Here There Be Monsters!

By Andrew Swerlick

 

What did you do on your summer vacation?

Resign from the White House? Nearly kill Internet radio? Start your presidential campaign in earnest?

Well, out in Cuero, Texas, one woman may well have discovered a new species, the mythical beast of Puerto Rican legend, the Chupacabra.

You’ll be forgiven if you have no idea what that means. The Chupacabra is not something most people are necessarily familiar with. But the story of this bizarre, mythical creature supposedly discovered in backcountry Texas is something that’s been gaining attention at even the national level, meriting coverage on both MSNBC and NPR.

The story first broke in late July when Cuero native Phylis Canion found a number of strange animal corpses near her ranch. A life-long hunter, Canion is no stranger to the animal kingdom, but the remains that she saw were completely alien to her.

“It is one ugly creature,” she told Elizabeth White of the Associated Press in an interview.

Canion is convinced that the hairless, blue-gray, fang-toothed animal is in fact a Chupacabra. The story of the modern Chupacabra began in the late 1980s, when reports on a series of strange animal deaths began appearing in Puerto Rican newspapers.

Both domestic and wild animals were found killed, with their blood completely drained, presumably through the series of small circular incisions that marked their bodies. Puerto Rican comedian and entrepreneur Silverio Pérez coined the term “Chupacabra,” or “goat sucker” in Spanish.

Since then, sightings of the Chupacabra have spread throughout Mexico and into Texas. A number of purported Chupacabras have been caught by farmers and hunters, but in every case, DNA testing has revealed the strange creatures to simply be wild dogs, foxes or coyotes.

Still, many are waiting with bated breath for the results of DNA testing of this latest carcass, hoping that the legend of the Chupacabra will be confirmed. It’s thought that such verification would then pave the way for a closer look at other creatures of legend, like Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, creatures called “cryptids” by the “cryptozoologists” who study them.

Cryptozoology is a strange field, filled both with open-minded inquirers who consider the possibility that undiscovered species may be hiding out at the outskirts of civilization and cranks who explain cryptid sightings with wild theories of government-run genetic studies, alien visitation and time travel.

Studying not only the infamous Nessie and Bigfoot, but also thousands of other legendary and purportedly extinct animals, these researchers have amassed piles of eyewitness testimony, but little in the way of hard evidence.

That this field still continues to exist in spite of the slim evidential pickings is testament to a facet of human nature that causes human beings to desire to live in a world bigger than themselves. A world marked by new frontiers, undiscovered spaces, by maps with large blank swaths where the words “Here There Be Dragons” are scrawled.

But poking into the realm of mythical and legendary creatures isn’t the only way we can see a world still filled with the promise of the frontier. Science pushes out into the very frontiers of reality, examining the world at the quantum level where the mundane rules of the macroscopic universe no longer apply. Particles can be in two places at once, can pass through objects that are seemingly solid, can wink in and out of existence at a moments notice.

Space, too, offers humanity a world with no final boundaries. A near-infinite number of planets, many of which could play host to creatures far stranger than even the most imaginative cryptozoologist could dream up. A frontier that could one day be ours if we ever develop the technology.

Still, even in light of these more mainstream frontier spaces, cryptozoology persists, which really isn’t too surprising. After all, given the choice between the map of the world that used to hang on the wall of my fourth grade classroom — the color-coded one that spans every square-mile of the globe — and one reading “Here There Be Dragons,” I’d choose the second. Wouldn’t you?