Linda Moulton Howe

Linda Moulton Howe (born 1942) is an American investigative journalist and documentary producer whose 1980 film A Strange Harvest brought the cattle mutilation mystery to national attention and won a regional Emmy. She became one of ufology's most prolific reporters and one of its most disputed.

A Stanford-educated broadcast journalist, Howe was working Denver television when Colorado's mutilation reports drew her in. Her documentary interviewed ranchers, veterinarians, and law enforcement, arguing the deaths defied predator explanations.

Howe's career intersects the field's key nodes: in 1983, during the Bennewitz era, AFOSI's Richard Doty showed her an alleged presidential briefing document about crashed craft and beings, promising film that never came, an episode now understood as part of the documented disinformation operation, with Howe as a target. She reported on Dulce lore, animal mutilations worldwide, crop formations, and whistleblower claims across decades on Coast to Coast AM and her platform Earthfiles, collecting testimony no one else gathered.

Howe reports claims more than she makes them, but her framing accepts a non-human presence and government concealment as working reality. Her contribution is archival: an enormous interview record, including witnesses who spoke only to her, and the mainstreaming of the mutilation question that official inquiries (the FBI-adjacent Rommel report) tried to close.

Skeptics regard her as the field's leading amplifier of unvetted testimony, note the Rommel investigation attributed mutilations to scavengers and decomposition, and cite the Doty episode as proof her sourcing could be steered. Even sympathetic researchers fault credulity toward dramatic claimants. Her defenders answer that she documented the Doty deception herself, that ranchers' veterinary evidence was never fully answered, and that somebody had to keep records of what witnesses actually said.

Howe continues publishing via Earthfiles and speaking, an elder stateswoman to experiencer audiences and a cautionary tale to methodologists, sometimes in the same paragraph.