Classification: Unverified account

Chupacabra: how Puerto Rico’s monster was born and transformed

In 1995, animal deaths, a witness in Canóvanas and a mayor’s search launched a legend across the Americas. Necropsies and DNA tests explained specific cases, but the original bipedal creature was never verified.

Canóvanas, Porto Rico, Estados Unidos · See stories from this place and nearby

Before the name, the dead animals

In 1995, livestock owners in Puerto Rico found goats, sheep, birds and other animals dead or injured. Neck wounds and the impression that carcasses had been “drained of blood” attracted more attention than the examinations themselves. The losses and anxiety were real; attributing them to one unknown predator remained a hypothesis. An Associated Press report in December recorded that government veterinarians examined a group of sheep in Orocovis, including survivors with neck marks, and attributed that attack to stray dogs. This did not automatically settle every incident on the island, but it showed why combining different deaths into a single pattern was risky.

The name “chupacabras” arose in that atmosphere. On an episode of the Puerto Rican podcast En qué quedó, broadcaster Silverio Pérez recalled reacting on air to a report of dead animals in Orocovis and using the word humorously. Former Canóvanas mayor José “Chemo” Soto also credited him with the name in a later interview. It caught on because it offered an explanation before the causes of the deaths were known: someone, or something, was supposedly sucking goats’ blood.

A creature in daylight

The image that travelled abroad came from Madelyne Tolentino. She said that in August 1995 she saw a bipedal figure outside her mother’s home in the Campo Rico neighbourhood of Canóvanas. In an account published that December, she likened it to a kangaroo without a tail. In later interviews she described large eyes, long arms, slender hands and projections down its back. It was not the hairless canid that would become familiar in photographs from the 2000s. Her encounter reportedly took place in the afternoon, unlike the nighttime attacks on animals.

These interviews document testimony, not the creature itself. A 2025 reconstruction by Benjamin Radford compared a 1996 interview with one he conducted in 2010. Details changed: the number of fingers and the story of a young man supposedly catching the animal and opening its mouth did not survive in the same form. No photograph, specimen or independent account of that encounter allows the details to be checked. Discrepancies do not justify accusing the witness of fraud, but they prevent her description from becoming physical evidence.

There is a revealing cultural connection. In a 1996 interview, Tolentino mentioned the resemblance between what she described and a creature in the film Species, released in 1995. Radford proposed that the cinematic image influenced her account. That is a hypothesis about memory and visual culture, not proof that she knowingly fabricated the sighting. The resemblance helps explain how a portrait can settle into popular memory and spread without a captured animal.

The search in Canóvanas

For people losing livestock, the story was more than entertainment. Soto organised searches around Canóvanas. Reporters in 1995 followed residents, police and civil-defence staff through wooded ground; one party even used a caged goat as bait. Coverage brought the fear into local politics and raised a practical concern: the police chief warned untrained people against taking guns into the search for an unknown attacker.

The mayor said at the time that dozens of animals had died in his municipality. That was a local allegation, not a count of deaths caused by the same creature. In a 2016 interview he remained convinced that something unusual had been nearby, while acknowledging that he had never seen the Chupacabra. His search is documented; the expedition did not establish the identity of whatever killed the animals.

What the necropsies changed

In January 1996, Puerto Rico’s director of veterinary services, Héctor García, told the Associated Press that roughly twenty necropsies performed in the preceding months by the Agriculture Department laboratory had found nothing inexplicable. Some marks looked like dog bites; other animals had died of pneumonia or hepatitis. The examined cardiovascular systems were intact, contradicting claims that those bodies had been drained of blood.

This is the strongest evidence for assessing the central claim, but its scope is limited: about twenty examined carcasses, not every reported death. A carcass with little visible blood does not by itself demonstrate suction; without a documented necropsy, cause and time of death and actual blood loss cannot be reconstructed. Some private veterinarians at the time found particular wounds unusual. Those observations belong in the record, but they are not an identified specimen or an evidentiary chain linking all incidents to a new species.

A precursor, not the same animal

Puerto Rico already had stories about mysterious livestock deaths. Clippings from El Vocero preserved by the Virtual Library of Puerto Rico trace the “Moca Vampire” narrative to 1975. The shared themes of livestock, wounds and an alleged lack of blood may have helped audiences recognise the 1995 story. They do not show that Moca’s monster and the biped of Canóvanas were one animal returning after twenty years. The descriptions and circumstances differ; the connection is chiefly folkloric.

A new body in the twenty-first century

As the name travelled to the mainland, its appearance changed. In the United States, many alleged “chupacabras” were four-legged animals with exposed skin and conspicuous teeth. This time, testable material existed. In 2007, tissue from an animal found near Cuero, Texas, was analysed at Texas State University. Its DNA identified it as a coyote. The university did not claim at that point to have determined the exact cause of that specimen’s hair loss; the genetic test answered the species question.

Texas A&M specialists later explained why canids with mange resemble many of these photographs: mites can cause hair loss, crusting and skin changes, while remaining hairs along the back can resemble a ridge. A weakened predator may also turn to easier, penned prey. This is a strong explanation for many canid-type reports, but it cannot retrospectively identify what Tolentino saw in Puerto Rico. Nor does it mean that every animal death blamed on a Chupacabra had the same cause.

Where the evidence ends

The Chupacabra is a documented cultural phenomenon: real animal deaths, public searches, interviews and an image that travelled across the Americas. The bipedal “bloodsucker” has not been established by a specimen, verifiable recording or necropsy. Some later supposed specimens were known animals, and examined Puerto Rican cases had ordinary explanations. The most revealing question may be how one name came to join different events, and why every new photograph seemed to give the monster a new body.

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