Calling all of you in bloggoland. The CFZ, and me in particular, need your help. Can any of you find written or recorded usage of the word CHUPACABRA or CHUPACABRAS which pre-dates 1995? Can you let me know if you can find any, and let me have a citation, and preferably a scan of the document in question.
I would also be interested in any accounts of the English words "goat sucker" being used as an insult. I know that it is an old country name for nightjars, which are indeed the most Fortean of birdies, but has it ever meant anything ruder or more scatological?
Now fly, my pretties, and bring me back data....
Have emailed you some links Jon. It was first named in 1987 according to the links.
ReplyDeleteLxx
check out these news stories:
ReplyDeletehttp://cbs13.com/watercooler/Chupacabra.goat.sucker.2.1434712.html
http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=11846896
http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?S=11030731
check out these news stories:
ReplyDeletehttp://cbs13.com/watercooler/Chupacabra.goat.sucker.2.1434712.html
http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=11846896
http://www.newson6.com/Global/story.asp?S=11030731
As I understand it, before the late 1980s the name was used for a bird called (in English)a goatsucker - nothing mysterious about that.
ReplyDeleteThat the story of some sort of a beast causing animal mutilations was going around a decade before that WITHOUT using the name Chupascratcha or whatever, I have also got positive proof from Folklore. That animal mutilations have been reported for more than a century earlier I also have sources. That there's probably nothing of any especial interest at the bottom of it has been my conclusion for the past several years now.
BTW, I also just posted an account from 1998 Mexico which described a large upright lizard, later called a Chupacabras, in the Frontiers of Zoology group. I had heard secondhand reports of the creature from New Mexico or Arizona in the mid-1970s and actually, rumors of a creature described as being like a small tyrannosaur/Allosaurus were circulating around in the Pulp magazine days. L. Taylor Hansen was a pulp fiction writer who believed in the late-survival of such creatures in the Southwestern USA based in part on such things as the "Tyrannosaur" petroglyph at Hava Supai canyon.
ReplyDeleteThe creature is probably NOT a small dinosaur but rather a big lizard: that has not stopped people from imagining creatures such as Gwangi from the rumors that have been in circulation for a long time.