Origin of the Chupacabra Traced

Benjamin Radford, LiveScience editor has, perhaps found the origins of the pervasive myth of the chupacabra. The first reported sighting was in 1995 in Puerto Rico:

Radford dug through every El Chupacabra mention and traced the physical description of the monster to a single event in the second week of August 1995, when a sketch from an eyewitness named Madelyne Tolentino ran in a Puerto Rican newspaper. Locals immediately tagged the alien-looking animal as El Chupacabra.

The creature, Radford noticed, shared a strong resemblance to the alien/human hybrid in the 1995 sci-fi thriller "Species." When he spoke to Tolentino, he asked her if the thing that she saw could have been inspired by the film. Indeed, she had seen the movie in the weeks prior to making her description.

"You can make a direct connection between the film hitting theaters, her seeing the creature in the film, seeing it in the street, making the report and entering the public conscious," Radford said.

This, of course, does not explain how something that was supposed to be "a bipedal creature, 4 to 5 feet tall with spikes down its back, long, thin arms and legs, and an alienlike oblong head with red or black eyes," was, in Texas, misidentified with every mangey coyote to lope down the road.

This also does not have anything to do with our actual chupacabra ranch and its inhabitants who were created by many mysterious means.