A new series of cattle mutilations has ranchers, police and UFO enthusiasts stumped. Rancher Manuel Sanchez has found four calve carcasses on his ranch in as many weeks with odd cuts, missing parts and bizarre injuries.

“A lion will drag its kill. Coyotes rip and tear flesh. These were perfect cuts — like with a laser or like a scalpel. And what would take the waste — all the guts — and leave the nice, tender meat?” Sanchez says, as he nudges his old Ford through rutted trails, rosary beads swinging from his rearview mirror. “No tracks. No blood. No nothing. I got nothing to go by. They don’t leave no trace.”

Very odd. I want to give props to Chuck Zukowski for not jumping to the conclusion that Mr. Sanchez has. Remember: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Full story here.

Over at the New York Times’ Freakonomics blog, Peter Leeson has written up a guest post entitled “The X-Files, Economics Edition.” In it, he proposes an economic approach to the U.F.O. phenomenon:

Could the tools of economics help us get to the bottom of the U.F.O. phenomenon? That’s what fellow economist Claudia Williamson and I are hoping in our latest project that uses economics to analyze the American flying saucer phenomenon.

We’re still in the early data-collecting stages of our project; but in doing so we’ve come across an intriguing pattern. The figure [above] plots total U.F.O. sightings in the U.S. for each state (per 10,000 residents) between 1997 and 2007 against total Bigfoot sightings in each state (per 10,000 residents) for the same period.

Link to Leeson’s post.