Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster rank as the top two best-known monsters in the world, but since its 1995 debut, El Chupacabra has made a Justin Bieber-like ascension to No. 3 on the charts. The relative newcomer to the monster world is the go-to culprit for weird livestock deaths and creates a massive media stir whenever it's "sighted." It even has a fan club on Facebook.
That could all end, now that Benjamin Radford, author of several books on monsters and paranormal phenomena, managing editor of the journal The Skeptical Inquirer and LiveScience columnist, has released what he says to be definitive proof that El Chupacabra is not real; it's not even a hoax, he said, but rather a leftover memory of a science- fiction film.
Stories of El Chupacabra first surfaced in March 1995 in Puerto Rico, Radford said, when dead, blood-drained goats began showing up (El Chupacabra translates to "goat sucker"). That August, a newspaper printed an eyewitness description of a bipedal creature, 4 to 5 feet tall with spikes down its back, long, thin arms and legs, and an alienlike oblong head with red or black eyes. That depiction became associated with El Chupacabra, and it reports of similar creatures began popping up throughout the Caribbean, in Latin America, Mexico and Florida.
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