigfoot story, a good ghost story? That’s not a fringe question anymore. It might turn out to be a true one, too.

None of that changes the rule I set for myself: I’m still not writing about politics, not here, not under the Colorado Switchblade banner. What’s changed is what I get to write about instead — stories that don’t care what you voted for. Nobody has ever asked me about my politics before asking whether I believe in Bigfoot. Nobody picks a side on whether a rancher outside Trinidad really did find his cattle drained of blood with surgical precision and not a print in the mud around them. That question belongs to everybody. It’s one of the last genuinely shared mysteries we have left, and I think we need that more than we need one more hot take.

That’s the whole premise behind The Colorado X-Files, the video podcast I’ve just launched with my co-host, Kenny Collins — a strange-stories-of-Colorado show built on actual journalistic standards. We tell you what’s documented, what’s disputed, and what’s just a good story, and we let you make up your own mind. No team jerseys required.

Kenny, and how this started

Kenny’s been a working investigator out of the Estes Park area since 2007, with his first documented sighting making the local paper back in 2013. In the years since, he’s built the kind of hands-on field reputation you can’t fake — the guy ranchers and hikers actually call when something’s happened on their land. I brought the research and the writing background; Kenny brought boots that have actually been on the ground. Between us, we landed on a format: find a local story, dig into the history and research behind it the way I’d dig into any other investigative piece, get out on site ourselves whenever we can, and then bring in a real outside expert to stress-test everything we think we’ve found.

Episode one runs that whole loop on a single, very old Colorado question: what is doing this to our cattle?

A history that still doesn’t add up

Snippy is generally treated as the first modern American mutilation case on record — genuinely well-documented as a media event, whatever you make of the underlying cause. But it was the 1970s that turned this into a specifically Colorado story. Between April and October of 1975 alone, nearly 200 mutilation cases were reported statewide — enough that the AP named it Colorado’s number one news story of the year.

The federal government actually looked into it. Between 1979 and 1980, retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel led “Operation Animal Mutilation” out of the First Judicial District Attorney’s office in Santa Fe, on a roughly $45,000–$50,000 law enforcement grant. He examined about two dozen fresh cases and concluded it was predator and scavenger activity on animals that had already died natural deaths — the “surgical” look being scavengers opening the softest tissue first.

Not everyone was satisfied. Linda Moulton Howe’s 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest, which won an Emmy for Denver’s KMGH, argued Rommel had leaned on too few cases, mostly stale ones, and had waved off veterinary findings that pointed to sharp-instrument cuts. Her film is a Colorado media artifact in its own right at this point — arguably the thing that permanently welded cattle mutilation to the UFO hypothesis in the public mind.

The cases since then read like a pattern that refuses to close. In Costilla County in 2009, rancher Manuel Sanchez found four cows dead on his land near the New Mexico line — skinned back, organs cleared, one missing its tongue, no footprints or predator sign anywhere near them. He sold off the rest of his herd out of fear not long after. Up near Trinidad, Mike Duran has documented mutilations on his own property more than once, years apart — the kind of repeat-victim pattern investigators keep running into, where one ranch gets hit again and again while the neighbors are untouched. Researcher Chris O’Brien logged a 1998 case where a young cow was missing its entire right front leg, its spine pulled from neck to hip, its brain gone with no break in the skull at all.

And then there’s the one that still doesn’t fit anywhere. On October 21, 1975, inside the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs — fenced, staffed, practically in the shadow of NORAD’s underground command center — a 1,500-pound buffalo was found mutilated inside its own enclosure. An ear and the udder gone, roughly four square feet of hide removed, cuts precise enough that the zoo director called it “an expert job,” a read the county coroner backed up. No arrest. No public follow-up we could ever find. Just a director’s statement, a coroner’s report, and fifty years of nothing.

Three theories have circulated since the ‘70s to explain all of it: predators and decomposition, which was Rommel’s official position; a cult or satanic-ritual theory that dominated an actual 1975 Colorado law enforcement conference in Fort Collins despite producing zero arrests or physical evidence in fifty years; and a government-helicopter theory, anchored largely by former New Mexico State Police officer Gabe Valdez, who came to believe the U.S. government was responsible after investigating cases near Dulce involving clamp marks, gas-mask residue, and alleged tracking devices.

Standing where it happened

Here’s where I stop being able to write this like a normal reporter, because I wasn’t standing outside the story anymore. I was on the hillside.

Eight years ago, Kenny got called out to a property near Glen Haven for what started as a Bigfoot investigation — the landowner, Randy, believed something was crossing his land off Crow Mountain, and within an hour of Kenny showing up, a total stranger on the road independently told him he’d just seen the same thing on the same hillside. That relationship eventually led to a different kind of call: two of Randy’s goats had gone missing. Kenny found the first one nearby, killed clean by a mountain lion, teeth marks and all. The second one was almost a football field further up the slope, and it wasn’t a mountain lion kill.

We hiked back into that exact spot together for the episode. My drone was up, circling the ridgeline while I tried not to think too hard about how quiet it was. Kenny walked it from memory and his own case photos, pointing at bare ground like the goat was still lying there: neck broken and posed at a strange angle, one eye out, the anal area cut clean rather than torn open the way a scavenger tears, a mark on the rump like something had gripped it. No drag marks anywhere leading in or out. I kept looking for the thing that would make it make sense — a den, a trail, anything — and there was nothing. Kenny’s read, then and now, is that the animal was placed there. Not walked in. Placed.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. Kenny had brought Missing 411 investigator David Paulides out to look at that same goat back when it happened, and Paulides — a guy who does not, by Kenny’s account, throw this kind of thing around lightly — told him flatly it looked like alien activity to him. I stood on that hillside with a drone in the air and a friend who’d seen this exact scene once before telling me the same story he told an actual missing-persons investigator eight years ago, and I understood, for the first time, why Kenny’s spent almost twenty years doing this. It’s not because he has an answer. It’s because the question won’t let him go.

Chuck Zukowski, and the numbers that don’t add up

For our outside expert, we sat down with Chuck Zukowski, who’s widely considered one of the top cattle mutilation investigators still active today. His day job for thirty years was as an IC mask design engineer — chip and optics work that ranged from traffic-light components to spy satellites — and it matters, because he doesn’t investigate like a believer. He investigates like an engineer who happens to keep running into things he can’t explain. He also spent eight years as a volunteer reserve deputy for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office, until 2011, when he was let go specifically over his mutilation and UFO investigations after publicly disagreeing with the department’s own conclusions on a horse case. His research into geographic clustering along the 37th latitude — running through southern Colorado and northern New Mexico — became the basis for Ben Mezrich’s 2016 book The 37th Parallel and the Travel Channel series it spun off.

Chuck walked us through what actually convinced him this wasn’t predation: cases like Mike Duran’s, where a beloved 20-year-old pet cow was found within a 24-hour window showing no sign of struggle whatsoever — as if it had simply been set down rather than killed where it lay. He’s taken tissue samples from multiple cases to the Colorado State University veterinary lab in Fort Collins, and the pattern that keeps repeating is no hemorrhaging at the incision site — meaning the cuts happened after death — paired with hearts that had visibly collapsed, consistent, in his read, with the animal being drained of blood before it was ever cut open. He’s measured elevated EMF at scene after scene, in one case months after the fact, and has a working theory connecting UFO activity to water sources and aquifers, hydrogen propulsion, and what he describes as spherical “probe” objects that behave like autonomous drones.

He was careful, throughout, to separate what he can actually document from what he can only theorize — on the record, a vet will confirm what’s missing from a carcass; off the record is where you hear they’ve genuinely never seen anything like it in their career. And when I asked what he tells a rancher who just found this on their land and is terrified for their family, his answer was the same thing every time: in all his years doing this, he has never once heard of a rancher or their family being physically harmed by whatever’s responsible.

Why this, and why now

We closed the episode without an answer, because we don’t have one. What we have is a real, physical case eight miles from where I live, a documented history going back to 1967, and one of the most experienced investigators in the country telling us the blood loss alone doesn’t add up to anything he can explain through ordinary predation. Something is happening here on what looks to me like an industrial scale, and whoever or whatever is responsible has been getting away with it for close to sixty years.

But honestly, the mystery isn’t even the whole point for me anymore. I’ve written a lot of pieces designed to make people angry at each other. This is the first thing I’ve written in a long time designed to make people curious together instead. A rancher, a Bigfoot researcher, an engineer-turned-UFO-investigator, and a journalist who’s a little burned out on the news — none of us agree on much of anything except that something strange happened on that hillside, and we all want to know what. That’s rarer than it should be right now, and I intend to spend a lot more of my time on it going forward.

We haven’t landed on episode two yet — it might be UFOs, it might be shadow people, it might be Bigfoot — but it’ll have a Colorado angle, and it’ll be reported the same honest way this one was. And it’ll get the same treatment this piece just did: after every episode, look for a longform companion article right here on Colorado Switchblade, going deeper into the research and reporting than the video ever could.

If you’ve seen something strange happening in Colorado, or you know a story we should be looking into, our tip line is open: coloradoxfiles@gmail.com. And thank you to Driftwood Piercing Studio in Estes Park for letting us use their space to film.

The Colorado X-Files, Episode 1: “The Kill Site,” is available now. View it below. Please Subscribe, Like and Share!