Chupacabra
Existing in a sideways relationship to alien abduction is the Mexican Chupacabra (“goat sucker”), a creature with roots in ancient Mesoamerican legend linking powerful spirits with a variety of incredible beings. Some Toltec and later Aztec art of the 10th to 16th centuries, particularly friezes and other sculpture, depicts winged beasts suggesting the god Quetzalcoatl, the “feathered serpent” that rules the destiny of humans. In the eyes of many, the images reveal Quetzalcoatl and Chupacabra as one, or as representations of Chupacabra alone.
In the popular Mexican imagination, Chupacabra figures strongly in folklore and oral tradition dating to the 16th century, and the unwelcome arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Chupacabra, then, has unavoidable connections to the helplessness that accompanies invasion and subjugation. The creature acquired a particular omnipresence in the 1970s to the ’90s, when it became a variant of the mutilated-cattle phenomenon. For instance, the legend won considerable acceptance in Puerto Rico early in the 1990s, when the island suffered a wave of livestock killings. By mid-decade, the creature dominated imaginative thought across Texas and Florida; today, most reports come from the U.S.-Mexico border.
Believers describe Chupacabra variously, though most commonly as standing three or four feet high, with gray skin (or hide); a horrid humanoid face dominated by red eyes; and small, kangaroo-like arms. Some descriptions include a spiny back, and witnesses often report wings, a reptilian appearance, and resemblances to warthogs.
The Chupacabra diet favors chickens and other fowl, but also encompasses cows, goats, sheep (particularly lambs), and horses. The creatures feed by utilizing curved fangs against the prey’s skull, to drain the blood and brains. This folkloric detail recalls the head trauma suffered by the hapless man discovered near São Paulo in 1988. More popularly, the skull-violating fangs are on prominent view in a well-liked Mexican horror film, The Brainiac (1962), in which the title monster is a human transformed into a brain-sucking fiend by a passing comet—an oblique reference to extraterrestrials.
Persistent tales of Chupacabra attacks on humans have a built-in irony, given a relatively common belief that the monsters are not part of the natural world but the result of human meddling in genetics.
Inevitably, a portion of the Chupacabra community believes that the monsters are of extraterrestrial origin, brought to Earth from another world or, less likely, as intelligent engineers of their own destinies. Other accounts cast Chupacabra as organic weapons of alien design, or as the unwanted detritus of extraterrestrial experiments involving earthly fauna.
Chupacabra fever abated in the pop-culture imagination not long after a famed 1997 episode of television’s The X-Files, “El Mundo Gira” (“The World Turns”). In it, grisly, flesh-eating attacks on people and goats, initially blamed on Chupacabra, are actually the work of a deadly fungus. How mundane!