The following article contains images some readers may find distressing.

A decade ago, Mick Cook began finding dead cattle on his remote 14,000-hectare North Queensland cattle station with distressing and inexplicable injuries.

See more of Mick’s story in the video above

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The first was a dead cow lying on the ground, with her udder cleanly excised.

“We didn’t take it very seriously, didn’t know much about it, so I basically gave it a miss,” Mick recalls.

He admits that, until recently, he didn’t give too much thought to a succession of strange cattle deaths over the following years because, in this rugged country north-west of Mackay, it is not unusual to occasionally lose animals to predators or drought.

But just over two years ago, he was patrolling the river country on his station, and he found another dead cow.

“I thought, ‘well, another bloody one’, sort of thing,” Mick says.

“As I’m driving past her, I seen her udder had been surgically removed.

“There was no blood or anything, but very neatly removed, the whole udder.”

He also noticed that the poor animal’s jowl (the lower part of its cheek) and one ear had been cleanly cut.

“We went back and looked at a lot of the other cattle that had died and found that they’d been operated on as well in different ways,” Mick tells 7NEWS Spotlight.

What struck Mick and his wife Judy most was how precise the cuts were that had removed key organs from his dead cattle.

“It’s as if it’s sealed it when it’s cut it - there’s no blood on the hide, no blood on anything and I don’t know anybody that’s been able to remove a cow’s udder without blood everywhere.

“And not only that, there’s no struggle where the cow died or anything else,” Mick says, noting there were no discernible footprints in the dirt around these animals.

He knows what injuries look like when they are caused by local predators such as dingo native dogs and these injuries showed none of the teeth marks and torn flesh typical with such attacks.

The Cooks have lost at least ten cattle, all with identically surgically precise wounds that they frankly concede defy explanation.

One of the photographs Mick took shows a cow with a wound that is clearly hexagon shaped.

What the Cooks also noted was a complete lack of any blood that one would normally expect from such an excision.

The wounds were so exact that microscopic layers of translucent flesh were still intact behind a missing eye; a severed tongue and jowl, the excised penis of a prize bull and even an entire cow’s anus were removed with no apparent disturbance to the adjacent flesh.

“You can see all the veins and that behind where it’s been removed,” Mick says, “and you can see the blood in them, so there’s obviously still blood in them. But there’s no blood actually on the wounds.”

He doubts even a skilled surgeon with a knife could make such precise cuts.

Going public

When Mick and Judy went public on local radio and in local newspapers in 2018, other local farmers privately admitted they had experienced similar strange losses.

Police told the Cooks there was little they could do unless the perpetrator was caught in the act.

“If there’s nobody there, we can’t do anything,” Mick says police told him.

The Cook’s farm is very isolated, at the end of a remote road and the only access anywhere into the station runs right by the family’s homestead.

“We would have heard anyone passing by,” Mick tells me.

The one thing they do recall for sure is seeing strange lights one night in a valley beyond their home.

The next day they found a dead cow with excised organs.

“The only way in would have been by helicopter,” Judy says.

“But we actually checked and there were no choppers anywhere near us that night.”

“It’s alien to us,” she jokes.

Judy makes no bones about her suspicion that the explanation for these mutilations might “not be of this world.”

Ask the vet

Hundreds of kilometres to the south, further down Australia’s east coast, a senior cattle veterinarian with decades of experience across northern NSW, recognised immediately the similarities with cattle mutilations he has recorded in that area for years.

He asked not to be identified because of what he sees as an unjustified ridicule factor associated with cattle mutilations, saying he was worried that if he spoke out publicly it might damage his good reputation.

But he hastened to add that he believes the cattle mutilations are an authentic mystery and that it needs to be taken much more seriously by Government agencies.

Assured we would keep his identity confidential, he confirmed he personally investigated Mick and Judy Cook’s cattle mutilation losses, visiting them on their farm, and found the wounds identical to what he has been tracking in northern NSW over many years of veterinary work.

“It is definitely not an animal,” the senior vet tells me.

“These cuts are so precise that I strongly doubt even an experienced worker from the local abattoir could make wounds that are so exact.”

One of the freakiest wounds he saw was a cow with a huge mid-line incision across its abdomen; when he investigated, he discovered the wretched animal’s third stomach, the omasum, was missing, yet the prior rumen and reticulum stomachs were intact and undisturbed.

“That just can’t be done,” the baffled veterinarian says.

“To get to the omasum you need to move the two other stomachs and I cannot comprehend how that could be done without spilling their contents or leaving a huge amount of blood on the ground. There was none.”

The veterinarian personally investigated several cattle mutilations in his area where animals were attacked late at night in complete darkness and discovered next day.

One consistent report from the landowner was that they or their farmworkers had seen unexplained lights overhead that previous evening.

In every single case, he could not find the precise cause of death and every cut was so surgically precise that there were no tabs – no small pieces of meat – left on the bone.

Whatever it was had cut so precisely that it excised all the flesh right down to the periosteum, the clear membrane that sits over the bone - that was undisturbed.

“It’s a bit like the way a cat cleans all the flesh off a fishbone - what was left in many of these cases was a pure skeleton with all the meat stripped off it,” he tells me.

The vet admits the events left him concerned because these mutilations later happened on properties that were visited by him and the farm manager whose farm was one where a previous mutilation had occurred.

“I suspect we were followed,” he says.

The senior vet also investigated one incident where a huge cow was found mutilated on one side of a fence on Mick and Judy Cook’s property; the next morning it was on the other side of the fence.

“Nothing could have that moved that animal like that that I can think of,” he tells me.

He also says it is common for there to be a strange chemical smell near these mutilated animals and how dogs and other animals steer well clear of the carcasses, that would normally be stripped by predators very quickly in the wild.

Back in Mackay, Mick Cook also remembers being affected by a chemical smell he detected on one animal he found on his station.

For decades, such cattle mutilations have been the butt of jokes, and that giggle factor hugely distresses landowners like the Cooks because they clearly care for their animals.

They are shocked and unnerved by the injuries their valuable beasts have suffered.

The UAP link

When I investigated the phenomenon of cattle mutilations both in Australia and around the world, what surprised me was how consistent the accounts are across regions and countries.

Author Ben Mezrich investigated cattle mutilations in his 2016 book The 37th Parallel.

In it, he details how across the USA, for 5,000 kilometres along the latitude of the 37th parallel north of the equator, there have been numerous corroborated, officially reported, often videoed and photographed, sightings of mutilated livestock.

The carcasses are always completely exsanguinated (in actual fact, with no visible blood spilt anywhere) and with distinct surgically precise excisions of key organs.

Mezrich suggested the evidence was overwhelming that there is a link between UAP sightings and unexplained cattle mutilations.

In his research, Mezrich followed Chuck Zukowski, a former reserve Sheriff’s deputy in Colorado, who collated over 10,000 instances where cows and horses were found dead, consistently all missing organs, the cuts surgical and circular, every animal completely drained of blood.

A massive 100 agent FBI investigation into suspected human involvement, demanded by three U.S. State Attorneys-General, failed to solve the mystery.

I spoke confidentially to some of the law enforcement officers who were involved in those investigations, and they are convinced there is something real going on and that it is still happening across the USA.

Many farmers do not report it because police and government agencies seem ineffectual or unwilling to stop it.

It seems that, like the phenomenon of UAPs, cattle mutilations are another mystery that sober society has adjudged to be too controversial (and perhaps too confronting?) to take seriously.

But, like the UAPs, the evidence that there is a real phenomenon is overwhelming.

In a fascinating postscript to our cattle mutilation investigation, Mick and Judy Cook put me on to Mick’s brother Bill and his wife Letty, who, until recently, ran one of Australia’s most remote cattle properties, Suplejack Station - located 730 kilometres north-west of Alice Springs.

Several years ago, during a cattle muster, Bill took a photograph to record the event.

It was only days later that he noticed what he had captured hovering above the mustered cattle image, a blurry image of what looks like a silvery-metallic disc-shaped object, clearly speeding by just metres above them.

“The boys were working the cattle from the yard,” Letty tells me.

“Bill took a photograph and said ‘I didn’t realise we had a chopper there that day’.

“I pointed out that we didn’t and then we realised he had captured something inexplicable.”

Letty tells me they never suffered any cattle mutilations on Suplejack, but she does recall on one occasion something gave a yard full of weiner cattle the jitters so badly that they smashed down two fences to get away from it.

“If it was dingoes then you can normally expect a few wires to be broken but they were clearly so panicked by something that they smashed down two fences to get away from whatever it was,” Letty recalls.

I don’t know what it is that Bill captured on his phone, you be the judge...

Investigative reporter, Ross Coulthart‘s new book In Plain Sight explores the phenomenon of UFOs, UAPs and cattle mutilations, is available to pre-order now.

You can also watch Ross Coulthart’s 7NEWS Spotlight investigation The UFO Phenomenon now on 7plus.