Over the last month, Oak Harbor has received national and even international attention from the most unusual of folks.

People who believe that extraterrestrial beings, or the Antichrist himself, like to mutilate domestic animals.

In a six week period, Oak Harbor residents reported finding seven dead cats, four of which were cut in half. The police and the city’s animal control officer were convinced that it was the work of coyotes, but several people weren’t so sure. They pointed to the precision of the cuts, and the lack of tracks or signs of a struggle, as proof that a person was involved.

Then another explanation cropped up. An Oak Harbor man, who didn’t want his name used, suggested that the cat deaths could be the work of UFOs or aliens from another planet.

The News-Times received calls and e-mails messages from people across the country who see a link between the dead cats and aliens from another world. Mikk Molder of Toronto suggested that the dead cats were tied to nighttime paralysis and a malevolent, devil-like spirit.

Linda Moulton Howe of New Mexico investigated the Oak Harbor cases and wrote a story on her popular Web site, earthfiles.com. She is an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, a documentary filmmaker, an author and an internationally-known expert on unexplained phenomenon. She’s been interviewed by Larry King, Montel Williams, Art Bell and has appeared on the Discovery and History channels. She is a frequent guest on the popular late-night radio program, “Coast to Coast with George Noory.”

Her books include “An Alien Harvest” and “Glimpses of Other Realities, volumes 1 and 2.”

Howe said all the interest in Oak Harbor’s dead cats isn’t surprising. “Animal mutilations have been linked to something non-human for a long time,” she said in a recent interview.

She said that Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso, deceased in 1998, told her that in his work in Washington, D.C. for President Dwight D. Eisenhower that he saw “highly classified documents about the unusual deaths of animals around the world attributed to extraterrestrial biological entities. No blood, no tracks.”

Mysterious animal mutilations occur all the time. Cats are the only animal, she said, regularly found cut in half. An Oak Harbor woman told Howe that her cat’s body was like “a child’s hand puppet.”

She went on to say that government officials often aren’t forthcoming with information about these cases.

“They always say it’s predator, disease or Satanic cult,” she said. “All of these are easily eliminated by field investigation.”

Despite her suspicions, Howe didn’t draw any conclusions in her story about Oak Harbor. She said her role as an investigative journalist is to simply lay out the evidence.

“Perhaps the current rash of half cats in Oak Harbor and the Seattle region are the work of real coyotes,” she wrote. “But coyotes would not explain the hundreds of bloodless half cats found over the past decades from England to Canada throughout the United States.”

Howe and others have been investigating animal mutilations for many years. The Internet is filled with stories of carved-up cattle, inexplicable mass deaths of livestock and cat mutilations. A common theme is the number of cats found cut in half.

According to both a 1996 Newsweek poll and a 1997 Gallup poll, 48 percent of people in the nation think UFOs are real.

Fortunately, whatever — or whomever — has been killing cats in Oak Harbor has either stopped, moved on, or the pets are staying inside. The police haven’t received any reports of dead cats in more than two weeks.