What is the chupacabra?
In March 1995, farmers in Puerto Rico found dead goats and sheep with puncture wounds, reportedly drained of blood. That summer, a witness from Canóvanas described an upright creature with large dark eyes and spines along its back. It soon had a name: chupacabras, the goat sucker. Within a few months, reports were coming in from Mexico, Chile, Brazil and the southern United States.
Two different creatures
The Puerto Rican chupacabra walks on two legs and has spines. The chupacabra of Texas and the American Southwest, reported since the 2000s, is a hairless, dog-like animal. When carcasses of these animals were examined, they usually turned out to be coyotes or dogs with severe mange.
What scholars say
The skeptic Benjamin Radford examined the case in his 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra. He noticed that the first description from Puerto Rico closely resembled the alien in the film Species, which had come out in theaters shortly before. The “bloodless” animals can be explained by normal processes after death, and the bite wounds by dogs.
Episode on this topic
Further reading
- Benjamin Radford: Tracking the Chupacabra, University of New Mexico Press 2011.