Tracking The Chupacabra - The ParaPod Series 2, Episode 3 Review
March 01, 2016 10:11 AM ‐ The ParaPod • Mythical Creatures
This article is more than eight years old and was last updated in March 2018.
Is the chupacabra a blood sucking weaponised monster created in a lab by government scientists, or is it the fictional creation of a mad woman? Barry Dodds finds out once and for all.
In episode three of 'The ParaPod: Mysteries' it's the job of Barry Dodds to convince his co-host Ray Peacock of the legend of the chupacabra.
Barry begins by telling us about the chupacabra, which is apparently a "cryptid", that's an animal whose existence or survival is disputed or unsubstantiated, such as the yeti.
The first sighting of the beast was in 1995 by a woman named Madeline Tolentino. She saw the creature outside of her home in Puerto Rico. Based on her description, Barry tells us, it's got big red eyes, spikes on its back, scaly skin, it's got paws like a kangaroo but with claws, a tail, and fangs. Plus it can jump really high.
Ray interrupts, "thus far you've just described something that a four-year-old would draw at school"
Barry goes on to explain that it likes goats, in fact "it sucks goats" and "chupacabra literally means goat sucker". Apparently goats were found in the area, "they were all dead, they all had these three puncture marks and all the blood had been sucked out of them," of course these deaths were attribute to Madeline's sighting of the chupacabra.
Barry has a few theories on what the chupacabra actually is:
1. The first theory is based around the fact that "people were seeing a lot of lights in the sky at the time". Barry speculates that people think it could be a alien's pet, he says "aliens came down to have a look, this thing got loose."
2. Barry then goes into his second explanation, a theory that the chupacabra was a manmade creature, the result of an experiment that the US government conducted in Latin America. He said, "it could be a genetic mutation, where they've got like a dog, and a cat, and a lizard, and they've spliced them. They've taken a bit of each of them, put it in an egg, grown it, and it's escaped." After Barry says there's also a kangaroo in the mix, Ray questions how these animals could be combined. Barry says the use the animals' DNA and then amazingly likens the process to that used by the scientists in Jurassic Park. Ray is forced to remind Barry that the movie is fictional, "Michael Crichton made it up and wrote it as a book."
3. The third theory is that the chupacabra is a weaponised fighting beast. Barry explains, "NASA were involved with the US government and they made a creature to fight the Japanese and the Viet... what are people from Vietnam called? The Vietnamese? It was to fight them in the war, did it go wrong? Did it get out of hand?"
Conclusion
Despite the fact that Barry has said he's researched this topic well, it was clearly Ray who had come to the podcast recording with the best researched information, he said, "we're going to get some facts now because you're speaking utter bollocks."
Ray's information had come from the book 'Tracking The Chupacabra' by Benjamin Radford. Based on this information Ray was able to tell Barry that Madeline Tolentino who originally spotted the beast was actually describing the alien Sil from the movie 'Species', a movie she'd recently watched.
The chupacabra's modus operandi was sucking blood out of goats, but where did this part of the story originate from? Well, Ray says that farmers were finding their animals dead and came to the conclusion that their blood had been drained because there was no blood around the bodies and puncture marks were visible on the animals' necks.
This was of course just a guess on the farmers' part, and it's actually much more likely that it was wild dogs. They are known to kill with a bite to the neck, this would cause the animal to die from internal haemorrhaging with no visible sign of blood outside the body.
The final nail in the coffin for Barry was an additional bit of information about, Madeline. It turns out that she actually believed that what was happening in the film 'Species' was actually happening in the Puerto Rico at the time and that the film's makers had inside knowledge of these events.
To end the debate, Ray asks "what's your conclusion, Barry?" He answers, "based on that, it's probably bollocks."
Ray 3 - Barry 0.
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Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore
Originating in Latin America, the chupacabra is a contradictory and bizarre blend of vampire and shapeshifter, changing its appearance and characteristics depending on when and where it is seen. Rooted in conspiracy theory and anti-American sentiment, the beast is said to be the result of Frankenstein-like secret US government experiments in the Puerto Rican jungles. Combining five years of careful investigation with a close study of the creatures cultural and folkloric significance, this book is the first to fully explore and try to solve the decades-old mystery of the chupacabra.
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