CHUPACABRA @ 25
BENJAMIN RADFORD revisits the first report of the chupacabra 25 years ago and reveals new details from the original eyewitness about the world’s most famous cryptozoological vampire.
BENJAMIN RADFORD revisits the first report of the chupacabra 25 years ago and reveals new details from the original eyewitness about the world’s most famous cryptozoological vampire.
Even amid the rarefied field of cryptozoological curiosities, the chupacabra [initially chupacabras; see FT85:9] stands out as an oddity. It is the only vampire among the likes of Nessie, Yeti, Bigfoot, Mothman and other such fortean brethren, said to suck blood from goats and other animals. It’s also the only creature that has significantly changed form over the years. While most monster morphology remains fixed – big hairy bipedal sylvan creature here, big scaly saurian there
– the chupacabra has appeared in at least three distinct forms over the years: humanoid alien, canid, and “other” (including raccoons and basically any dead, unidentified animal).
It’s also the new kid on the block – a strapping young pup just 25 years old. As detailed in a previous article (FT271:3035), the original eyewitness, a Puerto Rican woman named Madelyne Tolentino, described the creature based on the HR Giger-designed monster Sil in the sci-fi/ horror film Species. The 25th anniversary of the chupacabra’s sudden appearance offers the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at that very first sighting – the astonishing encounter that spawned a monster whose fame now rivals that of Bigfoot or Nessie.
FROM LOCAL TO GLOBAL
Most accounts of Tolentino’s 1995 encounter offer only a brief summary of her description and little in the way of context. While key sightings of other monsters have received extensive analysis – Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin’s 1967 alleged encounter with a Bigfoot, for example (FT360:32-39), or Chris Davis’s 1988 sighting of the Lizard Man near a swamp (FT51:3436, 333:26-34) – Tolentino’s encounter received scant investigative attention, even at the time.
In the months after her sighting, the island of Puerto Rico was abuzz with rumours, tabloid stories, and reports about the mystery beast. Armed mobs patrolled the streets searching for the creature, and the mayor of Canóvanas, Jose “Chemo” Soto, courted local press (and votes) by promising to protect the public from the terrifying menace.
However, as the years passed and no hard evidence of the vampire surfaced, interest waned. The chupacabra was culturally appropriated by the rest of the world via The X-Files, tabloid news stories and television shows, and by the time the first dead canid version appeared on a ranch outside of Managua, Nicaragua, in 2000, it had largely faded from Puerto Rico as a threat. The chupacabra was commodified and commercialised, resembling Tolentino’s original sighting less and less with each iteration and passing year. This explains the chupacabra’s many forms, and why the current version bears little resemblance to what Tolentino saw back in 1995.
I spent five years researching the chupacabra for my 2011 book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore. I interviewed Tolentino and I described her encounter with the monster. Space constraints prevented an in-depth analysis, so the full story of her original sighting has never been told. Many of the photographs and details appear here in print for the first time.
TOLENTINO’S CHUPACABRA
The first chupacabra sighting took place in the small town of Barrio Campo Rico, in Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, a suburb of the capital, San Juan, near Calle 1 and Calle 2 and not far from the Iglesia De Dios church. It’s a semi-rural area a few kilometres from the El Yunque rainforest (reputed to be the creature’s home). The incident occurred at some point during the second week of August 1995 (Tolentino doesn’t recall the date, but it was a weekday, which places it between August 7 and 11) and between 1pm and 4pm. She said the sighting lasted from three to five minutes, and although it happened near a fairly busy road, no other cars appeared during that time.
This article incorporates two indepth interviews Tolentino gave: one in March 1996 to Lucy Pla and José Manuel Rodríguez of the Puerto Rican Research Group, translated into English and published in the 1997 Scott Corrales book Chupacabras and Other Mysteries; and an interview I conducted in 2010 with Tolentino and her (now ex) husband José Miguel Agosto at the location of her original sighting.1
THE CHUPACABRA WAS CULTURALLY APPROPRIATED BY THE REST OF THE WORLD
THE 1995 CHUPACABRA ENCOUNTER: 1996
In her 1996 interview, Tolentino described the encounter:
“I was helping my mother, since she was getting ready to move into that location. I noticed that a vehicle was about to park right outside the house. I looked to make sure it wouldn’t block access to the house. Then I noticed that the fellow driving the car was frightened. His eyes opened wide, and he started backing out. His attitude led me to believe that someone was going to hit him or mug him. It made me go up against the glass window, which is quite wide and faces the front of the house. I then became aware of the creature, walking on two legs, apparently having come quite a distance, from the corner... It stood in front of the window I was looking out.”
The creature, said Tolentino, was “about four feet (1.2m) tall, more or less. At the time, it was walking like a human, on both legs. Its arms were drawn back in an ‘attack position’, as though it were a [TV] monster. It had three, long, skinny fingers.
The arms were also very long... Its legs were long and skinny, and I could see three separate toes... For a nose it had two little holes, and its mouth was a slash... I noticed something odd on its lower back... They were like feathers, but flat on its back. At no point did they rise. [In an interview conducted by Marc Davenport in February 1996, Madelyne said the ‘feathers’ became erect and moved rapidly from side to side]” (editorial comment in original). As to eye colour, Tolentino said in the interview that they were dark grey, though the interviewer notes: “In an earlier interview, Madelyne said the eyes appeared black.” (Later versions claimed the eyes were red, a detail which has become canonical.)
“It was such a weird creature that I even got down on the floor to see if it had genitals. It had nothing at all – it was ‘plain’ and sealed. I laughed, and said to my mother, ‘What the heck is this? Does it defecate through its mouth after it eats?’”
Tolentino described its “slow, robotlike movements, as if being controlled by someone... as if being guided by remote
control. Like a robot... Had that thing appeared in front of me, I would have run, but since it was behind the glass, and there was a gate outside the glass, I thought, ‘That thing can’t harm me in here.’ Meanwhile, when my mother heard me scream [Tolentino didn’t explain when or why she screamed, after feeling that she was safe from it] she decided to go out and grab the creature... The thing took off running. I’m not sure if it was because I screamed or not... It kind of hopped, like a kangaroo... It plunged into the woods over there, where you see that palm tree.
“My mother ran after it. I went outdoors, but stayed far away... My mother was in there trying to catch it. There was a kid on a bicycle who went crazy when he saw the creature. He threw broken bottles at it. My mother shouted to a neighbour, ‘Catch it! There it goes!’ When the creature heard what my mother shouted, it started running much faster than it had. Its feet weren’t touching the ground. It was as if it had been suspended in the air, floating. Then it disappeared down that other street facing the church.”
Tolentino added that a young boy who worked for José chased the monster down and opened its mouth: “A boy who works for my husband and is always willing to deal with animals keeps a pair of gloves in his car. He put them on and went into the woods to catch the creature. He says that, when he tried to grab the creature, it whipped out what I thought were feathers. He says that they stood straight up and that they were very long spines. The spines changed colour. He says he pried its mouth open and saw that it had really large fangs. He kept on trying to grab it and the thing ran into the woods.” At that point, the excitement ended. No police or press were summoned, and the incident wasn’t mentioned again until over a month later when Tolentino’s story was reported in tabloids such as El Vocero and local radio shows.
In re-examining her original account, we find an elaborate – and somewhat implausible – account that goes beyond the creature’s appearance. It’s perhaps understandable that those who believe the chupacabra is real have elided much of Tolentino’s report, but we cannot arbitrarily pick and choose which parts of her account to credit; if there’s reason to suspect that she is misremembering, misrepresenting, or embellishing important details of her experience, there’s reason to see all of it in a sceptical light.
THE 1995 CHUPACABRA ENCOUNTER: 2010
In June 2010, I interviewed Tolentino and Agosto, both at her current home and at her previous residence, where the sighting had taken place. I found both of them to be open, helpful, and sincere, though Agosto had little to add since he had not been present.
2
Tolentino’s basic description of the creature didn’t change significantly between 1996 and 2010 – though her description of the encounter itself did, offering a markedly different version of events. Tolentino told me that only she and her mother saw the creature. Tolentino was sleeping, and her mother woke her up shouting that she’d seen some strange animal outside.
In contrast with her 1996 account, Tolentino said that her mother did not leave the house, but instead the pair watched the creature as it stood outside the window for a while. “My mother said, ‘I’m going to grab it,’ and she opened the door and started to go out. I asked my mother, ‘How are [you] so brave?’” It then floated (or hopped) toward tall grass in a vacant lot across the street and disappeared:
“HE SAYS HE PRIED ITS MOUTH OPEN AND SAW THAT IT HAD REALLY LARGE FANGS”
“We looked each other in the eyes, and I screamed... It was suspended in the air, left me without words, [then] disappeared into the tall grass.”
Tolentino corrected several mistakes in the famous drawing by UFO researcher Jorge Martín claimed to be based on her sighting. For example, the creature was about three feet tall (not four to five, as had been reported). As she had described earlier, at one point she stooped down to see if there were any sexual parts on the creature, but “it was ‘plain,’ there was nothing there at all. And the hair was short, so I would have seen if there had been any type of genitalia. This made me think it was not of this world.”
Furthermore, it did not have three fingers (as she stated in her 1996 interview) but instead five; and those five fingers did not end in claws, as was widely reported, but looked human. “There were no claws,” Tolentino stated categorically. “[I]t had human hands – not claws but long fingers and human-like nails. Its eyes were big and achiandos [“slanted”], and it didn’t have a nose, just two little dots. The creature’s skin was not brown but greyish… it looked like leather, wet and wrinkled. Its skin was like an extraterrestrial – but I never said it was an extraterrestrial. I have an interest in UFOs and aliens, but I never said it was either an extraterrestrial or an animal,” she told me. “I don’t know what it was. I’ve never changed my story.”
I asked her how it moved: “It was skipping like a kangaroo, but it had no tail. It did not touch the ground… it had no wings, but it came out like it was running as it approached.” (I asked Tolentino how it could be skipping and hopping and not touching the ground, but did not get an answer that really clarified this.)
The 1996 version told a dramatic story of how (after searching it for genitals) she doesn’t run or panic (or look for a camera), but instead makes a joke about it with her mother, then inexplicably screams. Her mother then bravely chases this bizarre, otherworldly creature to try and catch it. She fails, but a local boy manages to chase it into the woods, grab the monster and pry its mouth open, and then release it.
In the version she told me, none of this happened: She and her mother both stayed inside the house and watched as the creature floated (or skipped) away into a wooded area across the street. As for the brave boy who gave the weird creature an impromptu dental exam, despite apparently initially endorsing the boy’s story, Tolentino told me that it never happened: “Jose had a young worker who used to help him fix cars, and he ran out to see, but he did not see the chupacabra.” (It’s not clear whether Tolentino had come to doubt the boy’s account or whether his story had never been credibly proffered.)
CONCLUSION
If Tolentino’s account is accurate and truthful, she has remarkable powers of observation; most witnesses would have only remembered a few of the most obvious features, but she spills out detail after detail of description, from its eye colour (albeit several different answers) to the number of toes on its feet to its missing anus.
The members of the Puerto Rican Research Group apparently didn’t conduct any investigation beyond interviewing Tolentino months after the fact. There is no corroborating evidence of Tolentino’s story, no physical proof or traces, nor any photos or other eyewitness. In all, based on her 1996 account, there would seem to be at least a half dozen potential eyewitnesses to the sighting: Tolentino; her mother (who was unavailable to be interviewed due to infirmity), the (unnamed) local boy (who may or may not have chased the monster and pried its mouth open, but may have been present and seen something); one or more neighbours; and the man in a vehicle whose parking habits brought Tolentino to the window in the first place. Not one of them has come forward to corroborate her account or offer their recollections; of course, if the version she told me in 2010 is to be credited, they either don’t exist or have nothing to say. 3
Tolentino told me: “Most people have believed me, people trust me and know I’m telling the truth. The whole experience seemed both real and unreal at the same time... Others were making up pictures for sensationalism, but I [reported it] because I have good vision and wanted to put it down as I saw it... I have the most information, and I have never changed my story.”
Whether Tolentino is aware of it or not, her story has indeed changed significantly. Memory is notoriously fallible under the best of circumstances, but it’s hard to reconcile the different versions of this original, influential chupacabra report. We don’t know, and at this remove can’t conclusively prove, what (if anything) she saw that day – what the floating, grey-skinned, longfingered, spiky-backed alien humanoid figure was. But as Tolentino acknowledged in her 1996 interview, her “chupacabra” looks remarkably like a monster in a film she’d recently seen, “a movie called Species. It would be a very good idea if you saw it... It was a creature that looked like the chupacabra, with spines on its back and all... The resemblance to the chupacabra was really impressive.”
NOTES
1 The details and descriptions from her 1996 interview may be considered more reliable than her more recent recollections, though it’s important to note that they are second- or third-hand, having been conducted in spoken Spanish, translated to written English, and then edited for publication. I mention this not to suggest that the interview is necessarily unreliable, but merely to note that in accounts of fortean events that rely wholly on a single eyewitness, as in this case, crucial details can be lost or changed over iterations. Though I speak passable Spanish (and both Tolentino and Agosto speak some English and Spanglish), native speakers confirmed my translations of key details from my recordings.
2 Her husband Miguel was away at the time, looking for auto parts, but Tolentino reported in her 1996 interview that he later saw it: “Miguel says it was not walking, but floating in the air, defying the laws of gravity... It floated slowly.”
3 Though otherwise credulous, to their credit the Puerto Rican researchers did note several contradictions between what Tolentino had previously told them and what they were hearing at the time of the 1996 interview, such as details concerning the eye colour and actions of the spikes or feathers on the creature’s spine.
✒ BENJAMIN RADFORD is a folklorist and author of several books on monsters including Lake Monster Mysteries (with Joe Nickell), Tracking the Chupacabra ,and Mysterious New Mexico .His latest book is Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search for Spirits, and he is co-host of Squaring the Strange podcast.