Chuck Zukowski has spent the last 30-plus years investigating reported UFO sightings and unexplained animal mutilations at ranches across the Rocky Mountains and Southwest. His investigations have led “the Mulder of El Paso” to a shocking discovery: a “UFO highway” running across the United States.

Journalist Ben Mezrich chronicles Zukowski’s journey from a UFO weekend warrior to a groundbreaking UFO-logist in “The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway,” out Sept. 6 from Simon & Schuster.

To learn more about Chuck’s UFO quest, read The Post’s interview with him here.

RUSH, COLORADO, AUGUST 12, 2010

38.845858° N, 104.092197° W

Even after twenty years, the feeling of excitement still took Chuck by surprise, the intense burst of adrenaline that seemed to hijack his entire system the moment before he arrived at an incident site, the sense of anticipation that built in his chest, shortening his breath.

Today, the long drive over from his home in Colorado Springs hadn’t helped. Two hours was a lot of time to be alone with one’s thoughts while going through nothing but high, barren desert, broken by sporadic areas of low brush, dried-up streambeds and the occasional barn.

When he finally reached the dirt turnoff to the fifty-acre cattle-and-horse ranch, whose owner, Glenda, had called him, he drove up and parked his pickup truck next to the house. He caught a glimpse of the rancher’s face as she crossed the short distance from the edge of the grazing area where she’d been waiting for him. From both personal experience and his years on the force, he knew what fear looked like.

“Morning,” Glenda managed to say as she reached Chuck’s truck. He had the door open, but was still sitting and gathering his equipment from the front passenger seat. Rubber gloves, plastic bags for samples, two cameras, his handheld electromagnetic field reader, and his gun. He was pretty certain the gun was unnecessary. If history was any predictor, whatever had hit this ranch several days earlier had come in fast and had finished just as suddenly.

“Made it as quickly as I could, ma’am,” Chuck said as he got out and strapped the equipment to the special vest he wore. He’d designed it over the years, after responding to so many of these calls and learning what he would need for most of them. He placed the plastic bags and gloves into Velcro pouches along his ribs and the EMF reader and gun into holsters on either side. “I only wish I could have gotten here closer to when it happened.”

Modal Trigger

Half a week since the incident — a truly frustrating lapse of time, but it couldn’t be helped.

“I’m just glad you’re here. The officers who came by the morning it went down were — well, less than useful.”

Chuck could hear the distaste in her voice, and he completely understood. He’d already read the police report made by the two investigating officers who had stopped by the ranch after Glenda had first called 911. It was obvious the two cops had been far out of their comfort zone — Chuck couldn’t really blame them for that. It was equally obvious that the officers hadn’t been able to give the woman any comfort. It took a lot to traumatize a third-generation rancher, but a pair of cops from the El Paso County Sheriff’s Department weren’t going to be able to make much sense out of something like this.

They started away from the truck and into the ranch proper. On the surface, Glenda’s compound wasn’t unusual. Eighty or so acres, twenty-five head of cattle, with a low house beyond the grazing area and a medium-sized barn attached to the horse corral directly ahead.

But the farther they got from the road, the harder Chuck’s heart started to beat. The low grass they were now moving through seemed untouched — ungrazed — and it was instantly obvious why that was. The handful of cows Chuck could see were clustered together in a small section of their feed area, as close to the barn as they could go.

Beyond them, within the horse corral, the horses were behaving similarly — crowded together near the back fence. In the distance, he could hear a dog making noise from somewhere inside the house — a high-pitched sound, more wail than bark.

“They’ve been like that since it happened,” Glenda said. “Huddled over there, by the barn.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “They won’t go near the bodies.”

“On the phone, you said that at least one of the horses was nearby when it happened?”

Glenda nodded. “A survivor. A witness. Whatever you want to call him.”

This was part of the reason for Chuck’s elevated adrenaline level, beyond being at the site of the incident itself. It was extremely unusual for there to be any “survivors.”

Usually, there were only bodies.

“Over here.”

Even from a distance, Chuck could tell that the two fully mature horses — Princess and Buck — lying prone in the grass had died unnaturally.

Glenda led him the last few yards to the edge of the corral, where she unlatched a wooden gate and headed for the horses grouped together by the back. It took almost ten minutes for her to coax the animal away from the group, another ten for Chuck to get the poor thing comfortable enough with him so that he could approach.

It was a young male, a little over two years old, and to describe the animal as agitated would be a laughable understatement. He pawed at the ground, eyes rapidly shifting, spittle pooling at the edges of his mouth. Moving closer, Chuck immediately saw a reddish mark on the horse’s upper nose — what looked to be some sort of cut, scrape or even burn — about the size of a quarter. Following Glenda’s lead, he bent low and saw similar marks on the inside of the animal’s legs.

“And his behavior — the way he’s acting — this is unusual for him?”

“Unusual? He’s one of my husband’s favorites. Like a pet. Him, Princess and Buck, the three of them were inseparable.”

Chuck nodded. Horses are different from other animals on a ranch — they’re high maintenance, but more than that, they are often part of the family. Glenda and her husband — who, over the past few months, had grown too ill to tend to the ranch, leaving it under her watch — had raised these animals from foals. Beyond the emotional value, horses were expensive. Ranchers like Glenda ran their businesses at very tight margins. The unexpected loss of even a single animal hurt — losing multiple animals could mean the difference between a good season and a bad one.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. And the dog — she’s even worse. Same sort of marks on her. Shaking, drooling, whining. She won’t even come out of the house anymore.”

From the corral, Chuck could still hear the dog’s high-pitched wail. Nearly a week had gone by and the animal was still obviously traumatized. Chuck would want to take a closer look at the poor thing and run some tests on the agitated horse. But first, it was time to see the bodies.

Without another word, Glenda led him toward the pasture where the incident had taken place.

Even from a distance, Chuck could tell that the two fully mature horses — Princess and Buck — lying prone in the grass had died unnaturally. The carcasses were flat against the ground on their sides, splayed out in exactly the same position. As Chuck drew closer, he could see no signs of predators or of any sort of defensive resistance — no deep hoofprints or raised furrows. They had obviously died suddenly. According to Glenda, they had been young, healthy animals, worth around a thousand dollars each.

Both horses had been stripped to the bone in various places. Much of their hides was still present, but the wounds were prolific, from head to haunch.

“You seen this sort of thing before?” Glenda asked, her voice low as they both stopped a few paces from the bodies.

Chuck pulled his rubber gloves out from the pouch on his vest and moved the last few feet to the closer corpse. His heart was pounding so hard, it was difficult to keep his hands from shaking.

Yes, over the past decade, he’d seen this many times.

Even more terrifying, incidents like this had been going on for more than fifty years — this exact same scene had been witnessed and documented on ranches all over Colorado, as well as in New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and many other places — decade after decade.

What had occurred on Glenda’s ranch — as violent and horrifying as it was — was part of a phenomenon made up of more than ten thousand individual incidents, in a half-dozen states — all of them completely unexplained.

Ten thousand incidents.

For the past ten years, Chuck had been pursuing the truth behind these kills and what he believed to be a connected but also unexplained phenomenon. This was his hobby, his obsession, his addiction . . .

“The wounds,” Glenda whispered. “They look, well — surgical.”

Chuck didn’t respond. But as he peered closer, he could see that she was right. On both animals, the eyes had been carefully removed. Other wounds on what was left of the carcasses were precise, small, and yes, seemingly surgical — where internal organs had been excised. And the tongues had both been taken — cleanly, via perfectly straight incisions, far back in the throat.

And that wasn’t even the worst part.

“There isn’t any blood,” Glenda said, her voice trembling.

Chuck dropped to one knee by the closer, partially stripped corpse, the larger of the two dead horses — the male named Buck. His rubber gloves felt snug around his fingers as he sealed them tight at his wrists. She was correct — the animals had been drained of blood. No reddened stains anywhere on the revealed bones, the mostly intact rib cage, skull and stripped limbs. There did appear to be a darkened area of ground just in front of the dead horse, and below its hooves — and in the police report Chuck had read, the investigating officers had called it a pool of blood — but Glenda and Chuck were both experienced enough with dead animals to know the difference between decomposing fats and other bodily fluids and blood. A horse like this — a large male, maybe twelve hundred pounds before whatever happened to it — should have contained about four gallons of blood. For whatever reason, this horse had been exsanguinated — either before it was killed, or after.

“Not enough blood on the ground,” Chuck noted, “and none on the body.”

Why? How? This was a phenomenon so vast, there were cases being recorded in more than a half-dozen states, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes as many as ten in a week.

Now with both knees in the dirt in front of the animal, Chuck leaned forward, his gloved fingers gingerly reaching toward Buck’s partially skinned torso.

“Looks like a long, T-like incision going down what’s left of the abdominal area,” he said, talking mostly to himself, focusing on the areas of the carcass where he could still see flesh and memorizing what he would eventually put in his field notebook, which he’d then share with his expert veterinary contacts at the University of Colorado. “The back anal area was cut out in an unusual circular manner, void of the penis. The eyes, the tongue — and again, not the expected blood pooling, even with such a massive wound.”

Strange, perhaps impossibly so — even days later, there should have been blood around these wounds.

When Chuck had first talked to Glenda on the phone before he’d driven over to Rush, the woman had called the incisions on her horses “laserlike,” and had described a burn-type smell associated with them. And in the police report, the officers had related being led onto the scene by Glenda’s husband, who had been agitatedly suggesting that some sort of military agency must have been responsible for the butchery, using high-tech lasers. Chuck took a deep breath, then shook his head.

“I don’t see any burn markings,” he said, running his gloved fingers along each revealed rib. “No signs of cauterization at all.”

And there was no scent of burning flesh or bone; whatever smell had once been associated with the wounds had since cleared. However, as Chuck continued running his fingers along each of the animal’s ribs, he felt grooves. He peered closely and noticed unusual, etchlike markings, starting approximately three inches from the spine on each rib, originating up near the skull, and running consistently down all the ribs, a straight-line pattern leading all the way to the eleventh rib.

Curious. He kept the grooves to himself, as he rose from his knees and shifted to the second horse, splayed out in an identical position. He was pretty sure that when he eventually got out his measuring tape, he’d find the positioning so precise, the differences would be minuscule.

He didn’t even need to go to his knees to see that Princess’s wounds were also nearly identical to Buck’s: the same partially excavated hide, the same missing eyes, tongue and anal region, the same bizarre because of its location.

The very first well-publicized mutilation had occurred very close to Glenda’s ranch, more than fifty years earlier.

Back in 1967, a horse named Lady had been killed and similarly excised in nearby Alamosa, Colorado. Lady’s head and neck had been skinned, and her hide appeared to have been cauterized. As with Buck and Princess, the wounds had been bloodless.

That particular mutilation had also been accompanied by a handful of UFO sightings, within a twenty-four-hour period. One witness, a Superior Court judge named Charles Bennett, had claimed to have seen “three reddish-orange rings in the sky” that had maintained a triangular formation and had moved at incredible speeds. These reports had galvanized popular interest.

That 1967 incident, so close to where Glenda had found her prized horses, had caused the phenomenon of animal mutilations to enter the paranormal lexicon.

Standing next to the two dead horses — the terrified whine of the rancher’s dog still rising above the wind — Chuck did his best to reassure Glenda that he was going to do everything he could to try to help her understand what had happened on her ranch. He would run as many tests as he could on the two corpses, perhaps even cart the carcasses over to his veterinary sources at the university, and take readings on the “surviving” horse, as well as the traumatized dog. But even so, he was certain that nothing he could say or do would be enough. In fact, at the moment, nothing anyone could say or do would be enough.

In Chuck’s expert opinion — and over the past eight years, he had turned himself into one of the most knowledgeable investigators in the world — the scene in front of them wasn’t the result of a predator. No animal could have caused these bizarre wounds. Nor did Chuck see any evidence that pointed to human culpability. No footprints, tire tracks, or signs of violence one would expect with two horses taken down like this, in such close proximity, in such a macabre manner.

In their report, the two officers who had first investigated the scene agreed it wasn’t a predator, and despite any actual evidence, had assumed it was some sort of act of animal cruelty. Chuck believed their report only opened doors to more questions than it answered: In the history of animal mutilations — ten thousand, over the past fifty years — nobody had ever been caught or arrested.

Every one of them had eventually been deemed unexplained.

“But you’ve seen this before,” Glenda said. “How could this be happening, over and over again, and nobody knows why?”

Why? How? This was a phenomenon so vast, there were cases being recorded in more than a half-dozen states, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes as many as ten in a week.

“What about the authorities? Not the local cops, I mean, like maybe the sheriff, the mayor’s office?”

Chuck pulled off his rubber gloves and put his hand on Glenda’s trembling shoulder, leading her back to the house.

“Actually, it’s gone a lot higher than that.”

In fact, the phenomenon of animal mutilations, which had been simultaneously mocked as the product of some sort of Midwestern mass hysteria and shrouded in continually redacted secrecy, had once inspired a massive, multistate investigation. It had involved a Democratic senator from Colorado, the FBI, at least one satanic cult, and a near-decade-long open case file that had ended right back where it had started

Ten thousand animal mutilations — all of them unexplained.

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