The chupacabra
A blood-draining creature reported in Puerto Rico in 1995 and later across the Americas, sometimes attributed to secret government genetic experiments. The bodies keep turning out to be mangy coyotes. The first description came from a film.
Why this verdict
Debunked by DNA: every carcass submitted for testing has been a coyote, dog or raccoon with sarcoptic mange, and the original 1995 description has been traced to a science-fiction film the witness had recently seen.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That an unidentified animal kills livestock by draining their blood through puncture wounds without eating the flesh; and in the conspiratorial version, that it escaped from, or was created by, a secret United States government genetics facility in Puerto Rico.
02Where it came from
The reports began in March 1995 in Puerto Rico after sheep were found dead. The description that fixed the creature's appearance — bipedal, grey, large black eyes, spines along the back — came from a witness, Madelyne Tolentino, in Canóvanas. The investigator Benjamin Radford established through interviews that Tolentino had recently seen the film Species, released that year, whose creature Sil matches the description closely, and that she had understood the film's events to be occurring in reality. The government-experiment element attached quickly, in a territory where the US military presence at Roosevelt Roads and on Vieques was a live and legitimate political grievance.
03What the record shows
✕ DEBUNKED — Investigated and refuted. Here is what actually happened.
The physical claim has been tested many times because carcasses keep being produced. When they are submitted for analysis they return the same result: canids — coyotes, dogs, coyote-dog hybrids — and occasionally raccoons, suffering from advanced sarcoptic mange. Barry OConnor, an acarologist at the University of Michigan, described the mechanism: Sarcoptes scabiei infestation causes hair loss, thickened greyish skin and emaciation, producing an animal that looks like nothing in a field guide, and leaves it too weakened to hunt wild prey, so it takes livestock.
The exsanguination that gives the creature its name does not survive veterinary examination either. Predators commonly kill without consuming, and puncture wounds at the neck are ordinary canid attack marks; carcasses left in the field lose blood into the ground and to insects, and appear drained on a cursory inspection. Necropsies have not found animals emptied of blood.
The secret-facility version has never been given a location, a document or a defector, and there is no observed animal to reverse-engineer an origin for.
04What it cost
Mostly folkloric, and genuinely interesting as folklore: the chupacabra is one of the few cryptids whose birth can be dated, sourced and traced to a specific film, which makes it a rare controlled case of how a monster is assembled. The practical cost falls on farmers, who attribute ordinary predation to it and treat the wrong problem, and on the mangy animals themselves, which are shot as specimens.