CHUPACABRA

Opening

In 1995 Puerto Rico began finding small livestock dead with puncture wounds, and the killer acquired a name: chupacabras, the goat-sucker. In August a Canóvanas resident, Madelyne Tolentino, described the creature she said she had seen outside her home: upright, alien-looking, with large eyes, powerful hind legs and spines down its back. Her description became the standard image, and the comedian Silverio Pérez is generally credited with the name.

Within a year the word had spread to Florida, Mexico and much of Latin America. On the US mainland it came to mean something different: hairless, dog-like animals, which every tested carcass has shown to be coyotes, dogs or hybrids with severe mange. No body of the Puerto Rican creature has ever been produced, and the key description has a cinema problem.

Timeline

1975Livestock deaths in Moca, Puerto Rico, are blamed on "el vampiro de Moca". Animals are said to have small puncture wounds and to have been drained of blood. Suspicion falls on a Satanic cult. The word chupacabras is not used.

March 1995Eight sheep are reported dead, each with three puncture wounds to the chest and said to be drained of blood. This is the first attack later tied to the chupacabras.

August 1995Tolentino reports her sighting in Canóvanas, a town about 30 miles east of San Juan, during a run of livestock and pet deaths in the area. Some accounts put the dead at up to 150 animals.

29 October 1995The mayor of Canóvanas, José "Chemo" Soto, leads a night hunt with about 200 civil defence workers and volunteers, using metal cages baited with goats. It catches nothing, and neither do the weekly hunts that follow.

1995More than 200 reports are logged on the island that year.

Spring 1996Reports spread to Mexico, south Florida, Texas and California. On 14 May dozens of animals are reported killed in Sweetwater, near Miami.

July 2004 onwardA hairless animal shot near San Antonio, Texas, the "Elmendorf Beast", is identified by DNA testing at the University of California, Davis, as a coyote with sarcoptic mange. Later Texas carcasses come back as coyotes and coyote hybrids.

2011Benjamin Radford publishes Tracking the Chupacabra after a five-year investigation, tracing Tolentino's description to the 1995 film Species.

Key figures

Madelyne Tolentino gave the description almost every later drawing copies. She later told Radford she had seen Species before her sighting and found the resemblance "really impressive".

José "Chemo" Soto, a former boxer, soldier, postman and police detective, made the hunt a municipal campaign and took the story to Spanish-language television.

Silverio Pérez, a Puerto Rican comedian and entrepreneur, is credited with coining the name on San Juan radio.

David Morales, a veterinarian with Puerto Rico's Department of Agriculture, examined 300 reported victims and found they had not been drained of blood.

Benjamin Radford, a sceptical investigator, interviewed Tolentino and wrote the main study of the case.

Physical and documentary trail

There were real carcasses, and they were examined. Morales's finding that the 300 animals were not bled dry removes the feature that made the chupacabras a vampire. Bodies in this state are what predators such as feral dogs leave. On the mainland, at least half a dozen alleged chupacabras were tested between 2004 and 2010, and all were identified as known canids, usually with mange. Barry O'Connor, a University of Michigan biologist, concluded in 2010 that the US reports were coyotes infected with the mite Sarcoptes scabiei.

The creature itself rests on testimony, and the most influential testimony came weeks after the release of a film with a near-identical monster, an alien called Sil. Radford found that Tolentino believed the events of Species were happening in reality in Puerto Rico at the time.

An earlier version of this report credited a cartoon with spreading the name. I found no source for that and have removed it.

You can make a direct connection between the film hitting theaters, her seeing the creature in the film, seeing it in the street, making the report and entering the public conscious.

Things you might not know

• The beast is younger than the internet age. Radford found no blood-sucking chupacabra in the record before the 1990s. Claims of older legends, including a New Mexico tale and a Coronado story, trace to modern books.
• There are two different chupacabras. The Puerto Rican one is a spiny biped. The Texas one is a hairless four-legged dog-like animal. They share only the name.
• The singular is a back-formation. The original Spanish is chupacabras. Chupacabra came later as a regularised singular.
• The mayor baited cages with goats. Soto's hunters carried torches, nets and spearguns. Soto later admitted, "We've never seen him."
• Chile had its own outbreak. In 2000 about a hundred farm animals were reported killed near Calama. Footprints and hair pointed to domestic dogs.
• One preserved specimen is on display. Phylis Canion of Cuero, Texas, had a carcass found in 2007 mounted. DNA tests identified it as a coyote and Mexican wolf hybrid.

Competing explanations

An unknown predator. This depends on the eyewitness descriptions, chiefly Tolentino's, and on the claim of blood drained through neat punctures. The necropsy work did not support the draining, and no body, bone, hair or clear photograph has ever been recovered on the island despite organised hunts.

Known predators, mostly dogs. Feral and free-roaming dogs kill livestock in exactly this pattern, often without eating much. Mainland "chupacabras" have been mangy canids every time a body was tested.

A media creature. A name coined on the radio, a description shaped by a summer film and a mayor campaigning on television gave the island a monster that then travelled with Spanish-language media. Puerto Rico had seen a similar panic in 1975 under a different name.

Alien or laboratory escape. These were popular on the island in 1995. Radford notes they are the two origin stories of Sil in Species.

Later life of the case

The chupacabra became the best-known cryptid to emerge in the late twentieth century, and it now appears in Texas news stories about mangy coyotes nearly every year. Radford's work has been widely accepted by sceptics. Believers point out that one film does not explain every dead goat, which is true. The dead goats did not need a monster.

Finding

The dead animals of 1995 were real, and Puerto Rico's fear was real. The creature is a modern legend: a radio name attached to livestock kills that vets attributed to ordinary causes, given a body by one witness who had just seen Species, then carried abroad and reattached to sick coyotes. The 1975 vampiro de Moca shows the island had told this kind of story before.

What still will not resolve: what Tolentino and the other Canóvanas witnesses actually saw in the street, and why Soto's hunts, baited for months, never caught even a dog.