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In Search of Chupacabras
By Nick Redfern
FATE :: January 2005
In July 2004, I traveled to the island of Puerto Rico for a week with fellow cryptozoologist, good friend, and director of the British-based Center for Fortean Zoology, Jonathan Downes, and a production team from the Sci-Fi Channel’s new Proof Positive television series. The purpose of our trip was to make a 20-minute segment for Proof Positive on the still-ongoing mystery of the diabolical chupacabras. To say that our excursion to the island was extraordinary would be an understatement.
This was my first visit to Puerto Rico specifically looking for the elusive beast. Jon, however, had undertaken a similar quest in 1998 with a British television crew and had seen firsthand both the horrific, physical handiwork of the creature and the psychological and financial effects that the chupacabras attacks had on the local populace.
Indeed, until a person actually spends time traveling the island and personally speaking with witnesses, government employees, police officers, and ranchers (all of whom have been implicated in the mystery to varying degrees), it is incredibly difficult to appreciate how much the chupacabras mystery has become ingrained in Puerto Rican society. Despite the fact that it was during the mid-to-late 1990s that the chupacabras phenomenon was at its height, attacks are still regularly occurring, even if people are somewhat reluctant to report or discuss such incidents.
We traveled the length and breadth of the island on our weeklong journey of discovery and interviewed numerous ranchers whose animals (including chickens, cows, pigs, and even peacocks) had been found slaughtered and whose deaths had been attributed to the chupacabras. Typically, two small puncture wounds were found on the necks of the animals in question; massive amounts of blood had been drained from their bodies with fantastic speed; and major bodily organs had been removed, sometimes with incredible and disturbing precision.
In one particularly notable case, we spoke in depth with a farmer whose chickens had been mutilated and killed during the hours of darkness in this precise fashion. What made this incident stand out as particularly unusual, however, was the fact that whatever had killed the chickens had first carefully and quietly opened the complex locks on each of the cages in which the animals were held. This suggested a sophisticated degree of cunning, intelligence, and dexterity at work.
The other case that really stood out involved a lady who lived on a property that overlooked the incredibly beautiful El Yunque rain forest. This woman had what was quite literally a face-to-face encounter with the chupacabras in 1975. She described the animal as being approximately four feet in height and having a monkey-like body that was covered in dark brown hair or fur, wings that were a cross between those of a bat and those of a bird, glowing eyes that bulged from a bat-style face, and fingers with sharp, claw-like appendages. Whatever the creature was, it left a deep, lasting impression upon the woman, who recalled the near-30-year-old encounter as if it had occurred only yesterday.
For a week we traveled across Puerto Rico. We headed deep into the El Yunque rain forest and the caves of the island and spoke with countless witnesses to the creature and its deadly habits. At the end of our foray into the world of the chupacabras, I could only come to one conclusion: regardless of the many theories that have been postulated concerning the origin of the creature, the chupacabras is a very real animal—and a very dangerous one, too ...
Read the rest of this article in the January 2005 issue of FATE
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