'El Chupacabras del Sur America'

This photo of a very large bat has been circulating around the internet lately. It has a confusing perspective, but it looks as if it is about the depth into the photo as the man closest to the front. I have seen the photo referred to as "El Chupacabras del Sur America" or "The Chupacabras of South America." Part of the problem in identifying the bat is that the head has been damaged. I make an estimation that the wingspan as about eighty inches or seven feet across, the size of a big flying fox bat (for comparison see at Left) but the conformation of the body and wings are not quite the same. If this is indeed South America, then there is no bat of comparable size that is supposed to live there and it is indeed at the right size range to be our basic ChupaBat, the outsized False-Vampire one. It would be helpful to have a better view of the head but from what I can tell at this distance, it would seem that the ears have been removed and the creature de-fanged at the very least. The wings are slightly different in structure and the one at top seems to have longer fingers than in the wing of the flying fox, and a broader span of the mobile wingtip area as a result. If this is indeed South America then this creature is the original for the local vampire stories under the names of "Chonchon" and so on.

There is something of a parallel to the Thunderbird photo in that there is an element of forced perspective in the photo , but it is likely not top be a deliberate attempt at deception; rather, it seems to have been just an ambiguous positioning of the elements when the photo was taken.

At  5 Am on 3/24/2012, I received the following update from Quinton R. Godsell:

hi dale.about the s.american bat pic. i am in manila at the moment,my filipino friends informed me the pic was taken in the south of the philippine islands.they called it a tik tik.

Dale Drinnon replied

That is a vampire name. Thanks for the info. Any other particulars on it?

Quinton R. Godsell
yes they believe its a giant vampire bat.possibly mindanao.low level war going on down there.filipino soldiers in photo.

...If I get any additional information I shall add it on here.

In the meantime, I also found a recent reference to an older ChupaBat type creature from Texas called The Blood Beast and subject to scares about Vampires in the middle of the 20th Century: This is mentioned in pasing on a more frivolous internet Chupacabra site together with the illustration here. The illustration is profoundly interesting in that it shows a large bat very like the False Vampire bat, our candidate-model for the ChupaBat. The wingspan would be about six feet, or a man's armspan