The Chupacabra: A Monster Born in 1995 and Solved in Fifteen Years
The report that started everything read like the opening of a horror film. In March 1995, on the farms outside the Puerto Rican town of Canovanas, eight sheep were found dead in a single morning, each marked by three small puncture wounds to the chest and, so the story spread from farm to farm, emptied of every drop of blood. Something was killing without eating. Sheep, goats and chickens went on turning up in the fields the same way through that spring, and within weeks the island had given the killer a name that has never left it: el chupacabra, the goat-sucker, a coinage usually credited to the Puerto Rican comedian and radio host Silverio Perez, who used it on air as the panic took hold.
The panic was real and it was large. By the end of 1995 more than two hundred separate sightings had been logged across Puerto Rico, and hundreds of dead animals were being blamed on the creature, as many as 150 of them in Canovanas alone. The town's mayor, Jose Ramon "Chemo" Soto, decided that official reassurance was not enough, and led armed weekly expeditions into the brush around the town, sometimes with a caged goat as bait, hunting a thing nobody could describe with any two accounts agreeing. A farmer's dead animals had become front-page news, and a monster had become a civic project.
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