And you can blame Hollywood.
[Benjamin] 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.Of course, there is mention of the Texas beasts and how they fit into the whole mythos, mange and all.
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.
Soon after, reports of nearly identical creatures began appearing throughout Latin America. But these can be dismissed, Radford says, because they're all based on Tolentino's Hollywood-inspired monster.
"What I've tried to do is take the whole El Chupacabra enchilada and break it into small mysteries and then solve those mysteries," Radford said. "There's no place else for those mysteries to hide now. If I haven't solved every piece of it, then I don't know what I'm missing. It's all there."
2 comments:
I dunno, I was introduced to the idea of the Chupacabra back in the 1980s, when I was still in elementary school--of course, the story I heard involved a winged creature, and I haven't heard that since, so who knows.
I had a friend from Puerto Rico, and I think he was the first person who told me about the Chupacabra. He remembered stories of it from his childhood, and, if I remember correctly, he also mentioned wings.
Perhaps the winged version is the original conception of the beast, and the one that looks like the creature from "Species" was just one woman's interpretation that happened to gain media legs, eventually crowding out the original.
And then it showed up in Cuero, and it was never the same again.
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