Snippy the Horse — The Case That Started the Mutilation Mystery (1967)

On September 7, 1967, Alamosa County rancher Harry King discovered his horse Lady (misidentified as 'Snippy' by the press) dead in a field near the Great Sand Dunes in southern Colorado. The horse's flesh had been cleanly stripped from the skull and neck down to bare bone, with no blood visible at the scene or in the surrounding soil. Strange, flattened circular marks were found in the nearby brush. The case was investigated by the Alamosa County Sheriff, a pathologist, and representatives of the Condon Committee (the University of Colorado's UFO investigation funded by the Air Force). The investigation produced conflicting conclusions: the sheriff believed the horse had been killed by lightning, the pathologist noted the unusual precision of the tissue removal, and UFO investigators connected the case to reports of unusual lights in the San Luis Valley. The case received extensive media coverage and is now considered the first widely publicized animal mutilation case in the United States, establishing the template for thousands of similar reports that followed over the next five decades.