CRYPTOLINK: Real Chupacabra Body Washed On The Shores Of San Diego

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me. 

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CRYPTOLINK: Chupacabra catch-all for unexplainable - Clovis News Journal

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting (sometimes for the wrong reasons), usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me. 

They roam in the dark of night searching for prey.

Sharna Johnson

Sometimes they are lizard creatures, sometimes spiny and two-legged and other times they skulk about on all fours.

Monsters, anyway you shape them, the chupacabra is out there, sort of.

Anyone who has spent any time in the Southwest inevitably hears of the chupacabra, often from natives who sometimes still have a fear of the nebulous creature that follows them into adulthood.

Perhaps because the chupacabra is such a sketchy creature, its legend has almost become a catchall for the unexplained and a quick answer for the unidentified.

Spotted from the U.S. to Russia, recent reports place the blood sucking mythological critters in the Houston area combing through back yards, presumably in search of dastardly mischief.

And it may just be the absolute most attention mangy mutts have ever received.

That’s right, mangy mutts — literally.

Though the legend of the chupacabra is one thing, it appears real creatures have come to assume its identity.

Looking like a hairless zombie dog from a video game, photos and footage abound, there are even specimens, killed through various means, which have been turned over for verification.

After testing and examination, the specimens and photos of the elusive “chupacabra” have turned out to be canines with a fair degree of consistency and not just canines, but canines with mange.

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KARL SHUKER: WHY BLOOD-DRAINED CARCASES ARE NOT THE WORK OF CHUPACABRAS OR OTHER SUPPOSEDLY VAMPIRIC CRYPTIDS

It may be called a goatsucker, but the chupacabra is not a bloodsucker - Karl Shuker explains why.

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CRYPTOLINK: Honduras sheep attacks spark more chupacabra fears

A word about cryptolinks: we are not responsible for the content of cryptolinks, which are merely links to outside articles that we think are interesting, usually posted up without any comment whatsoever from me.

42 sheep were found dead from apparent animal bites on a farm in Honduras that was guarded by dogs and a few humans, too. What could be responsible for such weird carnage? Could it be . . . chupacabras?

According to Inexplicata:

Rumors about the Chupacabras have gained strength as a result of the death of a large number of sheep on a property belonging to a political representative of that province. Yesterday, at 5:00 a.m., when workers arrived at the property, they found dozens of dead sheep with injuries to their necks. Others had bled to death. Nearly 42 animals were lifeless and another 10 injured. The possibility that the death toll would increase over time was not dismissed.

Read on...

KARL SHUKER - A SELECTION OF RECENT SHUKERNATURE POSTS

Due to health-related family concerns, Karl has not been blogging very much lately, but here is a selection of his more recent ShukerNature posts:

ShukerNature's Top Ten Living Dinosaurs

The littlest chupacabra

The definitive bibliography of cryptozoology books

'Ape-man' Oliver

ShukerNature's Top Ten Mystery Cats

With best wishes, Karl, from everyone here at the CFZ.

VIDEO: Alleged chupacabras body from Cuba.

Another dead dog?

CRYPTO CULTURE: A new song about the chupacabras

http://jimbergmanmusic.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/listen-to-my-latest-single-chupacabra/

GOLLY, I WANT ONE OF THESE

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/120515/chupacabra-survive-the-night

DALE DRINNON: Chupacabras, trepanned skulls and uralics

New from the Frontiers of Zoology, I tracked down a long-overdue original source and including a reference to chupacabras from the mid-1940s:

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2012/01/honduras-chupacabras-folklore-page-i.html

Plus a couple of new articles on the Frontiers of Anthropology:

http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-skulls-trepanned-indus-mayan.html


http://frontiers-of-anthropology.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-on-uralics-part-4-little-people.html

Something of interest in there for everybody, I should think!
Best Wishes, Dale D.

DALE DRINNON ON THE CHUPACABRAS

I did just add another in the series on Chupacabras, giving more background on the subject and comments with the benefits of hindsight: http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/12/chupa-at-2000.html

DALE DRINNON: Chupacabras solved!

http://frontiersofzoology.blogspot.com/2011/09/chupacabras-solved.html

REDFERN IS CHASING THE TEXAS CHUPACABRAS

http://monsterusa.blogspot.com/2010/09/chupa-chasing.html

NEIL ARNOLD: Neil's "If This Was..." Part One

If this was in Puerto Rico would it be a Chupacabras?

UPDATE ON CHUPACABRA NAME RESEARCH

Letter from Richard Muirhead:

Jon,

I have ordered the book that mentions chupacabra in 1983, the book Kithra mentioned on her blog. I`m getting it via inter-library-loan but I was told Macc. library would have to get certain university libraries permission first. The book is, by the way, on sale for c. £4.50 on amazon

However, Loren Coleman's blog mentions use of the word on T.V. in 1960.


Best wishes


RM

FROM THE LATEST `PARANORMAL' MAGAZINE

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
By Jonathan Downes


In the last 15 years the world of cryptozoology has acquired a major new icon: the chupacabra. Originally the term - which literally means ‘goatsucker’ in Spanish - was used to describe a semi-bipedal, almost kangaroo-like creature that I, during a frivolous moment in 1997, described as looking like "Sonic the Hedgehog on acid." In the intervening years the term seems to have become a catch-all usage to describe any Hispanic bogeyman or monster, much in the way that Bunyip - which originally was a native Australian term for a specific long-necked monster inhabiting marshlands, billabongs and creeks - has come to mean any mythological or Fortean beast.

I would not normally make this confession but it came to my attention in the late 1980s that some episodes of a particularly dire Australian soap opera called Home and Away featured a putative Bunyip, which actually turned out to be somebody hoaxing an alien landing.

However, it appears that the wider use of the name Bunyip is not as recent a phenomenon as I had originally thought. The word bunyip is usually translated by aboriginal Australians today to ‘devil’ or ‘evil spirit.’ But as long ago as the 1850s bunyip – according to Joan Hughes’s Australian Words and their Origins (1999) had also become a 'synonym for imposter, humbug and the like' in the broader Australian community. In 1853 Daniel Deniehy; an Australian journalist, politician and vociferous democrat; coined the term ‘bunyip and aristocracy’ in a speech ridiculing attempts by a fellow politician William Charles Wentworth to establish a titled aristocracy in New South Wales. His satirical comments included, “Here we all know the common water mole was transferred into the duck-billed platypus, and in some distant emulation of this degeneration, I suppose we are to be favoured with a ‘bunyip aristocracy.’”

So it seems that my theories published in Animals & Men and elsewhere that the wider usage of the word bunyip is a relatively modern occurrence are completely wrong. Could I be equally wrong in the case of the chupacabra?

In the early summer of 2004 Nick Redfern and I were sitting, soaked to the skin, in a small café on the outskirts of Canovenas on the island of Puerto Rico. We had been caught out in a torrential tropical downfall whilst making a documentary for the American SciFi Channel on … you’ve guessed it, the chupacabra. I still smoked in those days, and was sharing my last packet of British Benson & Hedges cigarettes with an equally bedraggled swarthy-looking man called Ismael Aguayo. Ismael – then, perhaps in his mid-fifties – was (and as far as I know still is) one of the head honchos in the Canovenas civil defence. He was also (and again, still is) one of the world’s foremost chupacabra investigators.

Now, my Spanish leaves a lot to be desired. I could buy beer, cigarettes, beef stew, tostados, coffee and all the other essentials of life on the largest island in the Lesser Antilles, but what I was not able to do was discuss anything that involved the finer semantics. I had a number of voluntary self-styled interpreters with me who, whilst fluent in the island’s Spanish dialect, had a relatively limited grasp of the English language. However, we sat down, smoked cigarettes, drank coffee and beer and discussed the history and aetiology of chupacabradom as we waited for the rain to abate.

It had been Ismael who had been called to investigate the first known chupacabra incident in March 1995 when 8 sheep were discovered dead, each with 3 puncture wounds in the chest area and completely drained of blood. He told me that it was soon after that when he and a friend, sitting in the self-same café where we were sheltering from the storm, had coined the term chupacabra to describe the unknown perpetrator of this series of killings.

In the intervening years (nine at the time of our conversation) the term had spread in its usage. It was no longer merely used to describe the semi-bipedal spiky creature of the Canovenas plateau, but it had become a term of abuse for the most skanky of prostitutes, (the symbolism there is obvious, and I won’t sully the pages of this magazine by going into any further details) and had also been used to describe appearances of monstrous creatures, some with wings, and some with sickle-shaped claws all across the Spanish speaking New World, and even one or two sightings of anomalous creatures in the Spanish homelands.

Later on in the summer of 2004, only a few weeks after our conversation, a rancher near San Antonio, Texas, killed a hairless dog-like creature that was attacking his livestock. For reasons that I’ve never really been able to fathom this hairless blue dog was also described as a chupacabra, and the term became synonymous with these blue dogs after a seminal news report on the Elmendorf creature said “at the nearby Deleon’s Grocery and Market, customers came in to check out pictures of it. One woman said it was exactly how her grandmother described the dreaded chupacabra.”

Now I was in San Antonio investigating the case only four months after the creature was shot and together with my wife Corinna, shall be revisiting the area to carry out further research this spring. However, I have spent the last five years ridiculing this news story. How could any woman in a supermarket claim that the creature is like something that her grandmother claimed was a chupacabra when we all know that the term was invented by my mate Ismael. Or was it?

An awful lot rests on this. Is it possible that what Ismael actually told me was that he and his mate had decided to co-opt the term chupacabra from the shared childhood folklore of the Hispanic peoples of the New World and apply it to this frightening new killer of the Puerto Rican night? If so, this puts an entirely new light on the whole chupacabra affair.

So I am appealing to readers of this magazine. Can you find me any written, and citable references to the use of the word chupacabra (or any reasonable variant of same) in print before the spring of 1995? There is no doubt that there were vampiric attacks on livestock in the area going back for decades, but were any of them called the chupacabra? Does the name chupacabra turn up in children’s fairy tales? Or in comic books? Or anywhere else? And if so, how far back does it really go? Please do not hesitate to contact me either through this magazine or by email to Jon@eclipse.co.uk

CHUPACABRA HELP

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....

DALE DRINNON: Crypto Iggies

I had mentioned some of these in an earlier posting about Chupacabras. In this case I am not going to continue on about Chupas per se but instead I am going to focus on the more definite cryptid iguanid lizards. These ones are regularly reported but get little press coverage.

When I was going through Ivan Sanderson's files shortly after his death I saw a letter from a woman that claimed to have seen a small dinosaur at the edge of the road while she was driving. She said it came up as high as the hood of her car and had a grinning mouth full of pointed teeth and distinctly red eyes. She attached a tracing of the Charles R. Knight reconstruction for Ornitholestes.

This was in Arkansas. The woman wished to remain anonymous but a later message from the same area described the same sort of creatures as being the size of a turkey but without feathers, with a long tail and running around on the hind legs. I did see subsequent references Sanderson had made to these letters in his later correspondance but he never published an opinion.

I had independantly heard of the creatures being called 'Mountain Boomers' again in Arkansas but also in Texas, and blamed for mutilations of livestock in the Arizona-New Mexico area in the early 1970s. This last I did not put much stock in and Sabina Sanderson pretty much flipped out when I sent the information to her in a letter: I later saw that she had filed my letter in 'Animal Chaos and Confusion' together with a note about me that was pretty libellous. When I saw that she had done that, I had the note removed. I don't know why she was so bothered, because just about all the 'Dinosaur' reports in the Western United States are probably references to this creature.

Some of them are reported at exaggerated sizes, but most are small, about six feet long and three feet tall when standing up.

They are also called by the name 'Mini-Rex', which is a name I do not reccomend using, any more than 'Mountain Boomer' (which is ordinarily used for the common collared lizard. The collared lizard also runs on its hind legs).

Chad Arment has advanced the opinion that these are escaped basilisk lizards imported from South America, but the descriptions do not match closely.

These are larger.

The basilisk lizards are Iguanid lizards (belonging to the iguana family) and it is very likely that these are also Iguanid lizards.

Some reports also include such details as a dewlap, a flap at the back of the head, spines running down the back and sometimes horns on the face.

Standard books such as Jerome Clark's Unexplained! (1993) contain reports of them under the heading 'Dinosaurs, Living'




At the time I was first learning of these reports at the SITU I had also heard independantly of some very large iguana lizards reported in Latin America, about the size of a Komodo dragon or about a dozen feet long; these would not be as heavy as a Komodo dragon since they would have a proportionately longer tail.

I learned about them mostly through Native artistic depictions of them, but around that time there was a mention in Pursuit about 'Dinosaurs' in the 'Lost World' area of Venezuela - big lizards the size of a Komodo dragon. On Heuvelmans's checklist the 'Dinosaurs' are said to be like Iguanodons here and actually they seem more like iguanas than iguanodons.

Artistic representations show distinctive scaly crests that identify them as members of the genus Iguana specifically.

And to round this all out, I had recently been posting a series of messages about monsters reported from Patagonia at the South end of South America at the group Frontiers-of-Zoology... in this case I had drawn attention to the depiction of unusual creatures dated around 1600 and reproduced here. In the middle of it are what look like a large alligator, a large lizard and a smaller alligator; probably a caiman. That roused my interest because this area would ordinarily be too cold for such animals and they are not supposed to be here. In this case the lizard looks something like a New Zealand Tuatara and would be living in about the same climate zone. But after considering the possibility it might be a tuatara, I opted for it being a specialised iguana instead: its head is perhaps more like an iguanid's head than a tuatara's head. It does have a distinctive creat of spines along its back.

The illustration does not name any of the creatures but the lizard seems to be a creature otherwise called a 'Dragon', and local legends have it also that the dragons start out as small land snakes, develop a crest of spines down the back and eventually grow into lake and sea monsters (the Patagonian Plesiosaurs, in fact).

And so this form of 'Spiny Snake' or 'Little Dragon' is one of the necessary intermediate steps of that process, like the Scandinavian Lindorms, at least in the Native mind.

That would probably put its length at three to six feet long, or a metre or two: the Patagonian equivalent of the Tatzelwurm possibly.

DALE DRINNON: Chupacabra part 2

This paste-up is also from the files of the Frontiers of Zoology group and features the CFZ's own chupacabras representation.

I had remarked before that I first heard of a chupacabras creature in the mid 1970s as a FOAF report originating in the American SW: and it was described basically as being like a small spiky-backed dinosaur or a big iguana lizard, said to be raiding livestock. It was actually a story meant as an explanation of 'cattle mutilations', then a big news item. so the first example I heard of was a cattle-mutilations creature that was a spiky-backed lizard, and the name chupacabras not invented for such a creature yet.

I have since learned that there is a traditional Mexican version of this small dinosaur creature, usually said to raid graves and eat the bodies. A version of the legend has made its way into standard D&D lore as the fantasy creature known as the bone-snapper.

At any rate, when chupacabras reports proper started to emerge later on, several of the reports specified a small dinosaur or large spiky-backed lizard creature, sometimes said to run or jump away on its hind legs. The montage cuts together several representations of these.
Eberhart's Mysterious Creatures has an entry on such creatures under the heading 'Giant North American Lizard' but the first name I heard in common usage for them was Mountain Boomer. Other sources call them 'Mini-Rex.' And Ivan Sanderson's archives included separate letters from two unrelated sources writing about such a 'Small dinosaur' from the Arkansas-Oklahoma area, neither one of which was ever published. Some iguanid lizards do get up and run away on their hind legs, including the collared lizard (the more usual 'Mountain Boomer').

When the spiky-backed 'Chupacabras' reports started coming out of Puerto Rico, some sort of large iguanid lizard might have been involved. It probably would not be the same species as reported in Texas, Arkansas-Oklahoma, Colorado, Arizona and Mexico but it could have been something similar. The depiction does look like the front end of an iguana. And male iguanid lizards are known to have red eyes.

If it is necessary to be said, I don't think the lizards actually do any cattle mutilations or goat-sucking, or even digging up graves and breaking the bones. They only get blamed for that. What does that most often (and in just about the whole world over) is feral dogs, and they leave regular dog tracks (Ref. photos also on file in the group)

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.

NICK REDFERN: Head to Head with a "Chupa"

Most of you who read this blog have, I'm sure, heard the dark tales of the so-called "Texas Chupacabras" - those weird, hairless canines that have been seen roaming the woods of the Lone Star State for the last few years.

Well, as you may also know, over the course of the last few years, I have made several trips to Puerto Rico looking for the island's very own vampire, which in some ways, resembles the Texas Chupacabras but that in other ways, is acutely different.

Anyway, that thorny and controversial issue aside, in the latter part of last year I gave a lecture for the San Antonio chapter of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON).

And who should come along to the lecture? None other than MUFON legend and former head of the group, Walt Andrus.
But, there's more...

Walt brought along with him to my presentation nothing less than the skull of one of the hairless whatsits killed in Texas, that many believe to be a cousin of the blood-sucking beast of Puerto Rico. The skull had been donated to Walt by its former owner.
And there's even more!

Imagine my surprise when, a week or so ago, John Schwab (who currently runs the San Antonio MUFON group) emailed me to say that Walt wished to donate the skull to me - a skull that has just now arrived at my Arlington, Texas home.

Mercifully, I suspect the mailman had no idea at all of the monstrous form that he was depositing on my doorstep...

So now; thanks to Walt, John, Julie and all at SA MUFON; an honest-to-goodness Texas Chupacabras (or hairless dog, depending on your own, personal opinion...) sits proudly upon my office desk.

And as evidence, here is a photo of the monstrous critter (I'm on the left; the monstrous critter is on the right...) taken earlier this evening.

My wife, Dana, utterly hates it already.... :)