“IT WAS JUST SO MUCH MORE … it was so beefy,” Sharon Hill told me via Skype from her home in Philadelphia. She wasn’t talking about the latest beef jerky endorsed by a cartoon Sasquatch but her introduction into skeptical literature in the early 1990s. “It actually had evidence to it, whereas all these volumes of ghost stories and UFO stories were just recycled from book to book. The same stories were just reported over and over, and I got bored with that, so when I found the skeptical literature I thought it was great. It was exciting, and I liked thinking about it this way,” Hill said. She was wearing a headset with a microphone and took a sip from a wine glass. A parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper featuring the classic Universal Studios monsters hung in the background.
Hill’s interest led to her becoming part of a group of people who proudly call themselves skeptics, a network of people who examine claims of the paranormal with a shrewd, scrutinizing look. They are going to tell you that the ghost you think is in your house is a creaky floorboard, your alien abduction was a case of sleep paralysis, and your Lake Monster is just a funny-looking log. They are seen as the much-needed voice of reason and sanity by some but as killjoys pulling the wings off pixies by others.
Hill, who works as a geologist, has had a long interest in monsters. “The first books I read were about dinosaurs and monsters. Always been into animals, nature. I collected bugs and liked Dr. Seuss books with all the funny creatures in them. Always read about Bigfoot. When I was in third grade, I read all the 001 books on the shelf [the Dewey Decimal assignment for books on ‘knowledge,’ where you’ll find the paranormal section of the library], the paranormal things, Lake Monster, UFO stuff. I was a bookworm as long as I can remember. Godzilla, Dracula, ghosts. I liked the ghost stories but not the idea of being scared.”
Hill’s introduction to skeptical literature came after she graduated from college in 1992. “I was unemployed for a summer, and I just caught up on all my reading. I was reading stuff like Stephen Jay Gould, who was key in the skeptical sphere at that time. He would be talking about things like creationism. I think being a geologist and talking about how creationism reflects geology is the key to what got me into the skeptical approach to things.”
Interested, Hill began to join e-mail lists and visited online bulletin boards. “I ended up on a skeptic mailing list, where I met a lot of the people I still interact with today. That was 1993 or 1994.”
Hill explained to me the mind-set of this networking group of skeptics. “Skeptic is an approach, a process. You decide you want to use evidence to draw your conclusions. Some people are OK just taking other people’s word for it, without any evidence except that one piece of testimony, whereas a skeptic looks at it from a more objective perspective by saying, ‘Yeah, people make mistakes and they exaggerate and their senses deceive them and they misremember, and I’m going to look for more objective evidence.’”
Hill attended her first skeptic conference with a friend in 2000. It was a much different scene than it is today. “You could have counted the number of people thirty or younger on one hand. It was a very old, academic crowd. Typical white-haired, white-bearded professors. There were some women, but the original skeptic community was old, white, male. And now, today—and this has a lot to do with the Bush years and the Internet—it has pulled in a whole pile of younger people who were kind of disgusted with the idea that religion should play such a big part in your life or that you should believe in all these faith-based things. They were disillusioned with magical thinking.”
In 2010 Hill wrote a thesis paper titled “Being Scientifical: Popularity, Purpose and Promotion of Amateur Research and Investigation Groups in the U.S.” It focuses on paranormal researchers and their methods, specifically ghost hunting groups.
“They are the epitome of scientifical,” Hill said, using her term for methods that appear to be scientific but really aren’t. “I don’t know what it was like in the ’70s when there were these UFO groups; I think they were sort of the same. They were amateurs, they weren’t trained in science, but they were interested in doing the right thing in investigating.
“That meant, what our culture said, is that you have to be scientific because there is this honorific use of the word science. Anything scientific is seen to be better than an alternative. It carries some cachet to it to say you are being scientific even though you may just be pretending and don’t have any scientific background. And these ghost hunters are the epitome of pretending to play scientists on TV,” Hill laughs. “They’ve learned how to do what they’re doing by watching other people on TV.”
She continued, “So ‘scientifical’ really does mean you are playing pretend, that you are using a lot of the outward language and imagery of science, but if you ask these people to explain it, they can’t. And I’ve done that. I’ve cornered a few and asked them, ‘What do you mean you’re scientific?’
“‘Oh, well, we’re careful and we’re methodical and we use equipment,’ which to them is objective as opposed to being subjective with a psychic or feeling. They use those objective instruments to justify their subjective feelings about a place being haunted.
“And of course what they are doing is just anomaly hunting with the evidence, finding environmental variables that are weird or wacky—‘Oh, that’s paranormal!’ They default to that position.
“If I can’t observe it, it’s not science. Peer review, skepticism, being a critical thinker—some of those are really key to things that are missing in the current ghost hunting community. They don’t publish the results, they don’t share the results regularly, they don’t get together and talk about values and foundations and agreed-upon assumptions, so there is no foundation to it. It’s really a free-for-all.
“They envy the authority of science that they don’t have. And they can’t get that by being on TV. They can only get that by doing the work, going to school and immersing themselves in how really hard it is to do scientific work. You have to have a thick skin, you have to be open to criticism, and they are not. They don’t like to be criticized or questioned.”
Hill concluded, “So there is a mirror image of science and scientifical. It’s really claim-pretend, is how I would explain it.”
Hill even joined a group of paranormal investigators from New Jersey when they did an investigation of historic American Revolution outpost Fort Mifflin in Philadelphia. “I said, ‘I’m just going to keep my mouth shut all night long,’” Hill said. But when the group began experiencing what they thought was a ghostly tapping sound, Sharon broke her vow.
“I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me? This is so stupid.’” She crawled into a small enclosure behind a prison cell where she found a pile of plastic bags and garbage.
“It was water dripping off the walls onto the plastic. I said, ‘OK, everyone, wait a minute.’
“Plink!
“‘Did you hear that? It’s water dripping onto an empty bottle back here.’
“They were really just out to have a good time—and that’s OK! I don’t have any problem with that. It’s when ghost hunters go into the public sphere and talk to the media or give presentations or act like they are some sort of authority that I get perturbed by it. I don’t care what you do in your free time, but when you portray yourself to the public as being serious and having the answer, then I get angry that you’re basically just making shit up.”
After finishing her thesis, Hill needed a new project as an outlet for her skepticism and started to develop her site, Doubtful News (www.doubtfulnews.com).
“I wanted to do something different that involved my own interests. I’m a weird news junkie. I love Fortean stuff about weird natural anomalies, and I noticed they were not covered well in the media with any skeptical angle.”
Doubtful News is just one of several outlets of the skeptic community. In addition to sites like Skepchick (www.skepchick.org) and podcasts like Skeptoid, there are conferences and meet-up groups.
My friend J. Jason Groschopf (most commonly known by just his last name) is a member of such a group. Groschopf, a graphic designer in Portland, Oregon, began his interest in skepticism when he explored the field of ghost hunting. He was a fan of the classic horror-comedy Ghostbusters (1984) and saw ghost hunting as a blend of his interest in the paranormal as well as urban exploration. But the “scientifical” methods he encountered soon led him to an interest in skepticism.
After moving to Portland, Groschopf joined the newly formed northwest branch of the Independent Investigations Group (IIG-NW) associated with the skeptic group Center for Inquiry.
The group has meetings and occasionally takes “field trips.” For example, the group attended the Body Mind Spirit Expo 2013 on November 2 of that year and offered a variety of psychics, mediums, clairvoyants, and tarot card readers a reward of $100,000—not exactly chump change—if they would prove their abilities by an IIG test. Out of ten, all but two declined the challenge, and the two who said they would accept did not follow up with the group.
“I still love all of the mysteries, puzzles, history, and ambience that came with ghost hunting,” Groschopf explained to me. “Difference is, I no longer start with what the answer is to a given question and work backward to support that. Better to begin with a null hypothesis and follow the evidence wherever it goes. When I was a ghost hunter, I’d say, ‘A ghost caused that.’ Now that I’m a skeptic, I say, ‘I don’t know what caused that. Let’s explore the possibilities.’”
In 1995 a panic began in Puerto Rico. Livestock were allegedly being found drained of blood, and their mystery predator soon had a name: El Chupacabras, which translated means “the goat sucker.” After these reports began to circulate, sightings of the creature were reported. Descriptions varied, but Loren Coleman and Jerome Clark’s guide Cryptozoology A to Z gives the most common one: “It was said to be hairy, about four feet tall, with a large, round head, a lipless mouth, sharp fangs, and huge, lidless red eyes. Its body was small, with thin, clawed, seemingly webbed arms with muscular hind legs. The creature also had a series of pointy spikes running from the top of its head down its backbone.”
After a segment on popular Spanish-language television talk show El Show de Cristina, “Chupamania” spread, and sightings began outside of Puerto Rico in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, and America’s southern states, like Florida, New Mexico, and Texas. What was this vicious creature that feasted on the blood of livestock? Theories were quickly brought forward—a cryptid, an alien creature from another planet or dimension, an experiment gone wrong by the US government in the jungles of Puerto Rico, a starving mongoose, or even a minion of Satan himself.
Benjamin Radford, a friend and colleague of Sharon Hill, became interested in skepticism after he went on a scavenger hunt for beer in 1992. He recalls that defining moment in his book, Scientific Paranormal Investigation:
While at the University of New Mexico that year I won a regional essay contest (my piece examined the reasons for the 1986 Chernobyl and Space Shuttle Challenger accidents) and as a prize, I was flown to a college town in Utah to present my paper. While there my colleagues and I decided to venture out for a few beers. Because we were unknowingly in a dry county, this turned out to be an arduous and ill-fated venture. But in the process of going door to door and store to store, we came across a tiny used bookstore. Amid the shelves of books on fruit canning and apocalyptic survival guides (Mormon bookstore staples), I found a few old copies of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. One in particular, with a cover article on Nostradamus, caught my eye, as that was the first time I’d seen anyone criticize the famed prognosticator.
The author of that article was stage magician and the most famous name in skeptic circles: James “the Amazing” Randi.
“I love Mr. Randi,” Sharon Hill told me. “I’ve met him a couple times. I first met him at a Center for Inquiry conference, I don’t remember the year. I got my picture taken with him, because that’s what you do—you get your picture taken with the little Darwin-like magician.”
Randi worked as a magician for many years and then, like his magician predecessor Harry Houdini, decided he would concentrate efforts on exposing charlatans. His first famous battles were in the 1970s, when he challenged popular mentalist Uri Geller, who claimed the power to bend spoons with his mind. Randi wrote an exposé book titled The Truth About Uri Geller. Geller attempted to sue Randi for $15 million. He lost.
Other Randi targets have included televangelist Peter Popoff—Randi revealed it was not the voice of God but a hidden earpiece that was speaking to him—and famous psychic Sylvia Browne.
The James Randi Educational Foundation set up a reward called the Million Dollar Challenge. Starting with growing pots of $1,000, $10,000, and $100,000, the reward reached its $1 million offer in 1996. It’s a guaranteed cool mil to anyone who can pass tests set up by the Randi Foundation in a laboratory setting that prove that he or she has psychic powers or another paranormal ability. To date, many have tried but none have successfully completed the test and claimed the reward.
Randi’s exposures have made him a hero and mentor in the skeptic community. An annual highlight of the field of skepticism is attending the Amaz!ng Meeting, a conference far removed from old haunted houses and foggy forests in the bright lights of Las Vegas.
To say Randi’s article and Skeptical Inquirer made an impact on Radford is an understatement—he eventually became the magazine’s deputy editor.
Radford’s skeptical interests in the paranormal began when he was a young reader, he told me in an interview, Skyping in from his office in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“Like a lot of boys of the Tom Sawyer variety, I was always interested by adventurous, mysterious, weird things. Growing up in New Mexico, there were local legends like La Llorona”—“the weeping woman,” a ghostly woman said to haunt bridges in a white dress, crying because she has killed her own children. Radford would spend his allowance on books examining these phenomena.
He read “mystery-mongering books from the ’50s. Frank Edwards was infamous for cranking these things out. Books with titles like Stranger Than Science and Science Can’t Explain Blah Blah,” Radford told me, accentuating the titles through the air dramatically with his hands. At first fascinated, Radford soon recognized that the stories were being recycled and not examined thoroughly. Perhaps lending to Radford’s skepticism was the fact that his father and both of his grandfathers were journalists.
“No one was actually doing any investigating. These were just stories with no references, no citations. It said ‘they said that,’ and even from a young age I was skeptical of ‘they say.’ I lost this natural awe.”
After writing a book on skeptical investigation (Scientific Paranormal Investigation, 2010) and a book debunking sightings of Lake Monsters (Lake Monster Mysteries, 2006), Radford set his sights on the mysterious blood-sucking monsters of Puerto Rico, along with the canine-like creatures with the same name stalking the American South: Chupacabras.
In his book Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore, Radford suggests, “The chupacabra is merely a recent incarnation of a centuries-old vampire myth, with a Hispanic twist.”
Word had been circulating earlier in 1995 that something was attacking and sucking the blood from livestock, but it wasn’t spotted until August of that year. In August 1995 Radford tracked the legend down to Canóvanas, Puerto Rico, where he found the original eyewitness, Madelyne Tolentino. Radford interviewed Tolentino and found her story to be without merit. As he wrote in Tracking the Chupacabra:
Much in her incredibly detailed account is dubious, nonsensical, and contradictory. If Tolentino’s account is accurate and truthful, the woman has near superhuman powers of observation; most witnesses would have only remembered a few of the most obvious features, but she spills out detail after detail of description, from its eye color to the number of toes on its feet to its missing anus. You would think she had gotten an up-close, 360-degree inspection, instead of seeing the creature from one vantage point (a window) at some distance in the early afternoon.
Tolentino said her mother and a local boy gave chase to the creature, but this was never verified.
“It is amazing the Puerto Rican chupacabra researchers apparently didn’t corroborate Tolentino’s story with either her mother, the young boy, or another nearby man who first saw the creature,” Radford wrote.
The members of the Puerto Rican Research Group apparently didn’t conduct any sort of investigation at all, and instead merely interviewed Tolentino about her story. Reports of lost pets are treated with more professionalism and competence. This is not even amateur investigation, this is non-investigation, with little or no attempt made to determine the validity or truth of the report. Yet this account, clearly fabricated (or, at the very least, heavily embellished), is regularly presented as one of the best, most important pieces of evidence for the chupacabra.
Radford also found Tolentino’s description, which led to the first sketch of the Chupacabras, had an uncanny resemblance to the alien in a movie released shortly before the alleged 1995 sighting, Species. The movie featured a spiny-backed alien designed by artist H. R. Giger that does indeed resemble Tolentino’s description. Radford eventually tracked down an interview with Tolentino where she admitted that she had seen the movie before her sighting and used it as a reference to the Chupacabras she claimed to have seen.
Tolentino’s encounter soon became a media hit, and sightings in Puerto Rico and beyond quickly followed.
Soon there were sightings of a different kind of animal being called the Chupacabras in parts of the southern United States, particularly Texas. This animal was not being described as a spiny alien with kangaroo legs and bat wings. It was said to have little to no fur, long fangs, and a sinister, ugly disposition.
Radford and others quickly unraveled the mystery—coyotes, foxes, dogs, and other animals with severe cases of mange.
Chupacabras Type II has been sensationalized and always follows the same story line. Person or persons encounter the mangy animal, sometimes poaching livestock. They shoot it or trap it. Unused to seeing an animal in such a bizarre (and miserable) state, they assume they have caught the elusive Chupacabras. Local media, happy to roll with an unusual news-of-the-day piece with lots of clickbait potential, give it a snappy title—IS THIS THE MYSTERIOUS CHUPACABRAS? or something similar. Sometimes a larger media source picks up the story. Toward the end of the story, a token expert—a local game warden or maybe even Radford himself—will comment on the fact that it is just an animal with mange, but that gets buried far deeper than the lead. Repeat cycle.
For example, in early April 2014 I saw a story circulating on Facebook about a couple from Ratcliffe, Texas, who had caught what they claimed was a Chupacabras in a live trap.
“I hunted coons for twenty years with my dogs and I ain’t never seen nothing like that right there,” Arlen Parma, the man who trapped the animal, is quoted as saying to the local ABC affiliate. “A coon don’t make that noise, or a possum. What makes that noise? I guess a chupacabra does.”
Strange noises or not, wildlife experts who studied pictures of the captured animal agreed it was a raccoon with mange. After naming it Chupie and giving it a diet of cat food and corn for a few days, the Parmas were told by a DeWitt County game warden that the animal had scabies and it was euthanized. The couple planned to have the body stuffed to sell on eBay.
“I’m sure in some village in Ireland, you’ll find someone who believes in Leprechauns, but for the most part, and if you’re over ten years old, Leprechauns and Santa Claus are widely agreed to be mythical. That’s not the case with Chupacabras. There are significant numbers of people who genuinely, absolutely, believe this creature exists. I’ve interviewed many myself,” Radford told me, explaining the attraction of debunking the story of the Chupacabras.
“The other thing that attracted me is the fact that it’s a vampire. Bigfoot leaves behind footprints, Chupacabras leaves behind dead bodies. Wow, that’s fucked up! This is something that could theoretically kill me.” Radford found that most of these alleged “blood-drained” animals were not scientifically tested and had probably experienced normal blood loss in a predator attack.
“I didn’t know where it would lead, and that’s what drew me to it, the ability to definitively solve a modern mystery, and a global one.”
It’s an enigma that Radford says he has unraveled.
“I believe, and many people believe, I have definitively solved the Chupacabra mystery. Now you can argue with that, that’s fine. If someone else wants to write a book showing I’m wrong, that’s great, I’ll be the first to buy it. It’s weird, I was thinking about this the other day: in my obituary it’s going to mention I’m tied to this Chupacabra thing, which is bizarre to me. I’m proud of the book, proud of the research, but it’s weird to me when people talk about me they’ll be like, ‘Oh, he solved the mystery of that vampire thing … what was it called?’”
Not so fast, says Loren Coleman.
“Ben and I respect each other intellectually, but that also means we can agree to disagree,” Coleman told me. “To explain away all two hundred or so incidents of bipedal, short, hairy Chupacabras with his mass-hysteria theory from a movie trailer is just the usual Ben Radford rantings. He and I agree that probably 100 percent of the Tex-Mex findings of four-legged bodies are canids (dogs, foxes, coyotes, wolves) with mange.”
When I spoke to Coleman he told me that skeptics, especially those intent on debunking, are the mirror image of the obsession, just as bent to prove something doesn’t exist as those who try to prove it does.
“They’re somewhat simplistic,” he explained to me. “They look for the one story that is a hoax and try to paint the whole field based on 1 percent of the cases, and try to find one or two explanations. I mean, most of us in the field know that about 80 percent of the field is misidentifications and mistakes. So then the whole field has to be thrown out? Fifteen percent is still unknowns, and 15 percent is enough to keep me going.”
At first, I was thinking that Ben Radford might be a villain in this book, or at least that guy who likes to pop balloons at parties. But he told me this is “categorically not true.”
“I’ll give you an example. About five or six years ago, I was at a Bigfoot conference in Pocatello, Idaho, talking about Bigfoot. I was the only skeptic in the room. There were lots of people who had seen Bigfoot tracks, eyewitnesses, and I’m the asshole skeptic in the back. I got up onstage and said, ‘Look, I’m trying to tell you why I don’t think there is good evidence for Bigfoot, and we can talk about eyewitnesses, lack of evidence, tracks, I’m perfectly willing to go into the details. But you need to understand—I’m on your side.’
“I said, ‘I’m not laughing at you. A lot of people out there, outside this convention hall, they think you’re crazy. They think you’re full of shit and they think it’s too silly to investigate. Not me. I’m willing to listen to your story. I’m willing to look at your evidence. I will look at your tracks, your DNA reports. I’m trying to bring scholarship and science to the endeavor. If I was completely convinced Bigfoot or ghosts didn’t exist, I wouldn’t waste my time. I’ve spent eighteen years of my life and a lot of my own time and money, and I do it for the intellectual challenge. I do it because I genuinely want to know.’”
Before talking to Sharon Hill, I watched a video of her giving a talk at a conference. One of the points she made was that “everyone needs to be a skeptic.” I asked her why.
“Everyone needs to be a critical thinker and consider the evidence, because if you’re not, you’re going to go through life getting taken,” Hill told me. “People are trying to scam you, fool you, take your money. They’re trying to sell you something that doesn’t work. You can also invest emotionally in things like psychics and astrologers or hunting Bigfoot or ghosts. It can be harmful.”