7 Unsolvable Mysteries (That We Can Totally Solve)

7. Are Cattle Mutilations Alien Experiments?

Gruesome, mysterious and potentially associated with aliens, the mystery of cattle mutilation is ripe for some internet myth.

Since the early 20th century, something has been preying on cattle and other livestock in the dead of night. The animals would be found with areas such as eyes, mouth, tongue, internal organs and genitalia missing and, what's more, the wounds were clean, mostly bloodless and looked as though they had been removed with surgical precision. In many cases, the abdomen looks as though it has been sliced open with a scalpel.

Aliens? Satanists? Nutters?

Nah, probably maggots.

In 1979, a Sheriff from Arkansas left a fresh dead cow out in a field much like the ones that these mutilated corpses were found and had people sit and watch it for 48 hours straight. He didn't see any aliens or satanists or even any large predators, but what he did see was blowflies. As the cow decomposed, the trapped gases caused the abdomen to split open and exposed the internal organs. Blowflies ate the organs and laid eggs in the soft tissues of the eyes, mouth and genitals, and when the maggots hatched, they ate the soft flesh down to the bone, leaving a clean wound. The carcasses are often said to be suspiciously "bloodless", but this is likely because there were no open wounds until long after death, meaning that the blood would have settled and congealed. Dead things don't tend to bleed.

The resulting carcass from the sheriff's experiment looked just like the "mutilated" ones in just two days.

The problem is really that a lot of people don't really know what a corpse looks like and mistake natural phenomena of something untoward. Thereafter, it only takes a few retellings to pick up embellishments regarding alien spacecraft and government experiments and, voila, you have yourself an internet myth.