The creature, whose name is Spanish for “goat sucker,” is said to suck the blood from small animals such as chickens and goats. It has never been proven to exist, though is nearly as well known as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
According to the “Daily Star,” “Goat farmer Javier Prohens was having lunch with friends when terrified farmhand 54-year-old Bricio Saldivar alerted them to the bodies of the strange creatures on the outskirts of the small town of Monte Patria in the east central Chilean province Limari.”
Prohens described his farmhand’s reaction: “He was clearly scared and said he had been up at the old winery and found two strange bodies.” The partially mummified carcasses were found amid hay bales in a cellar, and “at first we thought they might be bats, but when we looked closer, we realized they had to be something else as the heads were too big for bats… And then someone said they looked like Chupacabras,” Prohens was quoted as saying.
The chupacabra was first reported in August 1995 by a woman in Puerto Rico who described seeing a bizarre bipedal alien-like creature with spikes down its back. Soon it was dubbed the “chupacabra” and caused a media sensation that spread throughout the Spanish-speaking world. However, as described in my book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore,” it was later determined that the eyewitness had actually (and mistakenly) described a monster in the sci-fi thriller “Species,” which she had recently seen.
Though the original chupacabra report has been discredited, the stories and sightings spread through the media, with the monster’s description changing over time. Fewer and fewer people claimed to see the bipedal, spiky-spined monster, and by 2000 it had completely disappeared, replaced by a variety of four-legged animals left hairless by a skin disease called mange. When medical and DNA tests were done on these “chupacabras” they were revealed to be ordinary animals including dogs, coyotes, and raccoons. Last year a couple in Ratcliffe, Texas, claimed to have found a chupacabra which turned out to be a raccoon.
The word “chupacabra” is now used to describe any animal which cannot be immediately identified or otherwise looks mysterious, either because of hair loss or decomposition. And that is exactly what happened in Chile: a worker found two weird dead things and decided that they must be chupacabras—not because they bear any actual resemblance to most descriptions of the monster, but because that’s the catch-all, genericized term for unknown animals in many places.
“Chupacabra” has become what in linguistics is called an eponym: a word that originally referred to a specific brand name or item but whose definition has expanded to others in the same general category; just as any facial tissues are now called Kleenex, any trash bins are called Dumpsters, and any in-line skates are called Rollerblades, any weird animal is now a Chupacabra.
So if the weird remains found in Chile are almost certainly not chupacabras, what are they? It’s difficult to come to any definitive identification based upon a few photographs, though some characteristics of this creature suggest an explanation. For one thing they lack any spikes down the back that are characteristic of the original chupacabra.
The paws and tail look feline, and the size (about a foot long) would match a common housecat. The skull also resembles a cat’s as well. The fact that the animals were found laying one atop the each other, as kittens sometimes do, may be relevant as well. A mother cat may have given birth to a litter and two of the unfortunate kittens may have been crushed to death by a bale of hay that toppled over onto them.
Where the animals were found provides another clue: inside a wine cellar, where domesticated animals such as cats are known to wander, hide, and even give birth—but conspicuously not a place associated with chupacabras, which are invariably reported outside, usually in desert areas (such as rural Texas) or in rainforests (such as Puerto Rico’s El Yunque preserve, said to be the original home of the chupacabra). An indoor chupacabra would be a first. Furthermore there is no suggestion by Prohens or anyone else that any goats or other animals had been found mysteriously drained of blood, as the chupacabra is known to do; and in any event the mummified mammals had been dead for many months or even years.
Amid all the sensational news stories about these bloodsucking monsters, there has so far been no analysis by zoologists or scientists. The flesh of these carcasses should be preserved enough to yield a definitive DNA sample, should Prohens or anyone else wish to submit it to a laboratory. But even if DNA tests are done it may not resolve the issue, as some may suspect a conspiracy or cover-up; that’s what happened in the case of a “chupacabra” found on a ranch in Nicaragua in 2000. Scientific tests at a local university revealed the remains to be of a dog, but the rancher who found it later claimed that the bones were secretly switched.
If public curiosity prompts the remains to be tested, the results will likely come back as a known animal — just like all previous “chupacabras” — but the mystery will remain.
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