How would you react if you were enjoying a nice walk along a beautiful river when you suddenly came upon a horrid stench and then you found it coming from the carcass of a dead goat in the water, and not just dead, but actually decapitated. And then you noticed another headless goat and then another and another and another.

In fact, there's at least one waterway in the United States

with more than a thousand headless goats dumped into it every year.

Who is doing it and why?

We're going to find out right now on Scptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

The Headless Goats of the Chattahoochy

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing

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The peaceful Chattahoochee River flows through Atlanta, Georgia, a lovely and winding stripe of nature through the urban landscape.

But for more than a decade, it has been plagued by about the least likely blight you can imagine.

The carcasses of headless goats,

hundreds of them month after month,

sometimes enough to congregate into jams.

Where are they coming from? Who is doing this? Is it Satan worshipers? Is it aliens? Is it something we haven't imagined? Today we're going to find out.

A 2022 article in The New Yorker famously drew attention to this and asked,

hundreds of decapitated goat carcasses have turned up in the river that runs through metro

Atlanta.

Are they evidence of animal sacrifice, drug smuggling, or both.

And sure enough, the article, and many others like it, paint a shocking picture.

This beautiful river setting juxtaposed with the incongruous and horrifying image of bloated

goat carcasses, decapitated, many covered with maggots, and found in such numbers that it's hard to think of any prosaic explanation for them.

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