Extraordinary claims. Ordinary investigations.

“Presenting factual, plausible and sometimes near impossible prodigious, curious and eccentric human beings who stands as examples of the sheer variety of humankind”. It’s The Human Marvels website.

Shown above, Dutch Fakir Mirin Dajo. In 1947, at the Corso Theatre in Zurich, he allowed an assistant to plunge a fencing foil right through his body. The foil appeared to have pierced several vital organs and yet, the fakir remained relatively unharmed. Needless to say, people were shocked, amazed and terrified by what they saw.

The doctors could find no evidence of trickery but many still refused to believe what they saw. Mirin Dajo agreed to an x-ray with the foil in place. The resulting image confirmed the legitimacy of his abilities.

It is important to note that his unique skill may have resulted in his demise on May 26, 1948. An autopsy revealed that Dajo died of an aortic rupture.

Everyone has an underdeveloped gift to levitate through the amazing yogic flying. According to Wikipedia:

“While sitting cross-legged or in a “lotus” position, Yogic Flyers hop about on springy mats. The TM organization says this is the first of three stages of Yogic Flying called “the perfection of leaping like a frog”. The organization emphasizes that only the first stage of Yogic Flying has been shown … Proponents of Yogic Flying claim that world peace and many other social and environmental benefits can be generated by having at least seven thousand yogic flyers around the world hopping at the same time.”

Shoko Asahara, leader of the Japanese Aum cult, allegedly gained notoriety showing his gift.

From Wikipedia: Oliver was a performing chimp who was once promoted as a missing link, or a “Humanzee” (a human-chimp hybrid). However, despite his somewhat unusual appearance and behavior, Oliver is, genetically speaking, a normal chimpanzee. Anthropologist David J. Daegling (in Carroll 2005) writes:

“‘Oliver’ is a habitually bipedal ape that has captured the imagination of both laypeople and scientists. He has been touted as a relict australopithecine, a bigfoot, or even the result of a clandestine human-chimp hybridization experiment. After years of lively debate, Oliver’s DNA was sampled to settle the issue and perhaps provide us with a breathing version of the missing link. The results are in … and, alas, Oliver is just a standard-issue chimpanzee with a penchant for walking.”

Watch above the first part of a documentary on the subject. The rest can be seen on haha.nu: Oliver the Chimp.

Excerpts from Stan Deyo’s “UFOs Are Here!” (1977), a very interesting documentary for the many interviews with famous figures exactly thirty years ago, from Spielberg — who was about to release Close Encounters — to Hynek and Valleé. On the clip above, a short commentary by Kenneth Arnold himself, plus Ray Palmer on the Shaver Mystery.

For more on the influence of Palmer and the Shaver Mystery on the origins of ufology, check John Keel’s 1986 article on Whole Earth Review, The Man Who Invented Flying Saucers.

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.