The Collegio Pittsburg's student voice since 1916
Curtis Meyer, reporter
From Sasquatch to Loch Ness, there have been a multitude of monsters and cryptids who have all had their day in the sun. They all have one thing in common, however. They have old roots, whether it is native American spirits or ancient curses. It seems that with the coming of the digital age, many old myths have been disproven.
There is one monster that defies the digital age, one who appeared in the 1990s and struck terror into Puerto Rican farmers. The Chupacabra, or “goatsucker” in Spanish, is believed responsible for the deaths of thousands of animals on the island nation of Puerto Rico.
It started quietly in March of 1995, when eight sheep were found dead by a local farmer. Remarkably, they seemed drained of blood and the bite marks on the neck would not match any animal, with three teeth marks. A few other isolated incidents occurred, but the attacks dissipated just as quickly as they came. Until August, that is.
In August, reports of the dead livestock ballooned, and it became a nationwide issue. Bringing back memories of a similar incident in the 70s, each animal was found to have three holes on the base of the neck near the head, about the width of a straw and three to four inches in length. All the corpses were bloodless.
Part of the mystery of the Chupacabra is what it looks like. Depending on who you ask, the Chupacabra is either an alien’s pet, a lizard kangaroo, or a laboratory monster created by the U.S. government. Whether you believe in its existence or not, something happened to hundreds of Puerto Rican livestock, and it remains unsolved who did it.
The first major sighting of the Chupacabra came from Puerto Rican woman Madelyne Tolentino, who claimed to see the Chupacabra through the window of her house. According to her, it was very reptilian, with green scaly skin, red glowing eyes, and spines down its back. Tolentino claimed that it hopped like a kangaroo and reeked of sulfur.
Around this same time there was a rash of UFO sightings in Puerto Rico, and this cannot be a coincidence. On Nov. 17, 1995, a luminous disc was sighted overhead a radio station in the town of Barranquitas, while at the same time all the radio equipment malfunctioned. Many eyewitnesses in the town have reported this, but it failed to reach any sort of large coverage. Notably absent from news stories was the presence of creatures, whose descriptions were akin to the Chupacabra.
This alien theory is not the only likely explanation for the Chupacabra. There is a national park in Puerto Rico, El Yunque, where the U.S. keeps a secret genetics lab. It is believed that the Chupacabra is a horrible experiment gone wrong, that escaped into the forest following Hurricane Hugo in 1989.
In recent years, the Chupacabra has either been rounded up by U.S. officials or returned to its home planet, as most modern sightings in the U.S. have been DNA tested and confirmed as wild dogs or coyotes. The U.S. denies the existence of any genetics testing facilities in El Yunque, and if the Chupacabra is an alien they have yet to emerge from the shadows.
Of course, our government has never made a mistake and tried to cover it up, so why would they start now?