The Lost Creek Medicine Show: The Legend of El Chupacabra

This is a chupacabra.

This is not.

Taken 2010 in Southern Alabama

This is a wild dog, coyote, or perhaps a fox with the mange or some other disease that effects it’s skin and appearance. If I was going to try and say it was anything else, I would say Zombie Dog, but calling all these sightings around the country Chupacabras has became a trend.

Today’s news feeds are filled with claims of chupacabra sightings, evidence, and sometimes even bodies here in the United States. The evidence, photos or video, always depicts a dog-like creature. The snout may be a little long, it may not have any fur, and there are other differences that set them apart from the average family Fido.

What bothers us here on Lost Creek is that these critters look NOTHING like the creature that was originally spotted in Puerto Rico in 1995 and given the name ‘Chupacabra.’ When this, perhaps modern-mythical, beast immigrated from the Caribbean through Mexico and Central America to emerge in the US, it apparently went through a major change in appearance.

The genesis of Chupacabra lore can be traced to Puerto Rico in 1995. Descriptions of the creature said it stood three to four feet tall and walked upright on two legs. It was lizard-like, with grayish skin and a row of sharp quills running down its back. Sometimes descriptions included a forked tongue, fangs, glowing red eyes, and leathery, bat-like wings. It's feet had three claws.

These early descriptions of chupacabras often said that they hopped, much like a kangaroo. Some reports described some kangaroo-like features. This reminded me of the time when a couple friends and myself went to a concert in Cleveland. On the way home we took turns driving and napping. While I was riding shotgun on the interstate somewhere in Ohio, we drove past what appeared to have been a dead kangaroo on the side of the road. When my friend in the backseat woke up and we told him about what we saw he insisted we had indulged in certain chemicals and left him out. I assure you, that was not the case. It wasn’t until I dug into the chupacabra descriptions that I recalled the kangaroo-looking critter on the interstate. That may have been my first run-in with El Chupacabra…more on that later.

Backing up further in time to the 1975s, we found reports of a creature called ‘El Vampiro de Moca,’ that was blamed for the death of livestock in the small Puerto Rican town of Moca. A rash of UFO sightings broke out on the island. Farm animals, initially suspected to have been killed by a Satanic cult, were found bled dry through small circular incisions. No one ever claimed to see the Moca Vampire, and it came to be believed that the slayings were the result of illegally-imported crocodiles.

Things seemed to die down. Now skip forward to 1995. The Puerto Rican towns of Orocovis and Morovis began seeing more dead animals turning up. The bodies of goats, chickens, and other animals appeared to have been exsanguinated through a puncture wound. Canovanas seemed to be the center of the new epidemic with over 150 reports of dead animals. That August Madeline Tolentino reported seeing the creature in broad daylight. The sketch below was made based on Tolentino’s description and published in local newspapers:

Prominent and described in detail by a witness described the quills in detail. An interesting theory is that the 'quills' described are actually its wings folded on its back. A story told my a former Navy Seal talks about seeing a group of creatures that at first resembled chimps killing another animal for food. Then they noticed spikes that ran down their spine that would stand up when they became agitated. They filmed the entire episode. The film according to the Seal is three minutes long and classified. ^[2]

Photo from Texas. Kangaroo-like appearance?

By the early 2000s chupacabra sightings had spread into the US, starting in Texas and continuing throughout the country. Ranchers would find their animals dead, spot a predator they believed responsible, call it a chupacabra, and sometimes catch it on film or even kill it. However, when DNA testing has been done on such subjects, it almost always comes back as a coyote with the mange or hybrid dog or coyote that has bred with other animals.

Unidentified animals labeled as chupacabras have been spotted all over the country, as far north as Maine. Kentucky is no exception, as the following video shows:

Some believe the chupacabra is some previously unknown creature. Others believe it is related to the UFO sightings and is some kind of alien creature. Lesser known is the theory that the chupacabra is the creation of a genetic research lab hidden in Puerto Rico’s El Yunque National Forest. El Yunque is a mountain range on the eastern part of the island. Proponents of this theory believe the creature escaped from the lab during a particularly bad storm in the early 90s. The US has admitted to having labs and testing chemicals in Puerto Rico as part of Project 112. Anthrax and Agent Orange are among the toxic chemicals that were researched and sometimes sprayed for testing on the island. Reports of other strange creatures have came from the Yunque area: hairy bigfoot-like bipeds, flying creatures resembling Velociraptors, a colony of black panthers, and a monkey-like creature that uses wings to fly ^(1).

Trail cam photo showing a creature with wings

^{Chupacabra in a tree?}

Is the chupacabra an example of an urban legend, a tale told again and again, evolving over time? Is it some alien or genetically altered creature? Rational explanations somewhere? The only thing we’re sure of is that the pictures of dead dogs and coyotes that keep surfacing have absolutely nothing to do with the original creature described in Puerto Rico. The farm animals they have been blamed for killing had lost very little of their blood. When these mangy dogs start showing up with a row of quills down their backs and walking around on two legs, we’ll start to take notice. We’re very disappointed that chupacabra has became a blanket term for any unknown or immediately identifiable animals. As much as we'd love to see at least questionable if not verifiable pictures of something that sounds more like the Puerto Rico cryptid , we hate every (fellow) redneck that see's a poor coyote suffering from a disease and emails the local news station video of it.

However, if the definition of the term is changing, to cover any strange beast, particularly crazed, diseased, possibly evil animals like coyotes and Foxes, then perhaps we should get the Enquirer on the line, because we’ve encountered one such beast first hand and it lives right up the road here in Letcher County. Interestingly, it has been linked to local Sasquatch sightings. But that’s another story all together.

Related Links:

chupacabrasightings.com - all the photos of Americanized dog-like chupacabras you could ever want to look at

Article from HuffPost on Feb '14 sightings in Texas

Timeline of famous sightings

[1] http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2011/03/an-island-of-monsters/
[2] http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2013/09/gargoyle-chupacabra-paradigm.html

This goes at the end because we wrestled over whether to include it or not. Images of sick animals are horrible. We love all critters, the regular and paranormal ones. But we posted pics of people's flesh eatern off and thieir rotting limbs with the krokodil stories in the hopes that educated people will far better. Here are pics for comparison of actual known animals: