Ancillary Mercy полностью

When Lady’s owner returned to the site the following day, the soil beneath Lady was damp, and a medicine-like smell pervaded the area. Nearby was a bush that was flattened to within ten inches of the ground. Near the bush were fifteen circular marks pressed into the ground; close to that were six additional indentations in a three-foot circular configuration—each was two inches across and four inches deep. Lady’s owner also found a piece of horse flesh encased in skin. When she punctured it, she said, a sticky green paste came out, burning her. Alamosa County sheriff, Ben Phillips, was less impressed by the unusual elements at the scene and blamed the horse’s death on lightning.

John Henry Altshuler, M.D., was a doctor of pathology and hematology at Ross Medical Center in Denver. He happened to be camping illegally in the area at the time of Lady’s death. During his extended camping sojourn, he claimed, he saw three UFOs over the valley, and in fact had gone to the area in the first place because it was a UFO hotspot. Before long, park rangers apprehended him, but when they learned of his profession (medical hematologist), they brought him to see the horse.

Altshuler saw Lady ten to twelve days after her death. He conducted a thorough examination, and concluded that she had been surgically worked on with some type of burning instrument. “Most amazing,” he said, “was the lack of blood.” He added:

I have done hundreds of autopsies. You can’t cut into a body without getting some blood. But there was no blood on the skin or on the ground. No blood anywhere.

Upon looking at the inside of the horse’s chest, he found no organs. “Whoever did the cutting,” he continued, “took the horse’s heart, lungs, and thyroid. The media sternum was completely empty—and dry. How do you get the heart out without blood? It was an incredible dissection of organs without any evidence of blood.”

The case finally made the press when the Pueblo Chieftain reported it on October 7, replete with all UFO connections. Soon, everyone came out to investigate: the Colorado Project, Blue Book, NICAP, and APRO had their own people on the scene. All but APRO attributed Lady’s death to conventional causes. Still, the theory connecting mutilations to UFOs retained its defenders, especially after the mid-1970s, when a wave of animal mutilations spread throughout the western U.S. Following APRO’s lead, MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) gave credence to the UFO connection, and Linda Moulton Howe placed herself at the forefront of the issue with her film and book, Strange Harvest. But while the phenomenon did not become widespread for several years hence, there were still a significant number of animal mutilation reports that followed in the wake of Lady’s death. In Alberta, Ontario, Manitoba, and western Colorado, animal mutilation reports were made through 1968.⁶⁸

SHAG HARBOR

A most extraordinary UFO incident occurred off the coast of Shag Harbor in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1967. During late September, several area residents had noticed odd nocturnal lights. Then, during the night of October 4, two sightings of a bright orange light took place one hour and one hundred miles apart. In the second instance, two men saw an orange light first, which was joined by two more lights, forming a forty-five-degree angle. A few minutes later, other witnesses saw four lights moving in a horizontal line, flashing on and off in sequence. They positioned themselves at a forty-five-degree angle and descended, or glided, into the sea, about a half mile offshore.

For some time, a single white light bobbed on the water, and some people heard a hissing noise from the area. The light seemed to be carried out by the tide and disappeared before anyone could reach it, but witnesses also noticed a yellowish, bubbling froth about eighty feet wide. No one had ever seen anything like this before. A statement from the Royal Canadian navy said there were no missing aircraft or ships in the area, and in fact no planes operating in the area at the time.

The object appeared to go into the sea between the mainland and Cape Sable Island. On October 6, Canadian navy divers from the H.M.C.S. Granby began searching the waters and ocean bottom but found nothing, even after other divers joined in. The search ended on October 8. On the eleventh, several witnesses reported seeing perhaps the same lights. They hovered about three-quarters of a mile offshore, at about five hundred or six hundred feet altitude, then disappeared; they soon reappeared, positioned at a thirty-five-degree angle, and descended toward the horizon.