The Chupacabra Might Actually Have Existed. Here's Why

Baby goats are pretty much adorable. Like lots of animals (including lots of humans) the record is a little more mixed as they get older and develop minds of their own. But as babies? Adorable. And so it's an even greater crime that anyone (or should we say anything?) would do something so cruel as to suck their blood and leave the lifeless little husk to be discovered by incredulous humans.

Believe it or not (and a lot of people do, and a lot of people don't) that seems to have happened (or not) to small livestock, including goats, with incidents reported in Puerto Rico, especially, but also lately in the Southwest United States. And the culprit? It remains uncaught, though a few people claim to have made a sighting. It's the second-cousin to the bigfoot/sasquatch, and it's name, translated, means "goat sucker" — the chupacabra.

That small livestock has been found from time to time, emptied of blood, seems to be more or less a fact. The meat is intact, so to speak, except for small puncture wounds, not unlike that expected of a vampire (and we are not for a moment suggesting that vampires are a thing; still, Twilight sold an awful lot of copies). What could have performed such a dastardly deed?

Encyclopedia Britannica tells us that the first appearances of the suckers-of-goats appeared around 1995, though Livescience mentions anecdotal evidence from the 1970s. There are people who claim to have seen the thing (or things), and the aforementioned bloodless victims, but nobody's managed to actually come up with a chupacabra body. Or a skeleton. Or a photograph. Or footprints. Or — well, there were a few incidents that were close, but as the BBC reports, "The bodies have invariably turned out to be coyotes, dogs or raccoons – barring one that was actually a fish." Coyotes, especially, and especially coyotes that appear hairless, but turn out to have really bad cases of mange.

And then there are not only the cryptozoologists, but the conspiracy buffs: the chupacabra is a lab creation of NASA, say some theorists in Chile, as Animal Planet relates. That's reasonable. It's not like they're blaming Elvis or anything.