Denmark was thrown into a panic last year over reports of animal mutilations. It began on July 25 when Monic, a $25,000 Arabian breeding mare, was found dead with a small hole in its skull between the ear and eye. The veterinarian who performed the autopsy was mystified: he found no bullet and could not trace the wound to any conventional weapon. Worse yet, one month earlier, two other horses had been found dead with unidentifiable wounds 3 to 6 inches deep.

The Monic mystery recalls that of "Snippy," the Appaloosa mare found dead in southern Colorado in September of 1967. The horse had been stripped to the to the shoulders and a subsequent investigation discovered that all the internal organs in her chest had been surgically removed. Since UFOs and other weird moving lights allegedly had been seen in the area, it didn't take long for some UFO buffs to link Snippy's death to extraterrestrials and thus the story spread around the world.

However, despite ample opportunities to do so, the Danes made no such connection to UFOs in the "Monic Affair." At first the rumors suggested that the horse had been shot by an arrow, which had been retrieved by an archer. But regular hunting arrows do not leave such small holes. Later, Monic's death became linked to a wave of horse mutilations across the German border. It seems that since 1992, 89 horses had been killed and 229 others had been injured in a crime epidemic the German police called Pferderippern or "horse rippers." When reports rose of injured horses in Denmark, Danish police appealed for calm and warned of smear campaigns against the Germans. "As it is," said a police spokesman, "we don't really know that the holes are man-made."

A lack of evidence finally led Danish police to give up trying to link the "Monic affair" to the German mutilations and the case remains unsolved. But the fact that UFOs never were pinned with the blame in this case intrigues Bill Ellis, an associate professor at Pennsylvania State University in Hazleton and president of The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. "The UFO scenario has been one of the dominant scenarios in the U.S. since Snippy the horse was supposedly done in by extraterrestrials back in the 1960s," he says. "It's easier for us to refer a mysterious event to an existing theory explaining mysteries than to invent an even more mysterious new scenario. That's why the Danish event was interesting: you could see the media and police grappling with the evidence and looking for scenarios rather than recycling old ones."

But Ellis can only guess at who was responsible for Monic's death: "From what the press says, it seems likely that someone, either for a nasty prank or for a grudge kept out of the papers, murdered the horse with a bolt-pistol (normally used to kill horses in slaughterhouses). But without on-site investigation, I don't want to make any call. As a folklorist, I'm much more interested in how people construct satisfying narratives from initially mystifying details. It's a serious analog to the 1 minute-detective stories' people used to play and maybe still do:

"Man found hanged from the ceiling in a room with no furniture, and no way for the man to have reached the rope. No other physical signs of anything on the floor, but the detective notices that the man's bare feet are burned. 'Suicide.' How come?"

--Patrick Huyghe