DALE DRINNON: Looking at the Chupacabra (Part One)

Knowing of our involvement with things apertaining to the Puerto Rican goatsuckers, Dale sent us several of his musings on the nature of the chupacabra, which we read with great interest. We have condensed them into a two-part article.

Early on in the Frontiers of Zoology group I had posted a link to a site that said that chupacabras depradations were being caused by giant vampire bats. All well and good; Shuker had mentioned reports of these giant vampire bats, and the website specified that they ranged from a wingspan of a foot to a few feet, walked on all fours on the ground and the largest ones were the size of a small dog on the ground. This is generally comparable with reports and traditions elsewhere in Latin America.

But there is a complication; there are different types of giant bats in the New World being reported and their characteristics are quite different.

While I was working for the Anthropology department at IUPUI I came across some photographs of some stone statues from Colombia, illustrating something that reminded me strikingly of Ivan Sanderson's Ahool drawing from Investigating the Unexplained. These reference photos were on file at the department and the captions stated that such 'Bat-effigies' were found occasionally from the American southwest to northern Argentina. Later I realised that these same figures were well known in Mesoamerica and related to the Mayan Kamazotz (Camazotz): in some of the UFO books, Kamazotz stories are ascribed to the Ikhals. They were said to stand on their hind legs as tall as a small child (2-3 feet or so) but were still regular bats, and ordinarily fish-eaters. And they are still being reported as chupacabras in some regions (notable examples from the southwest and illustrated on Cryptomundo, but known in 'Big Bird' lore from Texas in the mid-1970s, as bat-winged and monkey-faced, differing from the usual 'Big Bird' reports)

Moreover, the typical vampires of South American lore are chonchons, said to be a human head flying on ears transformed into batwings a fathom wide. Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures has entries on all of these giant bats, and the usual explanation given is they are all giant vampre bats.

It is not that simple: you have a small, medium-sized and a very large giant bat species emerging from these reports, and the medium-sized one is on a scale comparable to an Old-World flying fox (fruit-eating mega-bat) The largest is pretty much exactly comparable to an Ahool. The smallest reported unknown bat would be the giant vampire bat, the medium-sized one would be a giant false vampire bat, the chonchon. It is the size of a flying fox and the body of a flying fox is about the apparant size of a human's head. So the smallest one is the bat with a wingspan of a foot or two, but it is the blood-drinker. The others are innocent but get the blame; however, false vampire bats are still predatory and one that size might give a human a bad mauling if it was very frightened or rabid. And while the biggest one gets blamed for such things as haunting graveyards and kidnapping children, it would much rather keep to itself. The big one is at least comparable in size to a big owl or a big eagle, unless stories are very much exaggerated.