The Chilean Army and the Chupacabra

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The military is widely regarded as a national defense force whose purpose is to prevent, prepare for, and win wars.

But there are many cases where a nation-standing military force might be used for a variety of other much-needed duties.

Things like responding to natural disasters, providing humanitarian and logistical aid, you get the idea.

But there have been some instances in which armed troops have been called to respond to less conventional issues, like animal control.

In one notable incident in 1932, a detachment from the Australian Army was tasked with tracking down and annihilating a pack of over 20,000 emus that were rampaging through the farmlands of Western Australia.

Ironically, it was the birds who won, which dealt a massive blow to the egos of all soldiers involved.

But while this particular incident in the 1930s is easy to laugh about, animals can be dangerous.

Especially those animals that are reclusive, unpredictable, and widely believed to not even exist.

Taking place in the year 2000, there is a very bizarre story about something that happened in the city of Calama, Chile.

Its citizens, along with those of dozens of other small towns and villages across the entire country, found themselves living in fear of some kind of vicious predator.

First, it started attacking their livestock, and then it started attacking people.

Things got so bad, the Chilean army was called in.

But the soldiers that were sent out to look for this animal had no idea what they were even looking for.

The hundreds of eyewitness accounts were never really consistent about what it looked like.

In spite of all the confusion caused by the varying descriptions, there was one thing the soldiers knew was certain.

The creature, whatever it was, had an insatiable taste for blood.

This is the very bizarre story of when the Chilean army captured a chupacabra.

I'm Luke Lamana,

and this is Wartime Stories.

No, no, if it were dogs, it would be a lot messier.

Lots of blood and bites.

I'm not seeing any of that.

Might have just died.

How was she before you went to bed last night?

Does she seem sick to you?

No, no, she was the same as always.

I'm sorry, Papa.

I must not have noticed something.

Hold on.

What's this on her neck?

Tris?

Three holes?

It looks like something got its teeth into her.

But in the shape of a triangle?

What does teeth like that?

I really don't know.

As with many cryptids, considering that most people argue that they are not real creatures and just folklore or made-up encounter stories, It's difficult to determine exactly where stories of the chupacabra first originated in South America.

Although it wasn't initially called by the name Chupacabra, some people believe that the the creature first made an appearance in 1975, alongside a series of bizarre animal killings.

The story goes that one morning in February of that year, residents of the small Puerto Rican town of Mocha woke up to find that their livestock had been killed.

Across several of the local farms, 15 cows, three goats, two geese, and a pig were all found dead.

What mystified the people was that the animals were still secured in their pens where the farmers had locked them the night before.

Still more bizarre, none of the animals had been torn open and eaten, as would be expected from an attack by the usual predators.

The bodies were completely intact.

The only thing missing was all of their blood.

The carcasses had somehow been completely drained of it.

On closer inspection, the farmers saw that each of the dead animals had similar wounds on either their necks or chests, dried and crusted blood around three circular puncture marks.

While attacks on livestock by wild dogs weren't unheard of, as news of these strange killings started spreading around town, it was apparent to everyone that whatever killed these animals was no ordinary predator.

As if this wasn't unnerving enough, this was only the first of many more attacks.

Again and again during the rest of February and into March, some unknown thing would slip out of the surrounding jungles, drink the blood of multiple animals, and then disappear.

By the middle of March, around 90 animals had been killed in and around Mocha.

The locals were now on the brink of hysterics, and word of the bizarre events had started spreading beyond the small town.

Over the following months, the attacks apparently continued to happen, and the stories continued to spread.

On July 31st, the El Visero newspaper ran a story entitled, Vampiro de Mocha, Ataca Nuevamente.

or The Vampire of Mocha Strikes Again.

As might be expected, most readers considered the story to be ridiculous.

Clearly, the rural farm folk were just letting their superstitions run wild, and the Elvisero newspaper needed to fire its editor.

It didn't help to convince anyone when the story made it clear that no one had actually even provided a description of this supposed vampire.

How could they be sure it wasn't just some kind of common predator, like wild dogs, or even just a big hoax?

While a few more papers did end up picking up the story, the Mocha incident was largely overlooked by most media outlets, with the majority of Puerto Puerto Ricans giving the remote village of Mocha and its predicament no serious amount of consideration, let alone sympathy.

Eventually, the attacks did stop, and over time the townsfolk stopped talking about it.

Life returned to normal, and the incident dwindled down into nothing more than a local legend.

Children born in the late 70s and early 80s would maybe hear about it and take it as a joke.

Nothing more than a boogeyman story that their parents had just made up to scare them into staying out of the deep jungles or just just making sure they made it home before dark.

That is, until the mid-90s, about 20 years later, when the creature started attacking again.

This time, the killings did not go unnoticed.

In fact, the strange and elusive creature and its terrifying reputation was now launched into the international spotlight.

In 1995, Puerto Rico once again experienced a string of strange animal killings.

This time, however, whatever was responsible seemed far more determined and aggressive than whatever had been killing their livestock 20 years earlier.

In a single night, a staggering 150 farm animals and even pets were killed in the town of Canovanas, less than 100 miles to the east from the town of Mocha.

Like the Mocha killings, all of these animals were drained of blood, and all of them showed the three telltale puncture marks in the shape of an inverted triangle found on either their necks or their chest.

But unlike the Mocha killings in 1975, which took place in a much more rural area, now the killings were happening very close to the island's capital city of San Juan.

So the attacks quickly became the center of a media frenzy.

It seemed like every major media outlet in the country was now running the story alongside photos of the blood-drained animals.

The sensational headlines then began making waves throughout South and Central America, eventually even being picked up by both U.S.

and European news publications.

A variety of theories began to circulate about what, or possibly even who, could be responsible.

For example, some were suggesting that the grizzly deaths were clearly ritualistic and must be the work of a satanic cult.

However, as the attacks continued to happen night after night, Witness reports started pouring in.

Maybe it was just all the media attention that the story was getting.

But unlike the previous attacks from the 1970s, people, lots of people, were coming forward claiming to have seen what was doing it.

The problem was, if what they were saying was true, then Puerto Rico was dealing with a complete unknown, an undocumented predator never before heard of on the island.

At the time, some commentators stuck to the creature's original label as being called a vampire.

But a well-known Puerto Rican comedian, Silverio Perez, happened to come up with a nickname that just stuck.

He forever solidified the creature's place in cryptid lore when he branded it the Chupacabra,

translated from Spanish as goatsucker.

Because of all the varied details provided in the hundreds of reported chupacabra sightings during the year 1995, it's difficult to accurately describe the thing.

However, there are at least some aspects of all the descriptions given that appear consistent.

The chupacabra is often described as a bipedal creature, standing on its hind legs at around four to five feet tall.

The legs appear to be similar to those seen on a kangaroo.

The creature is generally described as hairless, or at best having thin patches of fur covering what appears to be leathery brown skin or even scales, like that of a reptile.

Like some reptiles, the chupacabra is often depicted as having a row of protruding spines running down the ridge of its back, and at least in some accounts, a lizard-like tail.

In spite of all these strange features, one of the most striking is said to be the creature's eyes.

Having a distinctly alien quality about them, they are often described as large and oval-shaped.

with witnesses claiming that they glow either red or bright yellow in the surrounding darkness.

Its eyes would have to have some level of night vision as the chupacabra is clearly nocturnal, doing most if not all of its hunting exclusively at night.

Its kangaroo-like legs are said to be very powerful because the creature has been seen covering large distances in a single jump.

It can also move with incredible speed while crawling on all fours.

Even more shocking, it can apparently ambush its prey from above using a pair of bat-like wings.

It is also described as having a set of prominent fangs.

All of the animals killed by the chupacabra were found completely drained of blood, but without any other markings on them.

So in order to incapacitate its prey, it's presumed that the chupacabra is either venomous or has enough strength to overpower even large animals, before then sinking its razor-sharp fangs into their veins.

By the end of 1995, it's believed that the chupacabra was responsible for more than a thousand reported animal deaths.

While some might speculate that increasing changes in its natural environment eventually just drove it into Puerto Rican settlements, evidently the creature is not just native to the island of Puerto Rico.

By the end of the decade, the chupacabra had become something of a paranormal and cultural phenomenon throughout Latin America, similar to that of the Sasquatch in North America.

It's hard to say whether this is because all of the international media coverage got spun spun out into various folklores, or simply because people in neighboring countries stopped overlooking their own sightings and strange killings, and were now associating these with the popularized name of the chupacabra.

Whatever the case, by the end of the decade, reports of chupacabra attacks had been popping up from South America through Central America all the way to the southern United States.

While some of these reports are more than likely the result of overactive imaginations or opportunists looking to get in on on the chupacabra craze.

There are many more people living across Latin America that would say that chupacabra was and still is a very real and very dangerous threat.

Case in point, what happened in Chile in the year 2000 when the military was involved?

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Whoever decided what the borders of Chile would be on the map, clearly they wanted all of the beaches.

The nation is large, but very long and narrow, stretching down along the lush, mountainous western coastline of South America.

Unlike many other countries in the 90s, most of whom had long been freed from the bonds of colonialism and dictatorship, even as everyone else was either celebrating the year 2000 or preparing for Y2K, the nation of Chile was still getting used to its new freedom.

Various political reforms over the previous century had ended in 1973 with the installation of a brutal military regime.

Chile had then endured nearly 20 years of tyrannical rule at the hands of a leader named Augusto Pinochet.

Thousands were killed, with many more being tortured or exiled.

The Chilean people then finally succeeded in ousting the dictator in 1990, once again paving the way for a democratic government.

Still, after living nearly two decades under Pinochet's iron fist, the fear, paranoia, and violence perpetrated by the government under the former military regime weren't easy to forget.

The year 2000 was seen as a year of hope, with many Chileans looking forward to a new millennium, one defined by national healing, freedom, democracy, and economic prosperity.

But while their political fears were subsiding, A new and very unexpected kind of terror was about to be met in the first few months of the new year.

The Chupacabra.

According to those who lived through the ordeal, the trouble first began on the night of April 12th.

Oddly enough, it had nothing to do with dead farm animals, at least not at first.

What happened on April 12th took place just outside the small town of Tucopel, nestled in the heart of Chile's central Biobio region.

Residents of the town reported seeing strange lights moving across the sky over the nearby countryside.

The eyewitnesses said the cluster of lights quietly came down out of the clouds, like an airplane when it lands, before then disappearing from sight beyond the trees.

Curious, the townsfolk then went out the next morning to see if something had crashed.

All they found was a large patch of dried brambles, a type of plant known to grow various berries, that had clearly been flattened.

but it was surrounded on all sides by vegetation that hadn't been touched.

It looked as if something had landed right on top of the brambles and then flown off.

Clearly, it was not an airplane, and without making any noise, combined with the dense jungle, it hardly seemed possible that it was some kind of helicopter.

Disturbed by the strange event, residents both within the town and those on the small farming homesteads dotting the outskirts were unsure of what to make of the strange lights and the crushed brambles.

But then, a few weeks later, things got even stranger and now terrifying.

Come on, Nijos.

It is time to go home.

You boys are gonna get your food

and I am gonna go lay down because

I am tired.

Hey, Julio, what the hell is this?

You said all the cattle were rounded up, and I come out to find a bull running around the pasture.

Julio

leave it to the old man to close up shop.

Damn kid can't tell his ass from his elbow.

Hey, damned bull,

get over here.

You're really gonna make an old man walk out there, huh?

All right, I...

What the hell is that?

It was around 8 p.m.

on Saturday, April 29th.

Jose Ishmael Pino looked weathered.

Certainly, being 59, it was partially his age catching up to him.

But it had also been a very long and tiring day.

He was in the process of closing up shop before his shift ended on the Esperance Ranch near Tucapel.

By this point in the night, Jose was all alone.

Most, if not all, of his fellow workers had already clocked out, leaving him to do the final checks around the barn before calling in a night.

Accompanied by two of the ranch's resident guard dogs, satisfied that everything was locked up tight, Jose moved towards the entrance of the barn to leave.

But just as he reached the open doors, which faced out towards the pasture, he saw something that irked him.

The other workers had assured him that all of the livestock had been rounded up and secured for the night.

But now looking out over the pasture, Jose saw that one of the bulls was still out, clearly having a grand old time, running around the open field.

Jose sighed, so much for getting off work on time.

Starting to walk towards the bull, he cursed and called out to it, hoping it would trot over and save him the trouble of walking all the way across the pasture to get it.

The animals all knew Jose and usually did listen to him.

When he called out, the bull stopped in the middle of the field and then turned its head to look at him.

And that's when the hairs on Jose's neck stood up.

That wasn't a bull.

In fact, now that his eyes had adjusted to the darkness outside, Jose couldn't really make out what it was.

He could at least tell that it was unlike anything he had ever seen.

In a later interview with Jose Trainer, the then editor of the online magazine UFO Roundup, Jose described his encounter with what he later decided must have been a chupacabra.

There was a large bull running wild.

I was walking along when I saw something and I thought that was it.

Hey, damned bull.

I shouted and then I saw that it wasn't.

It hardly moved.

It just stood there, looking at me.

It stood about 1.5 meters tall like a big monkey with long clawed arms enormous fangs protruding from its mouth as well as a pair of wings

i was so scared i i turned and ran for the i ran back for the hounds i set them loose and let them chase after this i call it the birdo one of the dogs came back with a a blood-stained neck

Having been chased off the Esperance ranch by the dogs, the Chupacabra evidently wound up hunting elsewhere.

At dawn, four sheep and one cow were found dead across two different farms.

As with all the previous incidents, what shocked the locals was to hear the farmers saying that, rather than being torn apart by something like a puma or a pack of wild dogs, each of the animals was entirely intact, but drained of all of its blood, with unusual punctures on their necks.

Combined with the story of the ranch hand Jose's sighting of a strange animal, the word about the livestock deaths spread like wildfire over Tucapel and its surrounding communities.

Worrying about their own safety in the panic, many locals took measures to defend themselves.

Jose's employer, Jorge Venegas, the owner of the 75-acre Esperance ranch, began letting his employees leave work early, ensuring they all got home safely before nightfall.

We don't know what we're dealing with here.

I'm not so concerned about the attacks on the animals, but I have two children, 12 years old and 15 years old, and I'm not going to let anything happen to them.

In fact, right now, I'm going to get a floodlight to see at night in case something weird shows up.

Jorge had been one of the witnesses of the strange flying lights in the sky a few weeks earlier.

The combination of strange events now meant that he would be sleeping with one eye open and a loaded shotgun next to his bed.

For outsiders, the chupacabra might seem like nothing but a ludicrous myth, a sort of South American boogeyman or Bigfoot legend.

But to the magazine editor Joseph Traynor, who interviewed these men, it was clear that the threat posed by these creatures was taken very, very seriously in communities like Tucapel.

At least Jorge Venegas said as much during his interview with Traynor, all while holding the same shotgun he had started to carry with him everywhere he went went following these attacks.

In spite of the growing widespread panic about a chupacabra, or even multiple chupacabras, stalking through the jungles, At least some of the Tucapel residents tried to argue for a more likely culprit.

After all, when interviewed by the Chilean newspaper Chronica, an anonymous manager of the Raul Perez farm said that the region did have a recurring problem with packs of wild dogs.

There was one recorded incident from seven years earlier when wild dogs managed to kill some 70 sheep in a single night.

But a pack of wild dogs would likely have ripped the animals apart, not simply drained their blood.

and packs of dogs would likely have been seen and reported.

Not to mention that Jose Pino's encounter on the ranch, followed by several attacks, was just one in a wave of similar incidents that had started happening all over Chile.

Far to the north, there had also been an incident in the city of Calama.

One night in mid-April, only a few days after the strange lights descended from the skies over Tucapel, a young man was biking home along an empty street in Calama.

As he passed by the local lions club, he said that a strange groaning sound drew his attention to a patch of tall grass by the wall of the building, about 50 meters away from from him.

And that's when he saw a creature unlike anything he'd ever seen.

He said its eyes were glowing intensely bright in the dark.

And then looking down, he saw there was a corpse of a dog at its feet.

The young man then stopped and nearly fell off his bike and remained completely still, unsure of what to do.

But the chupacabra moved first.

It picked up the dog in what looked like clawed hands before sprinting toward him.

The man said he never had a chance to react.

It was way too fast.

In a moment, the creature had cleared the 50-meter distance between them, reaching to about 10 meters off to his side, before then veering away and disappearing into the night with the dog.

His legs now trembling, heart racing, he said he then hopped back on his bike and started pedaling as hard as he could and didn't stop until he got home.

Most people who heard about the young man's encounter by the Lion Club were terrified, but not everyone in Kalama was scared by the the rumors.

A few days afterward, a group of eight teenagers who apparently had nothing better to do set out into the countryside late at night, excited at the prospect of encountering this so-called blood-sucking chupacabra.

It doesn't seem like they actually thought they would find it, but much to their horror, apparently they did.

It was sometime early in the morning of April 24th.

The teenagers were exploring along the banks of the river Loa when they saw something they later described as a short, bipedal creature covered in a thin layer of hair.

When the creature saw them, it fled.

They were startled when it took one leap, covered an incredible distance in the air, and then darted into a nearby cave.

Now realizing that this idea had been very stupid, the frightened teenagers turned around and booked it back to town.

And now the added testimony of eight teenagers having encountered a real chupacabra further fanned the flames of Kalama's growing paranoia.

More reports of the chubacabra started coming in.

A few nights after the teenagers' encounter, several locals, residents living atop a nearby hill, claimed to have seen a reptilian-looking creature scurrying up the sheer face of a distant cliff.

They said that not only could it move very quickly, but it clearly had two bat-like wings.

When it finally reached the summit of the cliff, they said it began making a series of growls and screams that echoed over the darkened countryside.

As more and more chupacabra sightings and reports of dead livestock started popping up throughout the country, with the locals becoming more and more panicked, It didn't take long for local and even federal law enforcement agencies to get swept up in the whole ordeal.

On May 2, 2000, several carabineros, members of the Chilean National Police, were called to a farm outside the town of Santa Fe.

According to a clearly very shaken farmer, eight of his sheep had been attacked and left half-dead, their weakened bodies almost entirely drained of blood.

After inspecting them, with no way of helping them, the surviving sheep were put down by the police officers themselves.

The investigating officers also noticed something.

There were a lot of other animals on the farm, but only these sheep had been killed, and they all had one thing in common.

All of them were female, and they were all heavily pregnant.

The police thought the whole incident didn't make much sense, but it did seem as if whatever had done this had targeted these sheep in particular.

While the farmer never made mention of Chupacabra in his account, the local rumor mill picked up the slack.

Even the police weren't entirely convinced that they were dealing with a common predator.

In his interview with Joseph Traynor, Lieutenant Walter Koch of of the National Police weighed in on what could be responsible for the sheep killings.

However, he seemed equally as baffled as everyone else.

No,

there were no reports about it.

Chupacabra or whatever.

We don't even have pumas in this sector.

And only in the pre-Cordillera ranges will you find foxes.

The only predators of the type we've had are Siberian dogs which have feasted on some chickens.

A local schoolteacher in Calama, Carlos Villalobos, was also interviewed and offered his opinion on the chupacapers' origins, an opinion which was shared by many of his fellow Chileans.

I think it's linked to some unknown life form, possibly alien in origin,

but the authorities take the position of not acknowledging it.

And they are probably very justified since a collective panic situation could be unleashed.

By the first week of May, while many thousands of people all over the country of Chile were on edge in the wake of all these supposed chupacabra attacks, there was at least one small comfort worth acknowledging.

The chupacabra, despite its strength, speed, and proficiency in nighttime hunting, seemed to go to great lengths to avoid human contact.

Out of all the hundreds of reported attacks, some taking place even in major cities like Concepcion, all of them had been on either farm animals or pets.

The creature, despite its terrifying appearance, appeared to have little interest in attacking humans or drinking their blood.

However, on the night of May 7th, that changed.

Around 11 p.m.

on Sunday night, the small village of Santa Elena de Codao was awoken by the sounds of terrified screams.

Rushing out of their homes, the villagers followed the screaming and quickly found Alejandro Canales panic-stricken and badly bleeding from what appeared to be claw marks all over his body.

After he had finally calmed down, the villagers asked Alejandro what had happened.

Whatever they were expecting him to tell them, it wasn't this.

According to Alejandro, he had just called it a night after inspecting his rabbit enclosures, taking a familiar shortcut through an unlit alleyway.

As he was making his way down the gap between the two buildings, he felt a heavy weight slam into him, like something had fallen on him from overhead, followed by an intense pain as some kind of creature latched onto his back and started tearing at him with its claws.

Thrashing around in an attempt to shake the thing off, it finally let go of him.

Alejandro grabbed his flashlight and swung it around, and caught in the beam of light was a short, ape-like creature with large, pointed fangs, black claws, piercing gold eyes, and a pair of leathery wings folded against its back.

Despite his shock at seeing such a horrible thing, Alejandro knew exactly what he was looking at, and that's when he started screaming.

At this, the chupacabra took off into the darkness.

Up until that point, as far as anyone knew, the chupacabra hadn't attacked any human beings.

So now, among all of the other encounters reported in Latin America, Alejandro's terrifying account was one that now painted the chupacabra as a threat to to humans.

This particular attack seemed to finally cause a shift in the local authorities' attitude towards Chile's ongoing chupacabra problem.

And apparently, the Chilean army had already become involved.

Here is what people were saying.

According to reports obtained by Marcial Campos Maza, a reporter for Chile's EFE News Service, A platoon of Chilean soldiers had set out into the desert north of the city, making their way through the night towards an abandoned mine, the Radomiro Tomic mine.

It was in the mine where they are reported to have encountered three chupacabras.

The soldiers apparently opened fire on the creatures, or the creatures attacked the soldiers and then they opened fire, or vice versa.

Whatever happened in that mine, the report ultimately said that one of the Chilean soldiers was killed.

Whether wounded by gunfire or somehow subdued, the three chupacabra were ultimately captured in the altercation.

A male, female, and apparently a juvenile.

Considering the attacks on farm animals and now people were widely reported, responding to an ongoing threat like this is entirely warranted by the military.

But whether these stories were just rumors or not, the Chilean military has never acknowledged the incident one way or another.

People have tried investigating this, but the identity of the man who apparently died and the alleged operation itself has never been verified.

Whatever the army's reasons might have been for never acknowledging whether the event actually happened or didn't happen, this incident involving Chilean soldiers and chupacabras at the abandoned mine doesn't appear to be the only armed confrontation between them.

There's another coinciding story that two days later, on the night of May 10th, A soldier stationed on the city's outskirts reported seeing a short, hairy creature with a distinct hunched back.

According to him, this thing was capable of leaping incredible distances and could temporarily suspend itself in mid-air through the use of wings.

When it was spotted, the creature took off into the desert.

The soldier then ran to tell his commanding officer about it, who, possibly hoping to finally catch one of these damn things he'd been hearing about in the news, immediately assembled a patrol to go after it.

But as the soldiers then made their way out into the barren countryside to look for it, the story goes that they found something far beyond the usual standards standards of bazaar when it comes to chupacabra sightings.

Eggs.

Dug into the sand was a pit filled with what soldiers could only describe as strange eggs that they couldn't identify as belonging to any reptile or bird native to the desert.

Not that any of them were biologists, but they knew enough to say that these eggs were highly unnatural.

They opted to take the eggs back with them.

Meanwhile, a different patrol was reported to have encountered the creatures that they were looking for, a group of chupacabras.

They apparently killed two and captured a third.

Having now heard rumors about the army finding eggs and with the other one about an encounter with a chupacabra juvenile, the rumors in Kalama talking about chupacabra shifted to breeding.

People couldn't help but wonder if all the many reports of attacks around the country meant that these things could reproduce at an incredibly fast rate.

The whole thing is really very bizarre, considering all of these events are purported to have actually happened, as evidenced by the witness testimonies and the media reports.

And the rabbit hole only goes deeper.

Around this time, it seemed that the Chilean Army was not the only government organization taking an interest in the chupacabra.

It was also on NASA's radar.

In the days following the alleged killing and capture of several chupacabras and their supposed eggs, two Boeing 767 cargo planes arrived at Santiago's Arturo Marino Benitez airport from the United States.

Patricio Borlón Rojas, then a writer for Paradima Chile magazine, claimed that these planes were transporting containers clearly marked as belonging to NASA.

After landing briefly in Santiago, the planes then departed for Calama.

Around this same time, the exact day being reported as May 12th, Calama locals were baffled by the sudden closure of the nearby El Loa International Airport.

When they heard that the closure was due to the arrival of a single unmarked helicopter, of course, more rumors started circulating.

Most people, both within Calama and all over Chile who heard about it, now speculated that the chupacabras were not merely some undocumented species of wild animal, at least not any natural animal.

If NASA was involved, these creatures might be the byproduct of some experiment gone wrong.

Dagoberto Corante was not a journalist, but a well-known and respected architect in Calama at the time.

And for speculative minds like him, it was clear that now that their experiment had gone rogue and several of the creatures had either been killed or captured by a foreign military, high-ranking members of the American Space Agency had been sent to intervene, possibly even to reclaim the creatures.

Tagoberto was interviewed by journalist Marcial Campos Maza.

It was said that the captured animal

was kept at the regiment's barracks until NASA experts arrived to take it away.

On the day that the event transpired,

the military even closed the airport for several hours to enable

the landing of a helicopter conveying American scientists,

although no one

is quite sure why they had to close down an airport in order for a helicopter to function.

Those are able to land anywhere and the fact has given rise to much speculation.

Reading over Marcia Campos Maz's report, it is worth noting that there are some discrepancies in his testimony about what happened when compared to the more commonly accepted course of events.

What stands out most is that he refers to only a single creature as having been captured, making no mention of the eggs or of other specimens, both alive or dead, as mentioned in other reports.

If any of this is true, and there does at least seem to be something to all the strange animal and human attacks, by this point any truth in the overall story was being muddied up by all of the secrecy and countless theories as the Chilean people were trying to figure out what the hell was going on.

Rumors and stories were piling on top of each other, which makes it hard to know what was actually happening.

But in spite of all the contradiction, what is universally agreed on between all the different witness testimonies and reports is that NASA showed up in Chile and took charge of the situation, despite having no apparent official authority on Chilean soil.

So you can't blame people for wondering, what was NASA doing in Chile when all of these rampant tropacabra sightings, attacks, and strange rumors of military altercations with them were happening.

As you can imagine, with such an incredible story to untangle, there are of course many, many unverified conspiracies surrounding NASA and its direct or indirect involvement with the Chupacabra.

Namely, NASA is blamed for introducing the Chupacabra into South America.

People have held on to the idea that the chupacabra is an escaped product of a bioengineering weapons program, or that maybe it was even intentionally introduced into South America as a part of the experiment.

Then there's the idea that, because it's NASA, it must be the horrifying genetic offspring of animal and extraterrestrial DNA being combined.

the alien DNA having been taken from bodies recovered from crashed spacecraft.

Even NASA officials seem to be genuinely surprised by some of the wild accusations directed at them.

And they have actually been asked about this, believe it or not.

In an open conversation with Joseph Traynor, NASA spokesman Brian Welch spoke about chupacabras with a mix of amusement and annoyance.

In his mind, if these conspiracy theorists were so convinced that NASA was involved, well, why are they not hounding NASA for answers instead of just spreading rumors?

Before this, it was the face on Mars and before that it was modifying the weather.

Before that we were

beaming radiation from satellites to make people impotent.

Before that they were saying we faked the moon landing and if you were persuaded to believe that sort of thing

you'd blame you know the

last person you would go to for confirmation of it.

I mean people who believe this sort of thing certainly aren't beating down the door to ask us about it.

While there is of course no verifiable proof linking NASA or any other government agencies to the chupacabra, the conspiracy theorist in all of us has to think, even if it was true, they would never tell us.

Whatever the real story behind the chupacabra is, whether a complete media hoax spurred on by wild imaginations and false reports, demons running amok, or some kind of literal alien invasion.

By the end of May 2000, the seven-week-long wave of chupacabra attacks began to dissipate.

Most of us would have never heard about these events at the time, or certainly now.

And eventually, life for the residents of the various cities in Chile where the attacks happened returned to normal.

In the years since, many have come forward with possible explanations for the chupacabra phenomenon, pointing out that mass hysteria driven by superstition and folklore has a way of manipulating the truth.

The point being that many chupacabra sightings, as well as other cryptid encounters, are often chalked up to being a case of mistaken identity, combined with a person's strong beliefs in local folklore.

Packs of wild dogs, foxes, or coyotes that are found in most regions of Chile are still the most common go-to answer for anyone offering a rational explanation for the chupacabra.

If one or more of these dogs were to be affected by mange, a skin disease causing the afflicted animal to lose most of its fur, its hairless appearance in the dead of night could pass for the leathery-skinned chupacabra.

While some of these cases are bound to be the misidentification of dogs, coyotes, pumas, or any of the other predators native to places like Puerto Rico, Chile, and the rest of Latin America, we can at least acknowledge that none of those animals really look or act like the creatures described in chupacabra encounters.

Even with severe mange, mange, none of those animals could account for the large glowing eyes, bipedal posture, kangaroo legs, spines, wings, and blood-sucking appetite.

As with these and many other tales of the strange and unexplained, the story of the chupacabra ends with a question mark.

It is uncanny, though, isn't it?

That when it comes to cryptids, the military always seems to wind up becoming involved.

Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke Lamana.

Executive produced by Mr.

Bollin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt.

Written by Jake Howard and myself.

Audio editing and sound design by me, Luke Lamana, and Alex Carpenter.

Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham.

Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.

Mixed and mastered by Brendan Kane.

Production supervision by Jeremy Bone.

Production coordination by Avery Siegel.

Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden.

Artwork by Jessica Cloxton Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picada.

If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com.

Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.