Your Soul, Free Will and Afterlife in Heaven or Hell: Part One

The soul, free will, and the afterlife consisting of Heaven or Hell are among the central tenets of the Christian religion, and because they are central to the human psyche, fall within the providence of anthropology, hence natural history. All have philosophical baggage attached. In two cases, the soul and the afterlife, that baggage is a rather excessive amount.

The Concept of a Soul: The trouble here is that ‘the soul’ has so many diverse definitions that it can mean just about anything you want it to mean. Probably no two people would describe the concept in the exact same way. However, I think we can agree that an egg cell has no soul – however you define it. A sperm cell has no soul – however you define it. Therefore, at conception, you have no soul. No cell has a soul, therefore no tissue (a group of common cells) has a soul, therefore no body organ has a soul (an organ being composed of various tissues), therefore you, as a collection of various organs and organ systems must have no soul!

So when did you get a soul (assuming there is such a thing and that it has some degree of tangibility)? Did you get your soul at birth? Perhaps it was on your first birthday? Perhaps you received you soul when you became of age, say 21. Perhaps it’s just as likely that you don’t receive a soul at all – there is no such separate and apart physical thing you get from any higher authority. Perhaps your soul just develops or evolves naturally as part and parcel of your growing maturity over the years, in which case it can’t be totally separate and apart from the body. In other words, if you develop a soul akin to your developing a sense of morality or spirituality, then it can not ‘leave’ the body after death. Translated, your soul (however you define it) isn’t your ticket to an afterlife. It resides somewhere in that brain-thingy of yours, locked somewhere within that maze of biochemistry that collectively makes up your grey matter. As an aside, if you were to clone yourself, would your clone have a soul?

The Concept of Free Will:  To start will let’s examine the paradox of free will. Here’s one of many contradictions. You insist that you have free will. Therefore, God has no control over your actions. Therefore, God is not an all-powerful being. A God who isn’t all-powerful isn’t the most perfect being that can be conceived of. God has to be the most perfect being anyone can imagine. Therefore, there is no God. Now if God is all-powerful, even though God has granted you free will, your free will is ultimately an illusion living on somewhat borrowed time in that God can revoke that free will gift at any time He choses and thus have His wicked way with you!

Another take is that if God exists, all His attributes must be compatible. If all God’s attributes are not compatible, God must not exist. For example, God can not have His own personal free will and be all-knowing. If God is all knowing, then God knows in advance what He will and will not do. If God knows in advance that He will not do something, then He has no free will of His own. He has no options available to Him but to not do what He knows he won’t do.

Anyway, God has apparently granted humanity, including you, a concept called ‘free will’. That is, you are free to pick and choose between various alternatives, including making choices or decisions that can be described as good, or as evil; moral or immoral; ethical or otherwise. However, regarding such a free will, I would argue that you can never be 100% sure that any choice or decision that you make wasn’t due to the universal laws, principles and relations part and parcel of physical causality that started operating from Day One (the Big Bang event) and thus forever and ever predetermined. You might be 99.999% sure you have free will, and that it was God given, but I can’t figure out any way you could absolutely prove it to any outsider, or to yourself for that matter if you are honest with yourself..

If you accept free will, then you must of necessity admit that causality does not always operate. Just as you, dear reader might refuse to believe in pre-determinism, I absolutely refuse to abandon 100% causality, an absolute cause-and-affect principle, which then forces me to reject free will, even though I do so reluctantly. It gives me no joy to think that what I’m doing right now is the ultimate outcome of the set of conditions that existed at the time of the Big Bang event and that I therefore have no choice since that’s the nature of a clockwork Universe, but it’s the lesser of two philosophical evils for me!

I assume that anytime you, dear reader, make a voluntary choice, that there must have been some causality chain of cause-and-effect happenings that led to that choice vis-a-vis some other choice. Your decision didn’t happen for lack of any reason at all. Put another way, your choice has a foundation. Now I just extend that foundation, that causality chain, back to the initial set of conditions present at the origin of the Universe in much the same way as you can trace your (extremely improbable) existence via the chain of existences of (extremely improbable) ancestors, going right back through the unbroken chain to the first proto-cell some four billions years ago, (a proto-cell which in turn may have come from the depths of space and has an ancestry (your ancestry) extending back untold billions of years before Planet Earth ever formed).  You certainly can’t deny that ancestral causality chain, so why deny a causality chain that ultimately extends back to the Big Bang event and the pre-determined chain of happenings and which leads you to whatever choices you are currently contemplating?

And so ‘yes’, using that logic, you aren’t responsible for your decisions and resulting actions (though I’ll bet legal eagles everywhere would have something to say about that, for that undercuts our entire legal system). But from the point of view of the Universe, it might ask, ‘so what?’ It matters not at all to the cosmos (and to 99.9999% of all life forms, including humanity – past, present and future) whether you deposit money in a bank, or rob that bank!

Just as we have computer simulations (such as ‘Life’, a computer software package) that allow for no free will, that is, everything is pre-determined given the initial set of programmed conditions, could we in turn be part of a simulated ‘Planet Earth’ computer ‘game’ or simulation of someone (something) somewhere out there? Do the characters in a typical video game have free will, or do they dance to the tune of their programmer and player? Can you, dear reader, prove to me (or anyone) by some chain of logic that you or we are not the product of or existing in a simulated and therefore no free will, computer generated, virtual universe?  If not, then you have to admit, however remote the odds, that that possibility exists.

If the ‘many worlds’ interpretation of reality is correct, free will is an academic or moot point since all choices or decisions are enabled. To explain the ‘many worlds’ concept, it boils down to the interpretation that whenever you (or anything else – animate or inanimate) are forced to choose, to make a decision, all possibilities are entered into. So, you have this free will decision to do X or to do Y or to do Z. You actually end up doing all three, and thus there’s a new universe Y, and a new universe Z, which splits and branches off from universe X because you choose via your free will (or so you think) to choice X. In reality, you also choose Y and Z. Therefore, no free will was ultimately exhibited.

However, if I were a betting man, I’d bet that humanity does have free will, although that in no way actually proves the existence of God. Ultimately however, does it make any real difference whether you, dear reader, have free will, or the illusion of free will, as long as you actually believe you’re your own boss? 

By the way, can you have free will in Heaven? I mean can you, of your own free will, commit a sin in Heaven? If you can, well you shouldn’t be in Heaven at all and God has stuffed up, being all-knowing, in letting you in, in the first place. If you can’t commit a sin in Heaven, then God has revoked your free will!

To be continued…

The Enigma That Is Tunguska (1908)

Assuming one or more extraterrestrial civilizations with advanced, interstellar spaceflight capability exists; then they know about Planet Earth. Say ‘hi’ to those pesky UFOs. If UFOs aren’t mystery enough, there’s that enigmatic 30 June 1908 explosion of ‘something’ over the Tunguska region of Siberia. Might the two anomalies be connected? Something that came from outer space crashed into, or exploded above, the Tunguska, Siberia forest in late June of 1908, of that there is no question. Whodunit or whatdunit is the $64,000 question.

Something that came from outer space crashed into, or exploded above, the Tunguska, Siberia forest in late June of 1908, of that there is no question. It was heard up to 1,200 kilometres away; witnessed up to 700 kilometres away. The after-effects, from air pressure waves, ground shockwaves to unusual bright skies at night (quasi-auroras in the sky) viewed throughout Europe in the days (or nights) that followed are well documented. From that, and the evidence as observed from on-site scientific expeditions at ground zero (the epicentre) and the 1908 eyewitness reports, strongly suggest that something several tens of meters across exploded, and totally vaporized some 8 to 8.5 kilometres above ground level with a minimum force of 5 megatons, an accepted average force of between 12.5 to 15 megatons, at the other extreme perhaps up to 30 megatons (1000 times the force unleashed on Hiroshima). 

Because of the political turmoil’s Russia and the world were experiencing (WW I; the Russian Revolution), but mainly because the affected region was just about inaccessible due to the harsh climate, distance from civilization and wilderness terrain, it was many years before an actual scientific investigation was launched and travelled into the region to investigate into what actually happened – what impacted this vast forested region of Siberia where (fortunately) there were few inhabitants and witnesses. The main and initial scientific investigator was a Russian scientist, Leonid Kulik. His first expedition in 1921 didn’t actually reach ground zero; but later expeditions of his in 1927 (the first to reach the epicentre), with follow-ups in 1928 and 1929 and finally in 1939 got the scientific ball rolling. Of course everyone expected that eye-witnesses would be irrelevant because the object was obviously a natural celestial object, a meteor or a small comet, and there would be a crater. Samples of the extraterrestrial object would be collected, analysed back in civilization, fragments put on display in museums – mystery solved. That’s what everyone expected, but at times Mother Nature can be a real bitch!

Well, to make a long story shorter, initial and subsequent on-site teams of researchers (there were further Russian expeditions in 1958 and 1961 with the first post Cold War international teams hitting the ground in 1989 and 1991) found no crater; no chunks of extraterrestrial debris. Whatever ‘hit’ the Tunguska region of Siberia in June 1908 didn’t really apparently impact, but exploded high up in the atmosphere, a resulting blast wave flattening the trees in a radial pattern out from ground zero, ultimately covering an area associated with a large city. Even that wouldn’t have been all that anomalous were it not for some witnesses who claimed that the object as it descended, changed direction. You wouldn’t have expected that from a natural object. And thus was born the idea that the object wasn’t natural, but artificial, probably, well certainly, since terrestrial technology had no equivalents, extraterrestrial – an alien spaceship.

Seeing as how there’s evidence that UFOs, or ‘flying discs’ as they were called in the late 1940’, could run into difficulty and crash, as in Roswell (July 1947) for example, well that lent additional credibility that in 1908, a ‘flying disc’ also ran into technical difficulty, but exploded, probably a nuclear-type explosion,  relative to actually crash-landing.

Well, whatever it was, it was vaporized to the extent that there wasn’t enough solid residue left behind to establish once and for all that the object actually was. And so other exotic, though natural, theories were spawned to account for the overall Tunguska event anomalies.

So, some scientists have suggested that what hit Tunguska was a mini Black Hole that just kept right on keeping on and passed through the entire Earth, exiting out the opposite side (commonly postulated to be the North Atlantic). There are good theoretical reasons to suspect that mini Black Holes exist in space – ‘theoretical’ needs to be stressed however.

Even more far out, it was a tiny piece of antimatter. Antimatter, when impacting Earth’s atmosphere composed of normal matter, well its ka-boom time as there will be an annihilation of equal parts of our atmospheric matter and whatever the amount of antimatter was – gram for gram; ounce for ounce. When matter meets antimatter, stuff is turned into pure energy, and thus no solid residue left behind at the ‘crime’ scene.   

Even more far out there’s been speculations that the Tunguska Event was caused by a concentration of methane (natural) gas released naturally into the atmosphere which exploded; an extraterrestrial laser beam attack or scientific test on a relatively uninhabited region; giant ball lightning; even a terrestrial death ray or early nuclear experiment that went very wrong. Those make the alien spaceship / UFO blowing up theories seem mundane and commonplace. 

The disturbing bit about the Tunguska Event was that if the explosion / impact had happened slightly earlier or later, it could just as easily have exploded / impacted over a far more densely inhabited region. Hitting the ocean might have generated a tsunami, and we know the sort of havoc they can cause. More frightening, if it had happened, right out of the proverbial blue, no warning at all, in say 1958 instead of 1908, what would Russia’s immediate reaction have been? Maybe an assumption that there had been a nuclear strike, the first of many pre-emptive or unprovoked nuclear strikes on Russian soil. Their reaction, and response, could easily have been, in that Cold War, high tension era, shoot back now and ask questions later – assuming a later after all out nuclear war.

Back to 1908, maybe the Tunguska Event was a comet, or meteor, or a mini black hole, or a bit of anti-matter. Experts remain uncertain and undecided to this very day. Or, maybe it was a spaceship – obviously not of terrestrial origin. Lots of authors have written tomes advocating that explanation (and others even more exotic as we’ve seen). And in fact, although scoffed at by the experts, I’m not quite ready to write off the spaceship theory quite yet. If Roswell, why not Tunguska? However, I’d be being unrealistic if I didn’t admit that theory is a long shot. At the least, it’s still a marvelous scientific mystery. 

Further readings on the Tunguska Incident:

Atkins, Thomas & Baxter, John; The Fire Came By: The Riddle of the Great Siberian Explosion; Doubleday & Company, Inc., New York; 1976: 

Furneaux, Rupert; The Tungus Event: The Great Siberian Catastrophe of 1908; Panther Books, Frogmore, St Albans, Herts; 1977:

Rubtsov, Vladimir; The Tunguska Mystery; Springer, New York; 2009:

Stoneley, Jack; Tunguska: Cauldron of Hell; Star Book, London; 1977:

Verma, Surendra; The Tunguska Fireball: Solving One of the Great Mysteries of the 20^th Century; Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd., Crows Nest, NSW; 2005:

My Top Human Anomalies: A List

It’s been said and cited again and again that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it’s stranger than we can imagine. Whether or not that’s true, the universe, and all it contains, like us, is surely strange indeed. 

EXTINCT ANCESTORS: Modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved from other primates, most probably from chimpanzee stock in Africa when DNA relationships are analyzed. We have a 98% compatibility with chimpanzee DNA. However, there was a long chain of in-between hominoid species twixt chimpanzees and modern humans. Modern humans didn’t evolve willy-nilly in one jump from chimps. The interesting thing is that while all the numerous in-betweens have gone extinct, our ancestral primate chimpanzee stock didn’t. The anomaly is, why should ALL of our in-between ancestral species have gone extinct? We’re not talking one or two or three here, but dozens. It’s stretching credibility to the breaking point that one ancestral species should survive and thrive just long enough for the next in line ancestral species to evolve, and in turn survive and thrive, before going the way of the Dodo, and that this scenario was repeated again and again. There’s no real logical reason why some of our ancestral species couldn’t have survived to ultimately end up coexisting alongside modern humans to this very day.

HUMAN CULTURE & CIVILIZATION: There are two relatively unexplained turning points in the evolution of modern man when contrasted with our more primate-like ancestors. One is the acquisition of what we call culture. Culture (like art appreciation and abstract ideas like an afterlife) happened within a fairly narrow timeframe, roughly 50,000 years ago, wherever nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers gathered. Why the sudden transition? The second great leap forward, again, within a narrow timeframe, some 9000 years ago, was the transition from nomadic lifestyles to settlements – farming crops and herding now domesticated wildlife. Settlements rapidly became villages became towns became cities. While some nomadic hunter-gatherers still roamed the plains, like the Australian aboriginal, what was once that nomadic rule now became that exception to that rule. In both cases, culture and civilization, the observational evidence is rock-solid; theory can’t really explain the transition, or at least the relatively rapid transition, around the world, from the tried-and-true before-the-fact pre-cultural nomadic lifestyle to the unknown leap of an untested experiment with culture and settlements. 

CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. The anomaly is between what our ancient ancestors couldn’t have been expected to know, logically, with what they knew. Their knowledge, often expressed in their mythologies and religions, that there were in fact creations – the universe, stars, solar systems, life, and the human species - therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than they could have possessed. Who passed that information on down the line?

GIFT OF FIRE: In mythologies around the world, one common tale is that some junior deity nicked off with fire belonging to the senior gods, a hot technology that the senior gods had decreed humans shouldn’t have. These junior deities, Prometheus being the best known, in defiance of their superiors give the stolen fire to humans as a gift, usually at quite some considerable peril to their own life and limb. The anomaly here is exactly why presumably humans would come up with such a tall tale in the first place, not once but often and independently in cultures around the globe. The anomaly is because humans don’t need to receive fire as a gift from the gods; fire is a natural part of the human environment. It’s as logical as saying that the gods gave the gift of animals and plants for food, or air and water to humans and prior to that the human species didn’t eat or breathe or drink. At the time humans from many cultures invented the tale of fire from the gods, they had been using fire for tens of thousands of years! Perhaps the gift of “fire” wasn’t really “fire” at all but something more dangerous that the senior gods in their wisdom knew we shouldn’t have, like a parent knows better than to let their very young child play with matches. 

HUMAN UNIQUENESS: The anomaly here is that we humans are not just a different species to all others past and present, but vastly, vastly different. Four vastly different differences in particular strike me as odd.

We alone of all the mammals are bipedal. We alone of all the primates are ‘furless’ – the “Naked Ape” as Desmond Morris described us.  We alone of all species that are and have ever been, are top of the pops in IQ; king of the hill by an extraordinary wide margin in intelligence or the ability to figure things out, call it what you will, plus the use of tools and technology way above that of any other species. Lastly, humans have very distinct facial features – it’s usually how we recognize the identity of another human we’ve seen before. With all other animal species, you’re hard pressed to tell one individual from another based on facial features. You see one sheep’s face, you’ve seen them all. You tend to recognize individuals of other species by size, color and colored patterns, some sort of deformity or abnormality, not by their distinctive facial features which don’t really exist.

If it suits all the other mammals to adopt a four-legged gait and be quadrupeds; if it suited our nearly 200 other primate cousins to retain their fur; if all other species can exist, survive, even thrive without screwdrivers, the automobile, plastics, central heating, the dishwasher, the Internet and the atomic bomb then we have an anomaly here. Every animal species is different from every other animal species, obviously, but there are differences and then there are DIFFERENCES! The human species is so far out in left field as to be nearly out of the biodiversity ballpark.

MORE NAKED APE: Humans of all mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of freshwater. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was so extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s where we get our word, salary from. It would appear that in this case, Mother Nature goofed! Not only did this backwards evolutionary step make us more highly dependent on freshwater and salt than would otherwise have been the case, but since we lost our hairy covering in order to sweat, we’ve been forced to replace that hairy covering with artificial coverings – clothes. If only we’d kept our fur, but then clothing manufacturers and the fashion industry wouldn’t have ever existed!

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: THE EYES HAVE IT: Presumably, in the wild, animals that are active in the daytime need as close to perfect eyesight as makes no odds. They need near perfect vision to find prey, to avoid predators, to navigate, especially those animals who navigate in all three dimensions like flying birds and other creatures (like monkeys) that have an up-and-down as well as a front-back and a left-right lifestyle.

I’m not aware that any of the great apes, and that includes chimpanzees (our closest living ancestral species), are often in need of corrective lenses – they exist perfectly well without glasses, or at least that would be the case with the vast majority. Yet the reverse seems to be the case with humans, their descendents. A very large percentage of the human species have problems with their vision yet require (if they want to read, drive a car, watch TV, sew or play video games) acute vision made possible by glasses, contact lenses, surgery, etc. Presumably, before the invention of corrective lenses, people employed for certain tasks had to undergo an eye exam – like those transcribing by hand onto parchment, say the Bible; an archer in medieval times; a chariot driver in pharaoh’s army. And if you were part of the Mayan emperor’s ball team and couldn’t see very well, well you wouldn’t live to have bad vision for long. 

So, why do many humans have less than 20/20 vision, yet wildlife, even domesticated animals, seem to be able to see with visual acuity for whatever passes for their 20/20?

SPONTANEOUS HUMAN COMBUSTION: The anomaly here is that, albeit very rare, the human body can spontaneously burst into flame, killing the victim and turning the body into ash. It’s anomalous in that 1) the human body is composed mainly of water which you don’t tend to associate with fire or spontaneous combustion; 2) the body’s temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is hardly scorching heat; 3) this anomaly isn’t noticed in animals; 4) the fire is localized to just the body and immediate surroundings despite the intense heat needed to consume a human body, and obvious sources of external fire, say a burning candle, are usually lacking. The closest theory is that perhaps the victim’s body was saturated with alcohol from excessive drinking, and alcohol of course can burn, but that rarely fitted the lifestyle of the victim and it would take one hell of a drinking binge to saturate bodily tissues with alcohol in high enough concentrations to cause the body to combust. Since animals don’t spontaneously combust, that tends to rule out body fat as a fuel source.  

My Top Biological Anomalies: A List

You may live comfortably in your everyday un-anomalous world, but rest assured, that un-anomalous world is in itself an anomaly in a quite anomalous universe, all brought to you by Mother Nature.

CRYPTOZOOLOGY: How can reports of a Bigfoot or a Loch Ness Monster continue for decades, even centuries without physical verification? It’s as if these creatures were but phantoms. It’s easy to visualize such creatures, but far harder to explain how a rather largish lake monster can elude absolute and final detection, required to convince even the most skeptical of skeptics, in a confined lake seemingly indefinitely. Or, if a species is highly territorial, that’s the same as being geographically confined. All these observers can’t be totally mistaken. There is an absolute consistency in the observations, be it whatever’s in Loch Ness or Bigfoot or other unknown creatures. Observations have, in many cases, as noted above, been reported over many centuries, as for example Bigfoot by Native Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans.

However, the central fly in the ointment (an anomaly) is that you cannot ever have just one of these unknown creatures. Creatures, like all biological organisms will die. Therefore, to be sighted over lengthy time frames, these creatures need to breed. To maintain a population’s survival over long time periods requires an entire breeding population, not just two individuals. That in turn ups the ante that sightings, evidence and proof positive should be far greater than they are, especially when these unknown animals are confined to a relatively small space, like a Loch Ness. But there is a slight problem with a small but breeding population of critters – inbreeding. It’s the genetic dangers of inbreeding that’s ultimately behind taboos against incest.

DRAGONS: The anomaly here is that if dragons and dragon-lore was the product of just one culture at say one particular point in time, the concept could be easily dismissed. But when they appear in every culture, from ancient times even up through the 1700’s when they were still part of natural history, then one needs to pay closer attention. That’s all the more so since dragons were taken very seriously indeed. In China they were the emissaries between the gods and the emperor, and woe beholds any of lesser rank that wore a dragon image on their person. Dragons and dragon-lore form a major part of what passes for science-fantasy today. There’s probably no child over the age of five who can’t wax lyrical and tell you all about dragon-lore. The best guess scenario is that while dragons may be considered mythical today; they certainly were not, not too awfully that many generations ago. If that’s the case, if dragons were really real once upon a time, then the anomaly is – no fossils. 

The hidden assumption is of course that they were biological. What if instead they were technological? That in turn of course must of necessity translate into extraterrestrial technology, probably a vehicle and/or weapon of sorts (breathing out fire, anyone?). That might be reinforced by the dragon’s kissing cousin, the Garuda, the divine birdman of Indian myth, which served as the mount, the personal aerial ‘chariot’ of the Hindu god Vishnu. 

CROP CIRCLES: There’s no disputing, no matter how much the pseudoscience skeptic you are, that crop circles do exist. There are numerous pissed-off farmers whose fields have been vandalized; multi-thousands of after-the-fact eyewitness accounts and an equal number of films and photographs, as well as on-site and laboratory analysis of the phenomena. Observation here is at the 100% certainty level. Finding logical and rational theoretical explanations are however way more challenging than a ‘take two aspirin and call me in the morning’ type of remedy or diagnosis. In fact, no matter what theory is advanced, natural, human or alien, there are massive flaws to be had with each.

No natural phenomena can create a myriad of massive geometrically complex perfect constructions using agricultural crops as the medium. The challenge for a human, or even a team of humans, to create the same in total darkness in just a few hours (this is a summertime event – long days; short nights), without mistakes, without leaving their traces (footprints, tire tracks, litter, etc) without ever getting caught, tried and convicted for trespass and vandalism, is beyond the theoretical pale for even the most ardent of sceptics and sceptical explanations, though human hoaxes are the fallback position, albeit without real evidence. As for ET, why they would travel vast distances to, at least in part, dabble in agricultural graffiti, defies our understanding. If crop circles are an attempt by aliens to communicate with humans, well, there’s been a failure to communicate. Theory here is at the near 100% uncertainty level. There’s a long road to hoe yet to reconcile observation and theory.

CATTLE MUTILATIONS: There’s no disputing the bona-fides of this gruesome reality. It has been observed – after-the-fact – photographed, documented, and investigated by all manner of officialdom, as well as unofficial private investigators. And though oft referred to as ‘cattle’ mutilations, all manner of wildlife and other domestic livestock have been targeted too, the first reported case being a horse. Like the crop circle phenomena, there are three possible explanations: natural, human or alien.

If natural, why has this phenomenon only become an issue since the 1960’s? Predator-prey relationships, scavengers, etc. have existed and been observed ever since humans have inhabited the continents. There should be no anomaly here if animal mutilations are just the normal continuation of Mother Nature in tooth and claw. But there is an anomaly. If predators or scavengers, why are there no footprints, and especially if predators, why no signs of a struggle? How can predators account for precision removal of just certain body parts with razor sharp incisions? Since there’s no blood associated with the mutilated carcasses, did predators drink up their entire victim’s blood like an animal version of Dracula?

If humans or cultists are responsible, why hasn’t anyone claimed responsibility? Why hasn’t anyone been caught, tried, convicted, fined and/or imprisoned for trespass, animal cruelty, destruction of private property, etc.? Why no signs of human activity like tire tracks and footprints and litter (say a cigarette butt or beer can or two). Again, why no signs of a struggle?

Some have suggested this is the work of government, or government departments, taking samples to monitor for various bovine nasties, like diseases, or other types of contamination that could endanger human health if these livestock were consumed.  Really! There are vastly easier ways of legally gathering up tissue samples than sneaking around in the dead of night and killing/mutilating animals for a few body parts.

So of course it has to be extraterrestrials! How can aliens mutilate cattle (and other livestock and wildlife), decade after decade, without ever being seen? Why would aliens be interested in wildlife and livestock in the first damned place, or at least some of their highly selected body parts?