History

Why do Aliens Visit Farms and Take Cows?

Why do Americans think extraterrestrials would visit the countryside leaving crop circles, conspiracies, and levitating cattle?

10 min readJul 25, 2022

The bovine flails its legs, eyes wide, neck writing within the solid extraterrestrial beam — floating up, up into the night towards its impending doom…

It’s an absurd trope: interstellar travelers hurtle towards Earth from billions of lightyears away, only to crash land in the middle of the desert or abscond with a few cows. The idea that little green aliens would tractor-beam cows and disappear into the night is so ridiculous that it has become a parody of itself. After all, why would intelligent life crash in the middle of nowhere?

Why would aliens visit farms and take cows?

Perhaps there’s a simple answer: farms provide a lot of wide-open space for a plausible crash-landing and are remote enough for stories about alien visitation to remain plausible. Or at least plausible enough for tourists to investigate themselves.

Rural areas are — with exception — home to a population of Americans that don’t especially trust their national government and prefer that local governments tackle unfamiliar issues. Alien issues included.

Or perhaps we’re missing the point. Are cows more intelligent or visible than we previously assumed? Is it comforting to think that aliens might take cows instead of humans for their intergalactic experiments? Or are cows a mirror for our fragility, a reminder that we too are creatures of comfort that can only withstand stress for as long as our biology allows?

Often grim or goofy, the history of aliens visiting rural America — and yes, taking a few cows as souvenirs — has a lot to do with how we tell stories about otherworldly encounters and who we believe enough to listen to their tales.

Why do aliens take cows? Let’s start at the very beginning: Why do aliens visit farms in the first place?

Why visit farms at all?

From Roswell to Area 51 and the far reaches of Kentucky and New Hampshire, key narratives have shaped how we tell alien encounters — and for whatever reason, they nearly always happen on the range.

Roswellian cows and Area 51

Isn’t New Mexico a desert? Isn’t Nevada more desert??

Of course. In case you’ve forgotten, many desert areas of the US are struggling farming territories, and both alien hotspots are home to economically important and often troublesome cows.

Roswell
It’s no secret that Roswell, New Mexico, is a hotspot for alien tourism. The New Mexico town became an extraterrestrial hotspot after wreckage fell from a government experiment Project Mogul in 1947 and was deemed a government cover-up by retired US Army Major and television repair man Jesse Marcel.¹

Roswell depends on alien tourism, so that means interviews with townspeople are not the best indicator of whether extraterrestrials did crash land in New Mexico at the start of the Cold War.¹ But Roswell is also home to hearty aviation, manufacturing, and dairy industries. Roswell-Chavez County is home to USA Beef Packing and some even call the area the “Dairy Capital of the Southwest.”

Area 51
Area 51 is known as a not-so-secret US government military testing base surrounded by — you guessed it — more cows. And while some alien enthusiasts warn visitors that the cows can be quite a handful, a cattle ranch bordering Area 51 was recently listed for $4.5 million. The ranch appears to have sold, but little information has come from that corner of Nevada since. Perhaps it’s a government cover-up. Or perhaps nothing happened after all.

That’s not to say that there isn’t something going on at Area 51. But aliens? That’s a long shot, says Sarah Scoles, freelance science writer and author of They Are Already Here: UFO Culture and Why We See Saucers. A guest on the UFOology episode of the Ologies podcast by Alie Ward, Scoles describes her excitement driving near Area 51 one electric night:

“I kept on seeing things… as I was driving. And then eventually I realized that it was military flares; jets doing exercises… one will fire a fake missile and the other one will send off these flares to distract the fake missile… when you see them, your mind connects them into a shape, and sometimes the shape looks like a saucer.”

If you want to see some cool aerial tests, Area 51 might be worth the road trip. But don’t be disappointed if you only see a dazzling night sky and miles of endless road. And cows. Be prepared for the cows.

Little green men

One late summer night in 1955 in Kelly, Kentucky twelve members of the Sutton family pounded on the police station door. They weren’t the type of family who came running for help. They lived in a tiny shack on the outskirts of town without running water or radio. But they kept guns hidden throughout the house for exactly this type of emergency.

Shortly after Mrs. Sutton noticed a silver object falling across the sky, her family home was seized by “little green men” each with an “oversized head…almost perfectly round, [its] arms extended almost to the ground” with sharp talons and skin that shimmered in the moonlight. Could these creatures have been owls? Why, then, did bullets do nothing to deter the tiny green visitors?

Before dawn, state police, military police, and a news photographer searched the farm. They found bullet shells, but no evidence of aliens or liquor that might have prompted such visions. Later, newspapers like the New York Times got ahold of the story and popularized the Suttons’ account of the little green visitors. Their story is why we first think of “little green men” whenever aliens enter the conversation, and it continues the idea that aliens visit farms, whatever their intentions.

The first ‘alien abductions’

The first alien abduction tale took place in 1957 in rural Brazil when farmer Antônio Villas Boas claimed he was forcibly taken by aliens and made to do some really freaky stuff.

Barney and Betty Hill followed with a similar narrative after their experience driving through the mountains of rural New Hampshire in 1961. A light had been following them out on the open road, and when they finally returned home, their clothes were a mess. Their watches had stopped working. Was it really that much later than their estimated arrival? And why couldn’t they remember what had happened during their journey?

The Hills used hypnotherapy to recall what happened that night, and their encounter eventually became a 1966 bestseller, The Interrupted Journey. The couple claimed that they had been separated, taken into the ship, and probed in a series of alien experiments. Almost every part of their story has been questioned or discredited.

What the Hills did give us, however, was a new and widely-published narrative that shaped all subsequent alien abduction stories: aliens could pick up lonesome travelers, violate their privacy, and leave their memories scattered.

If aliens could manage such an exploit on unsuspecting travelers, why might they want our cows?

Where are all the cows?

Where the cows come in, and what remains unexplored.

Her arms were cut off. Her legs were cut off. Her ears were cut off…

Cows were important livestock well before they were ever carried off by alien spacecraft. So important, that they were allegedly carried off by fairy folk, vampires, and other creepy crawlies suspected to visit farms by night. Cows still make up a huge industry in the US today.

In the 1970s, the FBI investigated suspected alien encounters, including the Hills’ encounter as well as a series of human and animal mutilations in Project Grunge or Project Blue Book. One news clipping in these now declassified FBI documents reads “FBI joins investigations of animal mutilations linked to UFOs.” Indeed, that period saw a spike in livestock found mutilated in the woods, seemingly abandoned with no tracks to suggest predation and taken apart with ‘surgical precision.’ ²

Were these cow carcasses otherworldly, or normal rotting flesh? To further settle the matter, in 1979 the Arkansas sheriff’s department left a cow carcass undisturbed in a field for 48 hours, and the results looked a lot like the ‘mysterious’ cow carcasses found not far off in the woods.

This rise in reports was likely just that: an increase in the number of dead cows that had wandered away from their pastures and had their soft tissue scavenged by small animals too tiny to leave behind noticeable tracks. Annual cattle deaths remained stable during this period, but media coverage skyrocketed.²

This may have been due to economic anxiety. In the 1970s the US government send grain to food insecure nations, which in turn drove up the price of grain farmers could use to feed their livestock. President Nixon worsened the situation by freezing the price of beef, leaving farmers in a tight squeeze. Combined with the Satanic Panic and recent alien reports, stressed-out rural communities didn’t need to look far to turn their dire financial situation into something far more ominous.

Close encounters of the second kind

“Close encounters of the second kind” describe evidence and artifacts that suggest that an alien visit occurred in the past, despite a lack of eyewitnesses. Some rural examples of this are crop circles and alien skulls.¹

Crop Circles began appearing in Southwest county of Wiltshire, near Stonehenge and other neopagan sites, and have always shown up in modern secularized states with new age movements. A small group can make a crop circle’ using basic tools overnight. In the US, our most popular crop circle-type narrative is the Delphos ring, which may have been caused by bioluminescent fungi and ball lightning (which is still an understudied phenomenon itself.)¹

Debunked alien skull discoveries have mostly been modified human or cattle skulls interpreted or shaped to look otherworldly. Unless of course, you believe cows have been the aliens all along.¹

A simple matter of geography?

Many observatories and space telescopes are stationed in remote locations far away from light pollution and other distractions. It lies in the middle of nowhere. By contrast, The SETI Institute lies in Silicon Valley close to the NASA Ames Research Center, and many NASA sites are well connected with major cities.

The majority of US adults believe in UFOs and intelligent life beyond Earth, and the majority of US land is rural. Remote. Ready for UFO landings, perhaps.

Maps of UFO sightings and open cases ‘taken seriously’ by the US government point to these expanses in the American South, Southwest, and Midwest. These areas, for the most part, have a higher-than-average density of cows. And cows produce very high levels of methane, one (unreliable) indicator of life on Earth and neighboring planets.

It may be comforting that aliens take cows instead of their human counterparts. Or the association between aliens and cattle might point to our own species’ fragility, the idea that we are no more prepared for alien attack than the failing bovine caught between the mothership and her trailing tractor beam.

Why do these supposedly intelligent aliens, with their fancy gadgets and superior travel, visit rural places in the middle of nowhere when they have advanced technology? (Cue a chorus of conspiracy theories.)

Why does Bigfoot frequent the Pacific Northwest, or why does Mothman plague Point Pleasant, West Virginia? Why do cryptids supposedly wander where we least expect them?

It’s easy to relegate our worst fears to the dark, to imagine what might be lurking beyond our field of vision — or the limits of our exploration. Once those areas become well-known, the danger moves a little further off. Towards some other unknown corner. Or perhaps they stay, so long as the tourists remain happy.

Aliens and cows in the media

Perhaps aliens steal (and harm!) cows simply because that’s what they’ve done on television — in commercials, in the X-Files, in comics, and in a lot of Western Animation (Steven Universe, Invader Zim, and even Veggie Tales.) South Park argues that aliens converse with cows because they “have experimented with all the beings of Earth, and… have learned that [cows] are the most intelligent and wise.” Here are some more examples of this trope.

When I was younger, I’d play a modified version of the Invaders From Planet Moolah slot machine on my desktop and get excited whenever I landed an alien-cow bonus. I never considered the relationship between aliens and cows. They were inseparable. They needed no further explanation.

Today however, it’s difficult to turn this trope on its head into something new. Aliens, it appears, have always taken cows. It’s a wonder that any cattle remain.

Moo-ving onwards

And yet, is the alien-meets-cow narrative so obsolete that we can only accept it by subverting it or turning it into comedic gold? I don’t think so.

Yes, when I think of aliens and cows, I think of Invaders From Planet Moolah. I became caught up in this topic after stumbling upon an innocent Instagram art account selling stained glass UFOs, complete with petite plastic cows floating up, up, and away.

But I also think The Twilight Zone — and specifically, To Serve Man. I think of the narrative that didn’t include cows in the first place. Because the idea of aliens taking humans was a bit too scary for our sensibilities. And so into the narrative, we added cows. Because they were cute and amusing and well, aliens were already frequenting farms, weren’t they?