ODDSEAMINDEPENDENT FIELD ARCHIVE

Case file CR-0021 · land

The chupacabra

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TESTED REMAINS EXPLAINED

land / Puerto Rico → Mexico → Texas

Goatsucker, Tested

The name was coined on San Juan radio in 1995, for livestock deaths nobody could identify. A carcass from Cuero, Texas, tested in 2007, came back a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote, and other 'chupacabras' have proved to be coyotes and dogs with severe sarcoptic mange, which strips the fur and leaves a cadaverous animal. No animal from the Puerto Rican wave was ever tested, and that wave coincided with a severe drought.

Named for a crime the animal cannot commit.

Source on file
BBC News, 2007 (Texas State University) (archived)

Illustrative landscape · not an evidence photograph — The chupacabra
Illustrative landscape · not an evidence photograph
File
CR-0021
Date
1995 →
Place
Puerto Rico → Mexico → Texas
Record
named on the radio, then sent to a laboratory
Evidence
DNA, several laboratories
Agency
Texas State University; UC Davis
Assessment
D · explained

The full file

In March 1995, farmers in Puerto Rico began reporting livestock found dead with small puncture wounds and, it was said, no blood left in them. The earliest incident later tied to the wave is usually given as eight sheep, each with puncture wounds to the chest. A 1996 account in the Tucson Weekly places the first stories in the hill town of Orocovis before they reached Canóvanas, east of San Juan. The killings acquired a name on the radio: chupacabras, "goat-sucker", is generally credited to the San Juan comedian and broadcaster Silverio Pérez, who used it on air in 1995 while discussing the attacks.

The description, and how it travelled

Until August 1995 the culprit had no agreed shape. In the second week of that month a sketch by Madelyne Tolentino, who said she had seen the creature in Canóvanas, ran in a Puerto Rican newspaper. It showed an upright animal some four to five feet tall, with long thin limbs, an oblong head, dark or red eyes and spines down its back. That image became the chupacabra. By late 1995 and through 1996 similar reports came from elsewhere in the Caribbean, from Florida, and above all from Mexico. Down To Earth reported in June 1996 that a farm worker in Jalisco had described a beast about three feet tall with a large snout and bat-like wings, and that Sinaloa had sent a zoological team to look for it.

In Texas, from 2004 onwards, the word was attached to something else: a four-legged, largely hairless, grey or bluish dog-like animal, sometimes shot or found dead near farms.

What evidence exists

No body matching Tolentino's creature has ever been produced, and none is held anywhere. The physical evidence consists of dead livestock, which were not kept, and a small number of carcasses from Texas. The best documented came from Cuero, about 90 miles south-east of San Antonio, where in July 2007 Phylis Canion and her neighbours found three such animals, each weighing about 40 pounds, over four days. Canion kept a head in her freezer. A tissue sample, supplied by the San Antonio television station KENS, went to the biology department at Texas State University, where Mike Forstner's group sequenced it. An earlier animal, shot by a poultry farmer near Elmendorf, Texas, in 2004, was also tested, though accounts of that result disagree.

What investigators concluded

In Puerto Rico, Benjamin Radford reports that a Department of Agriculture veterinarian, David Morales, examined some 300 alleged victims and found none drained of blood; this figure comes from Radford's research and has not been confirmed independently here. In Mexico, Down To Earth reported that a government study ruled out any such creature and attributed the deaths to wild dogs or wolves, while noting that some veterinarians had found no blood in tissue around the bite marks.

The Texas State result, announced in November 2007, was that "the DNA sequence is a virtually identical match to DNA from the coyote." Reports of a later analysis at the University of California, Davis describe the Cuero animal as a coyote–Mexican wolf hybrid; this rests on a single press report. For the Elmendorf animal, some accounts describe a UC Davis test identifying a coyote with mange, others say the DNA was inconclusive beyond showing a canid, and a 2011 San Antonio Current column says a separate test identified a feral domestic dog.

Radford's five-year study, published in 2011 as Tracking the Chupacabra, concluded that Tolentino had seen the film Species in the weeks before her report, and that her creature closely resembles the film's alien–human hybrid. In his reading, the later Latin American descriptions derive from her sketch rather than from separate observations.

The leading explanation

The archive's rating rests on two linked explanations. For the animals, it is sarcoptic mange in coyotes and dogs. The mite Sarcoptes scabiei strips fur and thickens the skin, leaving an animal that looks grey, wrinkled and skeletal. Barry OConnor, a University of Michigan entomologist, argued in 2010 that wild canids such as coyotes, unlike domestic dogs, have had no evolutionary history with the mite and so no defence against it, and that weakened animals "may be forced into attacking livestock" because wild prey is harder to catch. For the upright, spined figure of 1995, Radford's film-memory account is the most specific explanation offered.

The strength of the mange explanation is that every Texas carcass tested has resolved to a canid. Its weakness is that it covers the Texas animals far better than the Puerto Rican wave, where no carcass of the attacker was ever examined, and it says nothing about the bipedal creature. The film account explains the image but rests largely on one researcher's interviews.

What remains disputed

The scale of the Puerto Rican killings is uncertain: totals of 150 animals in Canóvanas and of more than 2,000 by 1996 circulate in popular accounts, not in any official count. The cause of individual deaths was rarely established. A drought has also been offered as a background factor. The United States Geological Survey documents a severe Puerto Rican drought from late 1993 to 1996, with water rationing for more than a million people and agricultural losses of $165 million in 1994, so the drought is real; a direct link between it and the 1995 killings, and the claim of a matching drought before the 1996 Mexican reports, appear in secondary summaries without a cited study.

Sources

Revisions

Last revised . Every correction to the archive

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