a bell buckle bovine conspiracy

Anytime I hear about the town of Bell Buckle I always recall a dead cow I passed on the outskirts of town there a few years back. It laid there on the side of the road with all four limbs in the air and it’s tongue hanging out as if it had seen animals die that way in cartoons and took it to be the position one takes when exiting. This is a regrettable association, as Bell Buckle is a great little wide spot in the road for a day trip. Known mainly for it’s Moon Pie festival, Bell Buckle is also home to a good used book store and the poet laureate of Tennessee (whoever that is)—though none of these attributes have ever helped me understand what brings a dead cow to the side of the road. Would someone hit a cow and then keep just keep on driving? Bear in mind that in Tennessee you can eat what you kill with your vehicle, though I for some reason imagine a preclusion in that law for animals that are traditionally edible. Also, such a collision would’ve rendered the cow a much less pristine corpse than the expired bovine I happened upon. That then left me to wonder about dead cow pick up services and whether or not rural sanitation departments provide residents with such options. I haven’t ruled this scenario out. It would seem an easy avenue to investigate but I’ve never been motivated enough to contact their county’s services department and pose the question.

Which brings me to this, an option I tend to favor despite a lack of evidence and the fact that it could reflect poorly upon the town if taken without all the minor details. Perhaps the town placed it there as a sign to other cows that they are not wanted in Bell Buckle. Was there some incident, long buried by Bell Buckle’s established media, in which a cow or herd of cattle somehow threatened the Moon Pie festival in some way? Is the poet laureate of Tennessee (whoever that is) afraid of cows, and the possibility that one might just wander up and happen upon him/her and disturb the important work that he/she does in the state government enough for the community to take such a drastic action? I like to think so.

Or is it the aliens?

Now, at the risk of sounding any crazier, I will admit to having seen and unidentified flying object on two separate occasions. I won’t go into the whole stories, but I will say that each sighting lasted long enough for me to compare the crafts to identified crafts I have in my memory bank of flying objects. I ruled everything out. I can definitely say that neither of these was a star, plane, helicopter, space shuttle, flaming bird of some sort, swamp gas, or the poet laureate of Tennessee (whoever that is). I can however tell you that I do not believe that either of these crafts was piloted by beings from another planet. The military is always a decade or decades ahead of what they let us know they have, and I have always assumed unexplainable UFO sightings to be experimental crafts.

I also like to think that all the cattle mutilations you hear associated with UFO sightings has something to do with the government keeping the bovines intimidated and less prone to wander about, rendering the world a safer and less stressful place for the poet laureate of Tennessee (whoever that is).