Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

Over at Cryptomundo, Loren Coleman shares some uses of the term “Chupacabras” before it was made popular in 1995, “Chupacabras 1951“. Quoting Kenneth Thomas:

…watching the 1951 movie Bride of the Gorilla with Raymond Burr and Lon Chaney. Burr gets poisoned by a witch and either starts becoming a gorilla or it’s all in his mind and he’s running around naked at night in a South American jungle. The natives are convinced that it’s a legendary beast called something like a “sucaris.” (It was hard to tell from the dialect.) When they describe the legendary beast they are quite clearly describing a Chupacabras. The verbal descriptions were a match. When they decide to set a trap for it, they use a live goat as bait. They do bring a goat to the trap they set for the creature.

Coleman also mentions the birds called “goatsuckers” in Spanish, of the Caprimulgiformes order, which means literally goat-sucker in Latin. According to Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez work on the Chupacabras, those birds are indeed called popularly goatsuckers in Spanish, but the actual term used is “Chotacabras”.

“Choto” or “Chota” is the name given to the goat offspring when it’s sucking milk, and the popular (and erroneous) legend is that these birds are able to open their beaks so wide they could suck milk not only from goats, but from cows as well.

But the relationship between the Chotacabras birds and the Chupacabras is more interesting than a mere similarity of names and alleged behaviour, because the main promoter of the Chupacabras in 1995 was also involved on one Chotacabras case some years before.

In 1989, Puerto Rican Jorge J. Martín promoted the case of a bird with snake-like fangs allegedly found and captured by relatives of María Ortiz Hernández while they were fishing. It was promoted as the “serpent-bird of Gurabo“, and if you may wonder where such chimera idea would have come from, you just have to read how it was immediately related to the Quetzalcoatl legend.

Much was made of the creature, which was available for examination, until one policeman visited the house where it was preserved, grabbed the creature and removed its fangs. They were merely parts from the feet of a rooster, attached to a common bird’s beak.

Perhaps more importantly to our post here, the bird was a chotacabras.

And you can actually see some later drawings of the Chupacabras where it also has big fangs and wings.

So, as Noguez pointed out, you can add the “serpent-bird of Gurabo” hoax involving a Chotacabras to the predecessors of the Chupacabras mania that swept the world around ten years ago. According to the Mexican researcher, the term “Chupacabras” is a simplistic and erroneous use of the more widely known term Chotacabras.

Oh well. I was almost forgetting.  While you will probably not find any use of the exact term “Chupacabras” in the Bible, Spanish or otherwise, you will find the term “Chotacabras”, according to Luis Noguez. And it’s related to Lilith. Another kind of mythic vampire.

The “Chupacabras” is similar, both in appearance and on its background story, to a contemporary videogame character, ‘Sonic, the hedgehog’. While this short essay does not intend to claim that the electronic character was the origin for the Chupacabras, it will try to explore these curious similarities. Others have already noticed this link between the two, but usually with a tongue-in-cheek. There is however some room for serious speculation about it.

Appearance

The most widely known representation of the Chupacabras is related to its genesis with this name in Puerto Rico. If you have ever read something about the subject, it’s very probable you have seen some version of the original sketch by Jorge Martin for the sighting of Madelyne Tolentino. It was created in December 1995, and one notable thing about it are the curious pointy appendages running along the spine of the creature.

This is exactly the trademark of Sonic, created in 1991 by Naoto Oshima and turned into the official mascot for the Sega videogame company. As a stilized hedgehog, those spikes are easily understood.

 The Sonic games franchise, which extend to this day, reached its peak success exactly in mid 1990s. Online websites mention that at this time, Sonic was more popular among american children than icons like Mickey Mouse, Abraham Lincoln or Mario (from rival Nintendo).

In the original description by Jorge Martin above, the “spine-like apprendages” are described as having colors that “change  constantly from red to blue, to yellow, to green, to orange, to violet”.

When Sonic jumps and spins to turn into a kind of ball to roll away or combat his enemies with his spikes, he is also involved on a bright sphere of multiple changing colors.

Story

“At first I believed these animals to be the result of some genetic or bionic experiment“, wrote Jorge Martin. This was among one of the first speculations about the origin and nature of the Chupacabras, though other stories emerged after a while. “I now believe that they are not of terrestrial origin“, Martín added.

The culprits of the “genetic or bionic experiment” were, of course, the Americans, who have military bases in Puerto Rico. People speculated that one or more genetic monsters had just escaped. This particular version is an almost exact parallel to the background story for the Sonic videogames:

“Once upon a time there was a peaceful world called Mobius that is threatened when Dr. Kintobor, a kind scientist who was researching the Chaos Emeralds, is transformed into an evil megalomaniac after a lab accident. All the beautiful animals of the planet are transformed intro evil robotic beings, Badniks — except for Sonic the hedgehog, a friend of Kintobor that was too quick to be captured. Now Sonic must find the Chaos Emeralds, rescue his friends and defeat Kintobor before it’s too late”.

Dr. Kintobor, turned into evil Robotnik, transforms gracious animals into bionic robotic slaves, poluting and destroying the planet on his way. The whole game was “Captain Planet” style.

Discussion

The Chupacabras didn’t appear from nothing in 1995. It didn’t came from the blue videogame character either. The origins of the Chupacabras can be traced back to “animal mutilations” in USA almost three decades earlier, and to the “Moca Vampire” of the very same Puerto Rico in 1975. These coincidences between the appearance and stories for Sonic and the abominable sucking creature may well be just that. Coincidences.

Representing spines or “appendages” the way Martin did in his drawing does not necessarily proves that it was based on a Sonic drawing. Any child, if asked to draw a hedgehog or an animal alike with spines, may draw something similar. The Chupacabras, furthermore, despite having being described as a color-changing creature, was also described and more usually portrayed as having more dark tones.

Obviously a multi-colored character is more appropriated for fun child characters than scary monsters.

Having made all of these points, and noting that probably are many reasonable others, we cannot help but to also suggest that maybe these are not just coincidences.

Both the Chupacabras and Sonic may have been cultural products that emerged and reached huge success at around the same time. They are both always referred to as a single character, as if there was only one of them – this is not very evident in English, but in Spanish countries where the language clearly differs between singular and plural forms, the Chupacabras is always referred to as a single creature. This was emphasized by Argentinian Max Seifert at the time as an indication that the phenomenon was about a myth, and not the effects of an unknown species of animals.

While Sonic in the end may not be the origin for the Chupacabras, the same cultural references and influences could explain both of them.

And then, in the end it’s always possible that Jorge Martín was playing with his children’s Sega Genesis. Or not, maybe it was just a Master System.

References

There are great in-depth dossiers in Spanish about the Chupacabras over at MarcianitosVerdes. They cover the arrival of the monster in Mexico, Argentina and Chile.

Click on the image for the original post on Loren Coleman’s Criptomundo. The photo was sent to him with this report:

Loren, hopefully you can shed some light on this thing. The thing has many human qualities I can see under a scope. [It] appears to have clothing, however the burnished bronze color throws me off. [It was] photo[graph]ed by a 15 year old American girl. She was on tour with a group from Michigan. Supposedly the temp. is 100+.

Loren, the photo was taken in July 2007. The story behind it is this little 15 year old girl was attacked by this [thing]. How it happened is unclear. I met personally with the girl and her parents; I felt imposing since I had just met these people for the first time. It was a large family gathering and I was an outside guest invited. Still not sure why I was invited other than they had motorcycles and needed answers to questions. I was their answer guy.

Her father plainly said she’d not be going on anymore trips out of his sight. Supposedly this thing grabbed her and attempted to hold her and put mud in her face and hair. She said she couldn’t get away from it by pulling so she got a firm hold and tackled it causing it to lose balance thus allowing her escape.

Supposedly there are other witnesses; I am still trying to get more info.

The area is: Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil.

Surely, someone there knows of this incident.Two-Cam McLaren, August 9, 2007.

Coleman thinks it’s “intriguing, if not curiously prosaic”, and remarks that “anything is possible as an origin of any new photo”. It turns out that though anything is possible, the most prosaic explanation indeed must be the answer to this. And it’s so prosaic any Brazilian, like me, would find it not only obvious but slightly revolting.

That mud area we can see in the photos is what is called “manguezal“, and it’s a very  important ecosystem in Northeastern Brazil, not only for the environment but also for the locals. The image at left of very happy people are some tourists bathing in mud, but the  second and third one are from locals earning their life. They mostly catch crabs in the mud, and end up almost completely covered in mud.

It’s obvious the original photo sent to Coleman is of a local covered in mud, probably a man. You can see that he’s wearing a T-shirt and pants. The “horns” are the same as we can see in the tourists above: it’s just something you can do with your hair when it’s covered in mud.

The “Manguezal” culture was even promoted in the 1990s in Brazil as a nice cultural movement, the “Mangue Beat“, leaded by band “Chico Science”.

Now, Coleman may not be blamed for sharing this pic, warning about it possibly being fake and asking for input. People outside Brazil may not be used to see homo sapiens covered in mud — though even Americans my have watched somewhat similar “Give it Away“.

But those who sent the photo and called that guy, very probably a poor local earning his life, a “Beast”… I don’t know which is worse: that they were indeed “attacked” by “it”, and did not realize it was a human being; or if they knowingly called a local a horned Beast.

Update: Coleman quickly and kindly posted our explanation on Criptomundo.

Turn down the volume (unless you are into loud Arabic music) and check the video above. A few months ago, infamous paper Pravda reported that “Russian fishermen catch squeaking alien and ate it“. The video clearly shows the same “alien”. As Mexican weblog MarcianitosVerdes wrote at the time, it’s another Garadiavolo case.

As you can read on our entry about those abominable creatures, they are just common rays, skates and species alike. What look like evil eyes are actually nostrils. The real eyes are on the other side of the fish.

It’s not a very nice image, and the strange creature has such a horrible face that it was called “Garadiávolo” — the devil’s face.

The story associated with it is no less bizarre. Alfredo Garcia Garamendi was exploring the Laguna Negra on Puerto Rico when he was attacked by it. In spite of its small size — less  than three feet — it had a supernatural strength.

“I shot at it“, Garamendi told later, “but even being hit the animal quickly started attacking me again on the neck, and I felt that it was starting to choke me with its tail. Then I managed to reach my knife, and kept stabbing the animal until I felt it was motionless around my neck, because it was dead.”

The horrifying fight in 1974 wasn’t actually the first. Garamendi had already managed to capture one animal from this bizarre species four years before, but that time things did not end very well. Not so much for his physical integrity, but for his scientific interestes.

He had sent it for analysis in the Central University of San Juan. Afterwards, when he got his creature back, he was visited by men from the CIA, who demanded to take it away. He never saw it again.

More careful this time, Alfredo Garamendi decided to preserve and study the specimen in his own house. He wrote a book about it, drawing the creatures along with flying saucers, though he didn’t believe they “came from another planet“, but rather from “another dimension“. What for? “Maybe for the same reasons we have for sending monkeys and other animals to other worlds, to see if they survive on an alien environment“.

The strange events didn’t stop there. Garamendi’s wife didn’t like the mere creature’s presence, even if it was dead, in her own house. Not only because her husband spent many hours studying it, or even because of the many visits by journalists and curious people alike, but because of a series of unfortunate events that happened on her family since they hosted the Garadiávolo.

Eventually, there was an explosion on their house and the second preserved specimen was also lost, this time reduced to ashes.

So, what the hell are the Garadiávolos?

They could be just crude plastic or rubber models, along with unbelievable and very bad stories — including CIA agents and ever-vanishing evidence. But the case is more interesting than that because the animals are real.

It’s only that they are not actually “Garadiávolos”, aliens or dimensional beings, or freaks of the nature.

Mexican researcher Luis Ruiz Noguez points out that Garadiávolos are just common flat fishes, like skates, rays, batfishes, etc., which are cut and dried to end up with this bizarre humanoid appearance.

The thing is that the lower part of those fishes do look like a face, but what we think are the evil eyes are actually the nostrils. The real eyes are on the other side.

A common Ray. The nostrils look like eyes, and this one has a sympathetic face.

They can be huge, funny thing that I never saw any giant Garadiávolo. Lucky for the fishes those hoaxers do not feel like creating such a huge monster.

Cut some parts of the fish to create arms and legs, add some chemicals to preserve it, and you have a nice Garadiávolo.

From the display “Skates, Rays and Jenny Hanivers” (link)

This cottage industry was not created by Alfredo Garamendi. In fact, it’s probable he didn’t create the ones he showed: many fishers create these Garadiávolos to sell them to tourists.

They are periodically promoted as unexplained alien beings, as people soon forget the last timie they were promoted and then explained. The Pravda recently promoted it again as something extraterrestrial, along with a video.

Too bad the internet also has a video of a skate:

There is an ancient name for creatures like the “Garadiávolo”. It’s not known exactly where it came from, thogh it may be related to the French name for Antwerp — Anvers — where these chimera were sold centuries ago. Known as Jenny Hanivers, dragons and basilisks were very popular items on the 16th and 17th centuries, created on Eastern countries just like the Garadiávolos are created today: from flat fishes.

Around 1580, French Ambroise Paré wrote on Des Monstres about a flying fish or sea eagle, considered today as a Jenny Haniver, curiously very similar to Garamendi’s Garadiávolo.

Jenny Haniver drawn by Ambroise Paré on the 16th century (link)

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