Werewolves and Other
Cryptid Carnivores
The mammalian order Carnivora consists of some 280 known species, many of which are superbly adept at remaining hidden. Crafty and elusive, these animals stealthily stalk their prey, waiting for an opportune moment to pounce on their unsuspecting victims, often invoking a quick and silent death before vanishing into the surrounding brush. In the grand scheme of things, it’s really not that long ago that big cats, bears, dire wolves, hyenas, and a host of other apex predators hunted our human ancestors on a regular basis. Consequently, we have developed a healthy fear of these types of creatures and like to think that we’re intimately familiar with all of their forms. Surprisingly, once in a while we discover something entirely new.
As recently as 2006, scientists first confirmed the existence of a new species of sizable predator on the island of Borneo—the Sunda clouded leopard (Neofelis diardi). These fair-sized cats can weigh over fifty pounds but are rarely ever seen. The Bornean bay cat (Pardofelis badia) was photographed for the very first time in 2003, and a distinct, new subspecies of felid called a tigrina was found in the Brazilian grasslands during 2013. Earlier that year, a previously unknown carnivore named the olinguito was detected in the rainforests of Ecuador. Occasionally, American mountain lions (Puma concolor) are spotted in areas where they have been declared long extinct. Other unidentified predators could be out lurking in the shadows somewhere, waiting to strike.
La Bête du Gévaudan: A Famous French Werewolf
A blood-curdling howl pierces the dead of night as a full moon looms overhead. In the mist-shrouded forest, a sinister beast prowls, patiently anticipating its unwary mark wandering into its kill range. Suddenly and without warning, the menacing monster snarls and lunges, baring its razor sharp teeth and long claws—an agonized scream, then silence. This scenario may sound eerily reminiscent of a typical Hollywood thriller or perhaps even a gothic novella. But according to copious official archives, a minimum of sixty victims were devoured by something that was referred to as a bona fide werewolf two and a half centuries ago in rural southern France.
It was a turbulent time in France during the 1760s. Great political unrest and religious conflict abounded. Apart from the privileged minority or those in the favor of King Louis XV and the Roman Catholic Church, the vast majority of the citizenry was impoverished and persecuted. A series of brutally harsh winters added to the desperate conditions, and starvation was looming in the more remote regions. One such place was Gévaudan, a pastoral, mountainous region in the south of France. The greater part of the region’s inhabitants were simple farmers who were disenchanted by the high taxes imposed by the king and cut off from Paris, causing them to be vulnerable to attacks from Spain.
During the summer of 1764, the killings began. On June 30, a woman named Jeann Boultet was murdered near the town of Les Hubacs. A few days later, a fourteen-year-old girl was devoured at Habats, and just over a month after that, a fifteen-year-old girl was found dead near the village of Masmejean. By the end of August, the attacks became a regular occurrence. Most of the victims were young, generally girls or boys who were charged with tending to flocks of sheep or small herds of cattle in remote, wooded areas while the men worked the fields. The descriptions of the assailant (given by those who were fortunate enough to escape molestation) were consistent: it was an imposing, wolflike animal with a huge head and gaping muzzle, erect pointy ears, pronounced fangs, and an elongate tail with a tuft of fur on the end. It was said that the beast’s powerful body was covered in reddish fur, with a black stripe running down the length of its back. Its ferocity was unprecedented, as the creature regularly decapitated, disemboweled, or otherwise mutilated its human victims, yet it strangely avoided livestock.
As the body count mounted, so did the hysteria throughout France. The king responded by dispatching brigades of soldiers and professional wolf hunters to the region in order to slay the creature. The abusive soldiers only served to inflame the local citizenry’s festering disdain for the monarchy, while the hunters bagged a couple of exceptionally large wolves, which they blamed for the killings. But the attacks didn’t cease. Ultimately, the bloody reign of la Bête du Gévaudan lasted for almost three years.
Finally on June 19, 1767, a social outcast named Jean Chastel dispatched the monster, allegedly by firing a single silver bullet that had been blessed by a priest. Chastel claimed that he had been engaged in prayer just moments before and that the beast had wandered into a clearing right in front of him, as if God had answered. The animal’s remains were paraded through village streets for a couple of weeks, after which its smelly carcass was presented to King Louis, who insisted that the putrid cadaver be disposed of immediately. In recognition for slaying the creature, Chastel was handsomely rewarded and became a legitimate folk hero. But almost two and a half centuries later, the actual nature and identity of the Beast of Gévaudan remain a mystery. It is widely believed that its body was buried in an undisclosed location.
During the summer of 2008, I had the good fortune of traveling to France in order to revisit the case. It was all part of a two-hour television special titled The Real Wolfman, which was being produced for the History Channel. For the purpose of the program, I was paired with a police homicide investigator named George Deuchar. Many experts, including the late French cryptozoologist Jean-Jacques Barloy, felt that the killings attributed to the Beast of Gévaudan were, in retrospect, likely perpetrated by a human serial killer either disguised as a wolf or perhaps using a trained animal in order to do his bidding. Another theory holds that the monarchy took advantage of the mayhem incited by increasing wolf attacks and used it to instill a feeling of helplessness throughout the populace in order to maintain control. Deuchar and I were charged with exploring the various theories about the true nature of the beast.
The experience was remarkable, to say the least. In addition to visiting the Gévaudan region (now called Auvergne) and the precise locations of some of the attacks, we were led to the exact spot (by one of Jean Chastel’s descendents, no less) where the beast met its end. Patrick Soulier, curator of a local museum dedicated to the monster, granted us access to many of the original archives and death certificates from the period, and we also had an opportunity to observe France’s tiny remaining wolf population at a wildlife reserve.
In Paris I was able to confer with cryptozoologist and Beast of Gévaudan expert Jean-Jacques Barloy, and, most importantly, to meet with a taxidermist named Franz Julien at the National Museum of Natural History. Julien had apparently made a fascinating discovery over a decade earlier. In 1997, he had uncovered an old document that indicated that the Beast of Gévaudan’s remains were displayed at the Paris Zoo until 1819—and that zoologists concluded that they were those of a hyena!
While this notion may sound utterly fantastic (modern hyenas are native to Africa and Asia only, not Europe), there is an argument to be made for this possibility. The French have historically had a strong presence in Africa, and it was not unheard of for animal collectors of the eighteenth century to have such a creature in their menagerie. Who’s to say that a captive hyena couldn’t have escaped or been set loose into the French countryside? Ravenous and desperate, the animal conceivably might have attacked solitary humans on occasion, as African specimens are known to do. While hyenas actually belong to a completely distinct family, they do superficially resemble wolves and other canids. And they are seriously formidable predators, reaching weights of up to 150 pounds and possessing bone-crushing jaws. Hyenas can be found on the snowy slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro, so one could have potentially survived the harsh winters of France for a time. A species of enormous cave hyena (Crocuta spelaea) was in fact common in France around 10,000 years ago during the Ice Ace, though the probability of any of these surviving until the eighteenth century is remote. It would not have been the first time in history that an out-of-place animal achieved legendary status.
Like most cryptozoological enigmas, the mystery of the Beast of Gévaudan is a complex one, and the mass hysteria of the period no doubt compounded the issue. One of the world’s preeminent cryptozoologists, Dr. Karl P.N. Shuker (who holds a PhD in comparative physiology and runs the website ShukerNature), summed it up beautifully in an e-mail to me: “I think that this is a case of composite identity, involving several different inputs, including an unusually large wolf, rumors of an escaped hyena, and human killer(s).” Or perhaps a werewolf actually was terrorizing France over two centuries ago … if you believe in such things.
Nebraska Wolfman
Following my appearance on a television special, The Real Wolfman, I was contacted by a Nebraska resident named Brad who related the following to me:
I saw your show about the wolfman over in France. I have seen that creature on Interstate 83, while driving south in Nebraska. It came up on me on the highway. I was stopped by a law enforcement officer for about five minutes, and when I left the scene, I was going slow enough. It was on the other side of the freeway. I saw it coming toward me. Its eyes were yellow, and it was huge, and it was coming at me at a good pace. I was so startled that I floored my pedal to the metal and never looked back. It’s the honest-to-God truth!
Subsequent attempts to gather more details from Brad have been unsuccessful. But while Nebraska is practically the last place on Earth where we would expect to hear about werewolves trotting around, my good friend and colleague Linda Godfrey of Wisconsin has amassed a sizeable number of so-called Dog Man accounts from numerous locales around the United States. She has also written a handful of excellent books suggesting that something resembling both hominid and canid may indeed exist. The issue is whether or not this is a corporeal phenomenon involving biological specimens, or, rather, spectral manifestations of apparitions that are wholly supernatural.
Poland’s Wilkolak
Robert Tralins was a prolific author who penned over 200 books dealing with otherworldly topics. Many of the anomalies he claimed to have researched first-hand were featured as factual narratives on the popular television show Beyond Belief: Fact or Faked, which aired from 1997 until 2002. Additionally, Tralins once won a $750,000 libel lawsuit against the King of Egypt after he had been accused of making things up about the ruler, so the general consensus is that Tralins’s info was legitimate.
In his 1970 publication Supernatural Strangers, Tralins told the story of a Polish couple who claimed they were besieged by a wilkolak (werewolf) on their very own property during the evening of June 7, 1963. At that time, Josef and Sava Zbojno resided in the village of Wilczyn, which is situated in central Poland. Hearing their dogs acting up one full-moon night, the couple went out to investigate the matter. The pooches’ disposition quickly turned from aggressive barking to hiding and whimpering. That’s when Sava resolved to approach the enclosure and check on the dogs as her husband Josef illuminated the yard by opening the front door to their cottage.
Suddenly and without warning, there was a horrifying howl, just as a menacing beast with glowing eyes and razor-sharp fangs appeared. The grotesque monster seemed to be a huge wolf that was standing upright and cloaked in the tattered garments of a peasant. In a state of sheer panic at this point, Josef grabbed a wooden club and sprinted to his wife’s defense, smacking the apparition as hard as he could and happily causing it to retreat into the shadows. Regrettably, the husband’s action had been a moment too late, as the werewolf had managed to scratch Sava, leaving a deep gash. Despite their concern that they would not be taken seriously, the couple reported the incident to local police. According to Tralins, the Wilczyn Wilkolak had been seen on prior occasions, particularly when the moon was full. What is unknown is whether the creature still stalks the Polish countryside to this day.
O Lobisón: South America’s Werewolf
Over the past year, I’ve been in correspondence with a Brazilian researcher named Carlos Henrique Marquez. He informed me that South America is also home to its very own version of the werewolf, o Lobisón, and that he has personally interviewed several people who allege to have encountered these monsters. In its human form, this shape-shifter is reputed to display excessively yellow skin in addition to thick, calloused pads on its elbows and knees. One can supposedly identify one by the threads of victims’ shredded clothing imbedded between its teeth. An elderly witness named Jandira claims to have encountered a Lobisón some fifty years ago and still maintains a vivid recollection of the incident.
According to Marquez, the encounter occurred in a rural area of northeastern Brazil while Jandira was standing in the kitchen of her ranch house one bright, moonlit evening. Glancing out the window, she noticed a strange man strolling up beside her horse stable. As she watched inquisitively, the stranger entered the curral (corral) and fell to the ground, rolling around in a pile of equine scat. After about a half an hour, Jandira, who was understandably hesitant to leave the safety of her kitchen, watched in utter disbelief as a horrible, man-sized dog rose ominously from the very spot where the man had been rolling about. The most terrifying detail, though, was the fact that the canine apparition was standing comfortably upright on its hind legs, like a man would. Within moments, the monstrous being vanished from Jandira’s sight.
Another chilling and much more recent encounter stems from São Sepé, Rio Grande do Sul, and involves a twenty-year-old woman named Kelly Martins Becker. According to a filed police report, Becker claimed that she was scratched on the face and arms on January 28, 2009, by an animal that resembled a large dog but was walking exclusively on its hind legs. The victim’s injuries were confirmed during a subsequent medical examination while incredulous detectives pursued the possibility that her attacker was someone sporting a werewolf costume. Six months earlier, residents from the rural area of Tauá, Ceará, had described run-ins with a “half man, half wolf” that was fond of breaking into houses as well as stealing sheep. Law enforcement officers were at a loss to explain the reports and dismissed it as a case of costume-wearing hooligans.
A quick search on the Internet will produce several videos that purport to show some of these Lobisones lurking in the shadowy streets of South American villages at night. While most of these clips seem to reek of dubious fraud (i.e., people in costumes), it is worth restating that legends are frequently born from some tiny grain of truth. And while I’m not necessarily disposed to endorsing the possibility of supernatural monsters per se, there are two factors worth considering here: werewolf lore is global, dating back centuries, and South America is a continent that seems to present an inordinate amount of both vastly weird accounts and new animal discoveries.
Black Panthers
If the notion of real-life werewolves ravaging the countryside seems a little hard to digest, there exist accounts of a different type of mystery predator that may have some real merit. Throughout both the United Kingdom and the United States there has been a multitude of alleged encounters with very large, jet-black felids (i.e., “panthers,” which is a generic name for big cats) prowling along rural roadsides and eviscerating helpless livestock. The only problem is there are no known native feline species that adequately match the descriptions.
The largest plausible species of wildcat in the United Kingdom is the Eurasian lynx, a brown- or beige-colored animal that frequently displays spots and rarely reaches weights of over sixty pounds. Lynx are easily recognizable by their stubby tails, large feet, high hips, and trademark fur tufts sprouting from the apex of their pointy ears. Meanwhile, in North America the most sizable native cat is the so-called cougar or mountain lion (Puma concolor), which can occasionally grow to an impressive weight of some 230 pounds. Officially, cougars have been declared extinct in the eastern United States (except for a small population in southern Florida) but are fairly widespread throughout the rest of the Americas, and they are very nomadic and resilient animals. As recently as 2011, a rogue mountain lion was struck by a car in Milford, Connecticut. DNA tests revealed that the animal had wandered all the way from South Dakota, about 1,700 miles away. These mightily muscled cats always exhibit a tawny, tan, or light reddish-brown color. There has never been a confirmed instance of a melanistic (black) puma.
In fact, the only truly big cats that carry the gene that causes melanism are the leopard (Panthera pardus) of Asia and Africa, as well as a small percentage of jaguars (Panthera onca) found in South and Central America. So, ultimately, the claims of black panthers roaming Europe and North America are problematic.
Quite recently, a man named John wrote me the following letter, indicative of the many North American accounts:
I grew up in Augusta, Georgia. In the early 1960s we took a field trip to the forest ranger tower deep in the woods, probably twenty to twenty-five miles outside of Augusta. When we got there, there was a dead black panther/cougar on the ground that the forest ranger had killed that morning. I remember being upset that he had killed it for no reason. I don’t know if they still exist, but I’ve seen one dead five feet in front of me … I wish I could remember another person who was there. The troop leader and ranger are long deceased.
If only the pelt of this unique animal had been preserved, we might have been able to close the book on the black panther mystery long ago.
Carrabelle Cat
During the early part of 2012, I had an opportunity to travel to Florida’s panhandle in order to investigate sightings of a baffling black panther known locally as the Carrabelle Cat. The expedition was organized by my friend and fellow cryptozoologist Scott Marlowe, an academic and long-time pursuer of mysterious creatures throughout Florida. I extended an invitation to naturalist Lee Hales, with whom I have collaborated on countless other projects. Hales is a close acquaintance with extensive experience tracking and studying a variety of fauna throughout North America. Our party had in fact received an official request from the Carrabelle city council to investigate, a very rare endorsement of such an endeavor by a US government entity.
Hales and I joined Marlowe in Panama City, Florida, at an exotic cat sanctuary known as the Bear Creek Feline Center. Run by a colorful man named Jim Broaddus, the facility houses an impressive collection of species, including African servals, lynx, jaguarundis, a stout Colorado mountain lion, and even some Florida panthers. The plan was to familiarize ourselves with the appearance and behavior of pumas and jaguarundis specifically, as both have been suggested as potential explanations for the Carrabelle Cat. It’s been established that the accepted range of the puma is restricted to the southern portion of Florida, and jaguarundis (odd-looking, medium-sized, weasel-like cats with small craniums and long, bushy tails) are not officially native to the United States outside of extreme southern Texas. Experienced mystery cat researchers including Marlowe, Broaddus, and Chester Moore Jr. (a respected wildlife journalist) all feel that there could be a population of feral jaguarundis roaming the southeastern United States.
During our visit, Broaddus and his staff were extremely accommodating to say the least. Broaddus came across as a man who was exceptionally passionate about big cat conservation. He was even gracious enough to allow us to collect some puma droppings and urine samples to aid us in our investigation. We planned on using it as an enticement, hopefully luring our quarry out of hiding and into the open.
A meandering, two-hour drive east from Panama City along Florida’s Gulf Coast lies Carrabelle, a small town nestled in the appropriately named Tate’s Hell State Forest, which is composed of about 200,000 acres of highly foreboding wilderness area. It is from here that accounts of black panthers have been surfacing periodically, and one local hunter had supposedly even videotaped a mysterious, ebony feline that he felt was much larger than anything native to that area. We planned to re-create the scene from the footage on our trip and address its legitimacy. Upon our team’s arrival at a local diner, we met up with some of the town’s council members in order to discuss our expedition.
In the end, the better part of our excursion was impeded by a steady deluge of heavy rain and at one point it even felt as though our entire campsite might be washed out into the Gulf of Mexico. Any fleeting respites were spent driving and hiking the back roads and trails of Tate’s Hell State Forest while surveying the surrounding habitat, searching for spoor. On more than one occasion we stumbled upon what we identified as black bear (Ursus americanus floridanus) droppings, proving that there is at least one species of large carnivore present there, but we found no evidence of big cats in the area.
On the second to final day of our sojourn, the hunter who had shot the video of the mystery cat led us to the exact spot where he had filmed the animal. Using a full-sized cardboard black panther model that we had fabricated, Hales and I attempted to recreate the incident. Hales climbed into the tree where the hunter’s deer stand had been positioned at the time of the encounter, while I placed our model in the precise spot where the cat had been standing. Although the surrounding foliage had grown considerably in the two years since the footage had been shot, we were able to identify several large trees as landmarks. Hales took a series of photographs of our panther model for later comparison. Before leaving the spot, we created a feline “scratch pile” capped with our puma excreta and also set up a motion-activated surveillance camera to leave overnight.
We retrieved our camera trap the following morning, but, alas, the only animal we managed to photograph was the hunter’s free-ranging dog sniffing and ultimately consuming most of our puma droppings. Upon reviewing our photographic recreation, the cat in the hunter’s video did not look nearly as impressive as our cardboard cutout when the images were placed side by side. Digital analysis provided by a professional surveyor confirmed that the felid the hunter had videotaped was only fourteen inches tall at the shoulders and basically the size of a black house cat, a suspicion we had all harbored when we had initially observed its behavior and the erect posturing of its tail. And while we were ultimately able to reach a reasonable explanation for that particular red herring, we departed Carrabelle feeling that the potential was certainly still there for Tate’s Hell to harbor an elusive, rarely seen predator.
While it seems likely that a considerable percentage of black panther reports can be attributed to fleeting glimpses of outsized domestic cats, it’s difficult to explain them all away so easily. Marlowe is convinced that there is a melanistic morph of the Florida panther and is positive that he has seen one with his very own eyes. Researcher Chester Moore Jr. feels that some witnesses may be seeing black morph jaguarundis, while there may also be some black jaguars entering the United States via Mexico. Cryptozoologist Karl P.N. Shuker has another theory, suggesting that escaped or released black leopards are the culprits—apparently these Old World cats are a popular choice among exotic animal collectors. Regardless of their identity, black panthers seem to be among the most reported mystery beasts in the Western Hemisphere.
El Paso’s Phantom Feline
It is known that small numbers of both jaguars and jaguarundis are occasionally creeping across the Mexican border into the southernmost parts of the United States, but what about a feline species that has never been documented before? A woman named Lydia wrote this to me about an intriguing encounter that she had near El Paso, Texas, in 1964:
I was ten years old and walking my German shepherd dog on my usual route through my elementary school on a Saturday in broad daylight. We rounded a corner and there was a gigantic black feline. I have owned and loved cats all of my life and know a normal cat when I see one, and this was not. These days, I label it a cryptid. It was crouched with its bottom in the air. It was enormously muscled with a short Manx cat tail. It had gigantic strong hindquarters with extraordinarily long hind feet. Its short, pitch-black fur gleamed with health. Its eyes were literally the size of tea saucers, round, golden and calm. I, who know cats extremely well, would call it an amused stare. Not a feline expression that I had ever seen until then or since. … It did not seem to be quite as long or as tall as my dog Max. It was crouching, so hard to tell. But I believe it weighed every bit as much as Max in sheer muscle mass (maybe 80 pounds).
Lydia recalls how, after a few seconds “transfixed,” her dog instinctively turned away and coolly led her in the opposite direction, back toward their home. Halfway up the block, she glanced back and noticed that the creature had followed them to the very edge of the schoolyard, where it was still in a crouched position, intently staring at them in a menacing fashion. In retrospect, Lydia feels that Max may have saved both of their lives with his decisive action. “I never saw it move, but I know it must have been tracking behind us the whole way home—and I know it could have easily caught us. … That feline could have taken both of us.”
Lydia then summarizes, “To preempt the usual [questions]: No, it was not an overgrown domestic Manx, a mountain lion, a bobcat, a lynx, or any other wild feline species. There are no pictures of that cat anywhere and never have been, because I have looked for years.”
While I am inclined to wonder if Lydia and her pooch might have merely run across an exceptionally large bobcat, I have some reservations. Black bobcats, while exceedingly rare, do exist, and bobcats are prevalent in West Texas. But even the largest bobcats do not approach eighty pounds, unless Lydia was mistaken in her size estimate. Or, perhaps we’re talking about a uniquely monstrous specimen here. Cryptid cat authority Karl P.N. Shuker has pointed out that the very same gene that causes melanism in felids also tends to make them grow larger than normal.
Mexican Marauder
During March of 2014, I was invited down to Mexico in order to participate in a television series on the Science Channel titled Unexplained Files. The topic of that particular episode was a string of baffling livestock killings that had occurred in the south central state of Puebla during 2010. According to local newspaper reports of the time, as many as 300 goats had been slaughtered in a matter of some fifty days by an unseen predator. At least fifty of the animals had been virtually decapitated. It wasn’t long before the mythic, vampire-like Chupacabra (goat sucker) was proposed as the transgressor, due to the fact that whatever had eviscerated the goats had allegedly left scores of blood-drained carcasses in its wake. The Chupacabra legend needs little elaboration. Most readers by now are familiar with this legendary vampire, which has been grabbing headlines since the 1990s. However, in the course of pursuing my investigation it became palatable to conclude that the goats had in fact been the victims of a known varmint behaving in a totally unexpected manner and that accounts of the predation method had been grossly exaggerated.
Scouring the Internet, I’d initially been introduced to a startling image of about fifty dead goats that seemingly had their throats slit with surgical precision, seemingly too methodical to suggest any animal other than a human had been involved. Yet during production of the show, I was presented with a series of photographs of goats that displayed a range of gruesome injuries all over their bodies including deep, puncture wounds as well as long, sharp gashes that in some cases were causing large flaps of skin to drape open. These photos had been taken by ranchers whom I later had a chance to interview on camera. Strangely, these men described seeing only deep puncture wounds present in the throat region and a lack of blood that seemed to contradict the very photos they had taken. The goats in their care had obviously been attacked primarily from above by something that possessed razor-edged claws, long fangs, and evidently little interest in actually eating them. The disturbing detail was the fact that as many as eighty of the animals had been attacked in one bloodthirsty evening. Another ranch in the area had experienced a nearly identical slaughter around that same time period, but no photos had been taken of the victims in that particular incident.
In both instances, the livestock owners were at a total loss to explain what kind of predator could have made its way in over their tall fences, killing scores of animals in one evening and then disappearing quietly into the night without revealing its identity. However, I am convinced that the answer can be found by examining the most widespread and adaptable carnivore in the Americas, the mountain lion (Puma concolor).
While such cases are rare, there are documented occasions on which these powerful predators embarked on killing sprees that have resulted in dozens of sheep or goats being slaughtered in one singular event. These “thrill kills” have very little to do with the acquisition of sustenance and can best be explained as the result of a playful instinct that teeters on the edge of psychotic behavior. It’s like when a house cat bats a poor rodent or lizard into submission and then leaves its pulverized body on the carpet, uneaten. It is precisely this type of bloodlust behavior but multiplied exponentially. Imagine the type of panic that might have ensued within a crowded goat pen if a mountain lion had found its way in. The frenzied bleating and retreating of flocking goats would no doubt produce an adrenaline-heightening effect on an animal whose killing instincts were already approaching full throttle. Because such mass slaughters are exceedingly rare, it’s not impossible to imagine that the rural ranchers, belonging to a relatively superstitious culture, might suspect a supernatural culprit for the killings or other highly unusual occurrences.
To underscore this point, during filming I was shown a grotesque-looking specimen in a large glass jar that was presented to me as representing a deceased juvenile Chupacabra. Villagers in the western state of Nayarit had come upon the small carcass around the same time period in which farm animals and even some local children had gone missing. The natives were convinced that this monstrosity had somehow been connected to the disappearances and had turned its remains over to the local priest for safekeeping. Upon examining the cadaver, it became apparent to me that it was more likely a deformed, stillborn goat sporting extra limbs and a malformed skull. Despite the fact that a forensic veterinarian at the local university verified my conclusion on camera, the priest remained loyal to the belief of the village, insisting instead that the abomination was undeniably a Chupacabra. It would appear that in many rural locales, superstition still eclipses science.
