FigureLinda Moulton Howe (b. 1942)

What's documented

MA Communications, Stanford 1968; documentary producer and on-air investigative reporter for KMGH-TV Denver in the late 1970s and for KCNC Denver and various Westinghouse-affiliated stations through the 1980s. A Strange Harvest (1980), her 56-minute documentary on the Colorado/Wyoming/New Mexico cattle-mutilation wave of 1975–79, won a Regional Emmy and ran on PBS affiliates nationally; it remains the single most-cited piece of broadcast journalism on the mutilation phenomenon. Howe interviewed New Mexico State Police officers (notably Officer Gabe Valdez of the Dulce Apache Reservation jurisdiction), ranchers, veterinary pathologist Dr. John Altshuler, and Sen. Harrison Schmitt’s office during the production. Her subsequent broadcast work — UFOs: The Best Evidence (1989), the Strange Harvest sequels, and HBO/Discovery documentary contributions — established her as a working journalist with continuous access to the U.S. cattle-mutilation case files and to ranch-witness interview corpora. From 1999 to the present she has edited EarthFiles.com, a long-running independent investigative-reporting site with sustained engagement on UAP, cattle mutilations, crop circles, and AAWSAP-adjacent material. Howe was one of the named individuals briefed in 1983 by alleged Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) officer Richard Doty in a now-controversial document-transfer sequence that included the so-called ‘Aquarius briefing’; the document’s authenticity has never been confirmed and the episode is part of the Bennewitz disinformation history. Howe’s significance to the corpus is durational: she has been on the cattle-mutilation beat for forty-five years, which is the longest single-journalist tenure on that case file in American journalism.