1995 Puerto Rico Chupacabras

In all this time this blog has not directly addressed the 1995 Tolentino case from Puerto Rico which Benjamin Radford states was the actual beginning of the Chupacabras craze. Just what could a creature standing upright, the size of a small human, with its back covered in quills like a porcupine be?

The answer is, absurd though it may sound, A PORCUPINE.


 No, I am not being funny.

Ivan Sanderson notes in his book on Abominable Snowmen: Legend come to Life, that porcupines can stand up on their hind feet and even shuffle along like little bears, leaving tracks like little bear tracks as they do so. And this is not hard to imagine because they are structurally much the same as beavers and squirrels when you take the quills off them. And they grow to about the same size as a beaver, about three to four feet long. So they are also in the right size range to be considered a Chupacabras candidate.

A porcupine has little clawed hands and feet just like the Chupacabras sketch. The porcupine has a large round head with the size of it exaggerated because of the quills. The snout of the porcupine sticks out of the round head that a porcupine has in the same manner as is shown on thr Chupacabras sketch. And the Chupacabras sketch shows the fore and hind feet of a quadrupedal animal rather than what a habitual biped would have, being held the same way a porcupine holds its limbs when standing on its hind legs. This is somewhat clearer on the slimmer South American species of porcupine labelled Greenscreen Animals below. I apologise for using this one, but it was the only way I could get the right photo.


Upon closer examination we find more corroborating evidence. Porcupines have a red eyeglow and in some species the eyes are circled with a reddish-coloured skin patch. The eyes of a Chupacabras are also commonly represented as black and beady. The short snout has a mammalian "wet" nose on it and a prominently cleft upperlip. Protruding out of the upper lip is a pair of gnawing rodent incisors, although the artists can show some confusion about the shape of the lower incisors. Whiskers are sometimes shown on the sides of the snout, and to top it all off, ears are sometimes shown at the back of the head as the right size and shape to be porcupine ears (Although the ears are more usually said to be not apparent to the witnesses)

It also seems the original sketch is a little misleading in that the area with quills on the back has them being shown spread too thinly, and as a result the body looks too emaciated. However, the bottom as shown is actually quite thick in proportions. Filling in the area indicated for quills with a thicker bunch of quills copletely alters the body profile.

I did a search on Yahoo using both "Porcupine" and "Puerto Rico" and found that the most likely suspect was the Mexican hairy porcupine, some specimens of which have been introduced on the island as well as on Cuba, it seems.This photo is the result of the search using both of those criteria.
This species not only has the red skin patch around the eye, the body has a general greenish cast to it (The quills are sometimes said to be irridescent and show as different shifting colours to the observer)

As another contrast  between this type and the more usual "Chupa" seen elsewhere, here is a reconstruction of the more widespread reptillian type as done by "Cryptisaurus" on Deviant Art:

Benjamin Radford offered his "Solution" to then a book he wrote earlier this year in which he says the solution to the 1995 Puerto Rico sighting was that the witness was thinking of Natasha Henstridge in the movie "SPECIES", and offering a reward of $250.00 to anyone who could prove him wrong.

http://benjaminradford.com/investigations/chupacabra/chupacabra-faq/

http://gawker.com/5784720/el-chupacabra-is-actually-natasha-henstridge-in-species

Well, first off, Natasha is still obviously built like a human female, stands like a human female, has arms and legs of the usual human proportions and used in the usual human manner, has a waist which givers curves to her figure, and she has breasts. The Chupacabras has short animal legs, no boobs, and a bottom-heavy body. Natasha Henstridge does NOT have a "Gray Alien" head or eyes, and as an alien the eyes are heavily-lidded and not obviously red or black or any other colour. She has more and diffeent kinds of hoses and attachments on her that the Chupacabras does NOT have. In short, there is VIRTUALLY NO RESEMBLANCE from an objective point of view. So if Tolentino thought the creature she saw was anything like Natashia being "Sil", she was confused or being misled by her questioner. Which is quite possible and that questioner should be fully cognizant that the process happens, since he says so himself.

And I am still not asking Benjamin Radford for $250.00-No, that would be too small a price to pay after being so misleading on the subject. I would ask for $25000.00 and that the book be withdrawn from publication. And of course that if there needs to be any court case arising from this that Mr. Radford pay court costs since he was the one that offerered the reward and initiated all this nonsense in the first place.

Best Wishes, Dale D.

'Chupacabras' before Chupacabras

Up until recently the name 'Chupacabras' did not refer to the bizarre cryptid it is defined as any more. Recently, Benjamin Radford explained what he took to be the 'Origin of the Chupacabras' in a Puerto Rican woman's recollection of a recent horror film at the time. Because of the H. R. Giger-inspired monster in the movie, that woman produced a sketch Radford claims became the template for all the other 'Chupacabras' sightings from then on.


The Radford Explanation: witness's sketch above and the monster "sil" from the movie SPECIES.


Only there is more than one thing being called a chupacabras, as I have explained before on earlier CFZ blog entries. And because of that we have more than one origin story.















Chupacabras-dog such as is the common type in Texas: and Mexican Hairless Dogs



Here is the passage I posted in the group when I first found out about the reptilian-chupacabras being folkloric in Mexico, posted in October of 2009 (before I found it I thought it had been 2008) I later reprinted the entire text from the site and I am still looking for that message. One of the names as I recall was Timbo. There is also an exactly equivalent tradition in Northern Argentina.

I always regretted NOT posting the illustration from the originating site, but it was very small and attempts to blow it up did nothing for the quality of the photo.

... I saw a Mexican Folklore page (in Spanish) where the Reptile-Chupacabras was called by the name of a traditional "Grave robber". That would have been the first version I had heard of in connection to animal mutilation[sheep, in Navajo country] cases in the SW in the 1970s, and in fact it has separately become a standard monster in the Dungeons and Dragons FRPG game, as the "Bonesnapper", another small-dinosaur representation. Until I saw the Mexican Folklore page I had no inkling that the creature was actually out of documented Folklore.

And then last night I had an important additional piece of information, which I added to the original message:

I did a little more research and I found out that the name does not originate in Mexico but in Texas, and it is a Comanche word meaning "Hairless." Hence it was an appropriate name for a hairless dog as well as a reptile. I am not certain how widely circulated the name was in earlier days, but I assume it was once synonymous with the creature sometimes called "Mountain Boomer" (The first proper name I knew for the creature, but actually a mis-applied name for the collared lizard, which likewise runs on its hind legs)

So anyway that nails down that particular loose end.
Best Wishes, Dale D.

(Common mountain boomer or collared lizard. The cryptid version is said to stand up 2-4 feet high on its hind legs and to have exaggerated crests down its back. The cryptid version was being blamed for cattle mutilations back in the mid-1970s, Personal Information.)

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