The professor's steel rimmed glasses glinted from the bright angle poise lamp. He scratched his thick gray beard thoughtfully as he pondered the site in front of him. He brought the lamp down closer to better illuminate the body of the dead creature lying on a table at the Natural Science Research Laboratory in Lubbock, Texas.
The lab forms.
An important part of Texas Tech University's museum, and back in two thousand and five, Professor Robert Baker was its director. Recognized as a leader in innovative ways to look after collections of biological specimens, The facility houses four major natural history collections animals, birds, invertebrates, as well as an archive of genetic samples from more than a hundred thousand animals
across the world. Baker was passionate about what is known as the series problem, working out how exactly to define and identify the new species of animal to date. In his lifetime, he had already been responsible for describing eighteen completely new mammal species previously unknown to science, and now he was pondering a possible nineteenth. In appearance, the creature was shocking frightening. Even the emaciated corpse was covered by furlsh skin that was shrunken and blackened, so that the
snout and teeth of it were garishly pronounced. It had been brought in by game wardens at the Texas Parks and Wildlife District, who said that the animal had been shot one night while running across someone's.
Ranch on the South Plains.
Although he couldn't be certain, Baker suspected that what he had on his hands was a raccoon. The man who shot it, however, believed it was something else entirely, a fearsome mythical creature known as the tupa cabra. You're listening to Unexplained and I'm.
Richard McLean Smith.
Back in early spring nineteen ninety six, in the state of Hallisco in Mexico, a series of strange reports emerged detailing the seemingly senseless slaughter of countless sheep and goats. The report stated that the animal's carcasses or almost all, had two teeth marks about the third of an inch across on their necks and had been exsanguinated, meaning all their blood had been completely drained. It was like nothing anyone had ever seen before, and there was one word
on the lips of local residents Cupa cabra. The name was coined by Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Perez the year before to describe a mysterious predator that had supposedly been responsible for a number of strange animal deaths that plagued the country in the late nineteen eighties and early nineties. Taken from cupa, the Spanish verb to suck because of the animals reportedly vampiric habits, and cabras for goat due
to that supposedly being the animals favored prey. As time went on, the last s was eventually dropped to form the name more commonly used today. By the late nineteen nineties, however, it seemed fear of the creature, and perhaps the apparent creature itself had long since escaped the borders of Puerto Rico. In response to the killings in Hallisco, Mexico, the director of the Guadalajara Zoo, Francisco A. Rahon, visited the scene of one of the mass killings, where he made a
cast of a poor print that he found there. After careful examination, however, he concluded the culprit was nothing more.
Than a large dog or wolf.
Two investigators, Patricia and Mario Menendez Acosta, staked out several farm yards where similar attacks on livestock had taken place. One night, the the couple witnessed the animals being attacked,
but found the culprits to simply be feral dogs. The attacks had so gripped the local community that Cuban born American TV personality Christina Sarah Leggy featured reports of the mysterious creature on her widely popular Spanish language TV show Christina Then in Miami, Florida, on the night of March twentieth, nineteen ninety six, something left the lifeless bodies of sixty nine goats, chickens, and geese strewn across two backyards in
the neighborhood of sweet Water. One reporter described them as being a vampire dry. It was left to Ron McGill, a zoologist from Miami Dade Zoo, to attempt to bring a little calm and logic to the situation. Countless dead animals still littered the scene when he arrived the following day, having read all the reports about them supposedly being attacked by a vampiric creature. His first thought was to put
that to the test. Taking a sharp knife, he took hold of one of the goats and sliced through its carotid artery. Almost immediately, blood flowed out in a heavy stream. When he looked for puncture wounds, he found a number of bite marks that to him looked no different to classic canine puncture marks. As he told a gathering of TV reporters shortly after, these animals had also been killed
by dogs. Some residents of sweet Water wondered why if dogs were to blame that none of the animals had been eaten, But as Ron McGill explained, it was fairly typical of dogs to kill simply for the thrill of the chase.
It was a topic.
McGill knew only too well. Two years previously, feral dogs had gone on a killing spree at his zoo, killing fifteen antelopes, leaving the bodies uneaten, lying where they died, just like the scene in sweet Water, but others were not convinced. It was just as the TV crews were preparing to pack up that an elderly woman approached one of the cameras a stern, determined look on her face. It was no dog, she said, as the camera zoomed in closer, her eyes narrowing at the apparent memory of
it all. The creature, she said, whatever it was, had stood on two legs, not four, like a dog, with a body that was hunched over strangely, and when it looked at her, she said.
Its eyes were bright red.
As fears of the tupa cabra began to spread, more people felt the need to weigh in on the subject. Esteban Sarmiento, a primatologist from the American Museum of Natural History, examined tracks allegedly left by the creature and claimed to find clear evidence of a hoax. In contrast, self described researcher from the Miami UFO Center for Hilio Sanchez O Sejo took more plaster casts of tracks. He pronounced them to have been made by an unknown, possibly extraterrestrial creature.
By April two thousand, the tupacubra had apparently made it as far south as Chile, where some of the weirdest reports were being made in the northern Chilean city of Calama. No one seemed to have directly witnessed the creature as it attacked, but it was claimed that it killed up to three hundred domestic livestock, once again draining many of their blood. The attacks always seemed to happen after dark, with many locals claiming that sounds made by the creature
made them too terrified to investigate until daybreak. In response, local governor Francisco Segosia called for an investigation. When it finally wrapped up in June, Segosia pronounced that, as it was after previous investigations, the attacks had been made by feral dogs, but many residents were skeptical. It wasn't long after the Calama investigation came to a close that a report on Chilean radio suggested that, in fact, the real culprits were animals that had escaped from a secret testing
facility run in coordination with the US government. The theory was fueled by a small group of prominent Chilean eufologists, who claimed that some time ago, members of the Chilean military had found three strange eggs while out in the desert. The military, with the assistance of NASA, were then said to have conducted genetic tests on the eggs at a secret lab in the Atacama Desert, where they eventually hatched. It was all part of a program to genetically engineer
a hybrid animal that could survive on Mars. They asserted. They believed that a male, a female, and a cub of this hybrid had escaped from the lab and been living in a mine nor of Calama until NASA scientists flew down in a large black helicopter and took the three creatures back to captivity.
Later.
In one TV report, a Chilean taxi driver claimed that he saw a weird winged beast about the size of a man running down the street as he drove home. It ran beside him for a short while, he said, before out running his speeding vehicle. There were no other witnesses to this event, which, like the other reports of
the Chilean schupacabra, remained unsubstantiated. As the chupacabra mystery spread, reports came in from countries as far afield as the Dominican Republic, Argentina, Bolivia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Peru, and Brazil. In the Caribbean, it was typically described as being four to five feet tall, with long claws and a row of spikes.
Down its back. In Mexico, it was said to.
Look like some sort of weird dog that walked on two legs, while in Central and South America it was a three to four foot tall kangaroo like creature with wings that hopped and varied in color from purple to brownish yellow. Some claimed the animal's eyes emitted beams of light which shone like flashlights into the night, or that there was a smell of sulfur in the air when
it was around. What the descriptions did agree on was that it had a rounded head with elongated black eyes, thin arms with long claws, and a row of what appeared to be spikes down the center of its back. Some reports included details about the animal's jawline, which was said to be delicate, with a small mouth full of needle like teeth. The creature was reputed to have attacked goats, cats, sheep, chickens, dogs, ducks, and pigs. A few farmers even claimed that it tried
to impregnate their cows. Over the course of ten to fifteen years. Tuper cabra sightings were also reported fairly frequently in local press across southern Texas and even as far west as, Arizona in the United States, One apparently terrified boy in suburban Tucson told his father, Jose Espinosa, that a tupa cabra had walked through the front door of their house and sat down on his bed before jumping
out of the window. Then, in two thousand and seven, biologists at Texas State University in San Marcos seemed to finally get their hands on In the summer of two thousand and seven, Phyllis Canyon claimed to have found the body of the strange, hairless dog like creature on a ranch outside the small town of Cuero in Texas, just southeast of San Antonio. Canyon thoughtfully preserved its head in
her freezer. She then contacted a reporter, Joe Conger at the local news station, giving him a tissue sample from the animal, which Conga passed along to Mike Fawsner, a biologist at Texas State University. Forwsner, who was experienced in DNA testing on animals ranging from bats to toads, assigned two of his students to do an analysis on the
tissue sample. They found its genetic sequence was the per match for a coyote periodically in the noughties, Cuba cabra sightings and occasional corpses would be reported across the border regions of Texas and Mexico. One Saturday evening in May twenty sixteen, a woman in White Faced, Texas contacted the local game warden saying that she'd just seen a cupa cabra. The Texas Parks and Wildlife District had been getting calls about such sightings for a while, associated with an animal,
either living or dead, that looked very strange. The warden went to the place the woman had described, just over the county border in Hockley County, and found a corpse that fitted the description of other dead animals his colleagues had investigated. It was very thin, with bones showing through its skin that was blotchy and darkened in places. A lot of the animal's fur seemed.
To be missing.
The carcass was taken to the Natural Science Research Laboratory at Texas Tech in Lubbock, the same lab where several years before, Professor Robert Baker had examined the grotesque, blackened corpse of his own apparent tuber cabra. Baker's successor, doctor Robert Bradley, was.
Now in charge.
Unfortunately, he didn't have the preserved corpse of Baker's animal to compare this latest find with, because it had not been frozen intact to save space and the lab's freezers. Professor Baker had just taken a few tissue samples from it. Then the body had been put in a sealed case full of dermasted beetles, a procedure routinely used to reduce
a dead animal to just a skeleton. Over a period of several days, the voracious beetles munched away at the carcass, a chorus of tiny mandibles, clicking audibly as they feasted. When they'd finished, all that was left of the mysterious looking creature was a nice clean skull and skeleton to add to the lab's collection. A subsequent DNA test revealed it to be a raccoon after all, just as Professor
Baker had suspected. Doctor Bradley remembered another crucial bit of information about Baker's creature that what had made it so hard to identify at first was because it was suffering from sarcoptic mange. When doctor Bradley ran a DNA analysis of his strange corpse from Hockley County, it was revealed to be a coyote, it too, was suffering from sarcoptic mange. Sarcoptic mange is caused by parasitic mites known as Sarcoptis scabii,
which attack mammals. The ticks have circular bodies, four pairs of front legs, some with suckers, and two pairs of rear legs with long trailing bristles and spur like claws. When they infect dogs, the female mites use those legs to dig into the skin, causing severe itching, which makes the hapless dog constantly chew and scratch at its own body. Sarcoptic mange is highly transmissible, infecting wild animals like coyotes and raccoons. It can even jump to humans who have
come into close contact with an infected animal. On humans, it is easily treated. However, for wildlife like coyotes and raccoons, contracting sarcoptic mange means a sad and grizzly fate. The mites eat the fur off their host, typically from the abdomen and hindquarters first, so that the infected animals appear to develop a ruff of hair around their shoulders. Sometimes an animal will become almost completely naked, except for little tufts of fur around the feet and in what looks
like a ridge of hair running down its backbone. As the disease progresses, the host becomes very weak, making it hard to effectively hunt for food. As the animal starts to starve, its skin becomes tight and drawn, causing hip bones, teeth, and claws to become more prominent. Also with fur loss, skin is exposed to sunlight and melotonin is produced, often turning the animal dark gray or blackish in color. The
effect some is sinister. Glimpsed briefly in low light or after dark, to the untrained human eye, an infected animal would very likely appear monstrous, even alien. One biologist from the University of Michigan speculated that coyotes infected with sarcoptic mange might very well have trouble running down their normal prey, small mammals like rabbits. This, he said, might force them
to attack domestic livestock out of sheer desperation. Back in Lubbock, Texas, doctor Robert Bradley concurred, stating that coyotes and raccoons suffering from sarcoptic mange were especially prevalent in the surrounding areas. Every other so called tupacabra that doctor Bradley has subsequently tested has turned out to be a coyote, raccoon, or some other well known species of animal. And so it seemed there was finally a logical, scientific explanation for the
alleged tupa cabra sightings and corpses. And yet the very first cupa cabra sightings were reported from one of the largest islands in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, which doesn't have coyotes, and where eyewitness reports of cupa cabras have invariably described an animal walking on two legs, not four. The stories started in nineteen ninety five, when the island was beset by a succession of difficult circumstances. Puerto Rico has many
unique characteristics. As a commonwealth of the United States, residents have American citizenship but cannot cast votes in US elections. The island effectively has the USA's only tropical rainforest, El Junke, where at times it literally rains frogs. This intriguing phenomenon happens when the indigenous cocky frogs climb up trees during periods of high humidity and heavy rain, only to jump back down when they find predators waiting for them in
the tree tops. The island sits next to one of the world's deepest ocean trenches at almost eight and a half thousand meters below sea level, and is also the birthplace of the rum based cocktail, the Pina Colada, and in the nineteen nineties, Puerto Ricans could be forgiven for turning to rum for comfort. The island had been hit by one difficulty after another, starting with an alarming eight epidemic.
In nineteen ninety one, the US Center for Disease Control reported that Puerto Rico at the second highest rate of HIV cases among all US states and territories, especially among women. It was also a time when Puerto Rico was inundated by a voracious rat population. This in turn led to an increase in the rat's main predator, the mongoose. The mongoose proved to be spectacularly successful in controlling the rats, but that only created another problem, lots of hungry mongoose
short of food. Then, from June ninety four to May ninety five, the island experienced another epidemic, this time of Dengi fever, affecting twenty five thousand people, hospitalizing five thousand
and killing forty. It was spread by mosquitoes whose populations had increased dramatically, encouraged by several months of drought and unusually warm weather in the months prior to the summer of ninety five, and finally, in late summer that year, Whereto Rico faced the looming threat of Hurricane Marilyn, which was rapidly intensifying to the north. It eventually hit eastern portions of the island as a Category three hurricane, causing
damage estimated to total around ten million dollars. Assaulted by this barrage of threats, it isn't hard to see how a general climate of fear and anxiety might have contributed to the proliferation of unsettling stories about strange vampiric creatures.
Roaming the land.
But there were other longer term issues that weighed on the country's collective subconscious Two. In nineteen thirty eight, hundreds of Rhesus macaque monkeys were captured from twelve different districts of India, put in cages and brought by boat to Puerto Rico. From there, they were taken to the island of Cayo Santiago, just one mile off the eastern coast of the mainland. By the nineties, the island was completely
inhabited by the free ranging monkeys. It was part of a project set up by Columbia University and the United States and the School of Tropical Medicine of the University of Puerto Rico.
Their goal was.
To establish a breeding colony of free roaming, disease free monkeys on whom they could conduct research into tropical diseases, amongst other things. It became known as Monkey Island. The island was well known as one of the best places to study population management practices, as well as for providing an extensive genetic database, making it a top destination for primatologists. But Cayo Santiago wasn't the only focus for monkey research
in Puerto Rico. The Lapagera primate facility, located on the southwest coast of Puerto Rico, was managed by the Caribbean Primate Research Center of the University of Puerto Rico's Medical Science campus from nineteen sixty one until nineteen eighty two. Through a contract with the US's Food and Drug Administration. Primates were introduced from there to Isla Cuaver and Isla
Huaya can just off the southern coast near Juanica. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the nineteen seventies, there were multiple incidents of the monkeys escaping from the islands. They carried the viral herpes bee, which can be fatal to humans and potentially contributed to numerous outbreaks of the disease in the local human population.
The American state of South Carolina eventually stepped in to help, offering to make an uninhabited island off its coast available as an alternative location for the research to continue, and so between nineteen seventy nine and nineteen eighty over one thousand, four hundred animals were relocated to Morgan Island. But memories of the escaping monkeys still lingered in the minds of some on Puerto Rico. Exactly what kind of research was still going on with the macaques on Isla quaver and
islahuaia Can, they wandered, Did it involve genetic manipulations? It was in March nineteen ninety five that initial reports of slaughtered farm animals began to surface on mainland Puerto Rico. Sheep were found butchered in suspicious circumstances in Orakovis and Morovis, small towns located about an hour and a half's drive southwest of the capital, San Juan, in the center of
the island. In one case, eight sheep were discovered dead, each with three puncture wounds in the chest area, allegedly completely drained of blood. It was around this time that Puerto Rican comedian Silverio Perez coined the name tupa cabra. But for poor ranchers and farmers having their livestock killed
in what were already financially marginal circumstances was no laughing matter. Then, in August nineteen ninety five, in the town of Canovnas, just east of San Juan, around one hundred and fifty farm animals were found dead, But this time an eye witness gave a detailed account of a bizarre creature they saw lurking round the area at the time. It was to give rise to the most well known and iconic
description of the tupa cabra. Find out more next week when we return with the second and final part of Unexplained Season eight, Episode five Islands of Fear. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. In some other news, Unexplained will be coming to YouTube very shortly in video form, so please watch out for future developments there. You can subscribe to the channel at YouTube dot com
Forward slash at Unexplained Pod. You can also now find us on TikTok at TikTok dot com Forward slash at Unexplained Podcast. This episode was written by Diane Hope and produced by me Richard McClain smith. Diane is an audio producer and sound recordist in her own right. You can find out more about her work at Dianehope dot com and on Instagram at in the sound Field. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions podcast created by Richard McClain smith.
All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McClain smith.
Unexplained.
The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of
your own you'd like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained podcast dot com and reach us online through Twitter at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast