I’ve cut out a lot of meat in my day, just cut with a knife and then to think that this was a magpie and a coyote … A coyote rips, it doesn’t slice, and a magpie picks, Carter said. You could see on the sides there were slices, knife slices.

Moreover, Carter remembered from his previous days as an X-ray technician that radiation accumulates in the eyes and sex organs of animals. In most cases of the mutilated cattle, Carter said, the animals were missing their eyes and sex organs.

I don’t know how anybody could have ever determined that to be a predator or a magpie, but they all of a sudden changed their mind and said that’s what it was, Carter said.

Recognizing that the cattle mutilations in his county were typically preceded by helicopter sightings the night before, and having heard similar reports from the sheriff’s office in Rich County, Cache deputies staked out the airport one night.

In a 2001 interview with the National Institute for Discovery Science, a former Cache County Sheriff’s deputy, identified as Witness 1, described the confrontation at the airport.

There, after the man in the shiny coveralls loaded the suitcase into the plane, Witness 1 confronted another man who had just jumped out of the pilot side of one of the Huey helicopters.

I asked to see some identification, Witness 1 said, according to a transcript of the NIDS interview. He said, I have none. … I looked at the helicopters and they were dark, either dark, dark green or black. No identifying markings at all. This man had no … was in military fatigues with no … identification, no insignia of rank or unit. He didn’t even have a helmet. So I reached out and touched him on … you know, just below, on the chest and ran my fingers down the button line to feel for dog tags. There weren’t any dog tags.

At that time, Witness 1 said, two other helicopters in the air began making what Witness 1 believed to be a beginning gun pass.

I can’t prove this, but I had a … I knew that if I attempted to physically arrest that man, I think they would have killed us both right there, right on the spot with the same mental attitude that the pilot had that ran … my patrol car off a runway.

Realizing he didn’t have any evidence to arrest the man, the deputy tried to do some quick thinking.

I told the man that I was talking to exactly what happened. I told him about the mutilations in Rich County, told him he’d been spotted there, told him about the mutilations here, told him he’d been spotted here, told him we had riders out and in all three counties with high-powered rifles and that sooner or later we would get a shot at his helicopter and we intend to bring you down, sir, if this mutilation … action does not stop, Witness 1 said. He looked at me and smiled a little bit. And then he said, May I go? And I had nothing to hold him on and like I say, you know, I wasn’t holding the high card in that deal. So I said, Yeah.

The man got back into his helicopter, took off, and flew off to the west.

After that encounter, at least for the next five or six years, the cattle mutilations in the region stopped.

If we’d have had probable cause to hold the guy, we probably could have stopped him, Sheriff Carter said, remembered the 1976 incident.

Later in 1976, apparently inspired by how Cache County handled the situation, one of Carter’s National Sheriff’s Association colleagues in Texas started organizing armed patrols and closely monitoring the unmarked helicopters that were seen in his region. Soon after, mutilations there also ceased.

It’s now been 32 years since the 1976 encounter at the airport, and although Carter said he believes that radiation experiments were behind the entire controversy, he said he’ll probably never know for sure.

It was just a great big government cover-up is what it was, he said.