This Story About Red Skittles Proves Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

Regular red Skittles with standard S (nonmysterious)

If The X-Files did an episode about cattle mutilation in Wisconsin, this odd story out of Dodge City might factor into the twist.

While on routine patrol on Tuesday, January 17th, a sheriff drove down County Highway S. Suddenly, he came across hundreds of thousands of red Skittles strewn across the roadway. Mysteriously, the Skittles didn’t have the candy’s signature S emblazoned upon them.

He may have thought, What is happening here? Highway S … Skittles with no S. Where are these Skittles going? Where did they come from? And why only red Skittles?

At this point, Agents Mulder and Scully would have come in handy.

People at the Wisconsin news channel WDJT CBS 5 also thought something seemed odd, so they investigated. What reporter Justin Thompson-Gee found was that the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office reported that the Skittles were headed to a farm to be used as cattle feed.

“It is reported that the Skittles were intended to be feed for cattle, as they did not make the cut for packaging at the company. In the end these Skittles are actually for the Birds!” the sheriff’s office Facebook post read. Sheriff Dale Schmidt later joked to WDJT, that due to the Skittles being monochromatic, it would be hard to “taste the rainbow.”

It’s not unusual for candy to be part of a mix of cattle feed, reported Thompson-Gee, combining them with other ingredients to create a “nutritional profile.”

Likely story.

It must be noted that Mars, Inc., the maker of Skittles, is based in McLean, Virginia—a five-minute drive from CIA’s headquarters in Langley. No connection has been reported at this time.

Mars, for its part, said that the Skittles should have been destroyed after a power outage caused a shutdown in the factory that didn’t allow the S to be printed onto the candies.

“We don’t know how it ended up as it did, and we are investigating,” a spokesperson from Mars told WDJT.

We will be following the story and reporting back if the truth is, indeed, out there.