Season 08 Episode 5: Islands of Fear (Pt.2 of 2)

helping her elderly mother move into her home. After depositing some boxes in the living room, Madeleine glanced casually out at the front window as a car drew up in the street outside. She watched it carefully as it parked, concerned that it might block her driveway. Satisfied it hadn't, she was just about to turn back to the task at hand when she noticed that the driver had a strange look on his face. He seemed to be staring

out at the windscreen at something in the distance. The look on his face was quite clearly one of fear. It was as though he were about to be attacked by something, thought Madeline. She drew closer to the window and scowned the street, trying to see what it was that had scared the man so much. And it was then she later claimed, that she saw the terrifying creature

ambling down the street toward the car. Madeleine's description of the events that unfolded next in that sleepy Puerto Rican barrier would become headline news across the country, and soon after the world. The report would trigger similar sightings of the so called Tupa cabra across Latin America and beyond for decades to come. On March twentieth, nineteen ninety six, seven months after her claimed encounter with the Tupa Cabra, Madeline Tolentino gave an account of her apparent experience to

two UFO enthusiasts, Lucy Pla and Jose Rodriguez. The account was astonishingly detailed. As she put it, she first became aware of some kind of creature walking down the street on two legs. Its eyes were dark gray, she said, with no whites to them, and they were elongated up woods towards its temples. Even from her vantage point, she could see that they were damp and protruding slightly. Its face,

she said, was especially frightening. It had two little holes in the middle, which she presumed was a nose, while its mouth was described as just a slash above the chin. She estimated the creature to be around four feet tall, with long, skinny legs, each with three toes and webbing between them like a goose foot. As she described it. She added that the creature had short, well combed hair, and that its torso bore round it marks where the

skin seemed to have been burnt by something. The center of one of the apparent burn marks revealed pinkish, purply skin. The arms were long and thin, with three long, skinny fingers, and they were drawn back into what Madeleine described as an attack position. Odd featherlike projections protruded from its lower back,

joined by some sort of coppery brown membrane. Curious as to what its gender was, Madeleine bent down low to see if she could discern anything between its legs, only to find that it seemed to be completely smooth, as if its body had been sealed up. She cried out for her mother to come and see it too, and together they watched as it moved closer to the car in stiff, robotic movements, almost as though it were being

guided by a remote control. At some point, it seemed to become aware of the car and the frightened driver in sight. For a few spined, hingling moments, Madelin watched on the creature halted, apparently unaware that Madeleine and her mother were watching it from the window, only for it to then slowly swivel its head and gazed directly at them. Madelene screamed in horror. This, she said, seemed to startle the creature, who then bounded off down the street in

large hops like a kangaroo. It plunged into a wooded lot opposite next to a machine shop owned by Madeleine's husband, Jose Augusto, who happened to be away that day. Utterly confused by what she just witnessed, Madeleine then claimed she went outside to try and get a better look of where the creature went, but was too afraid to give chase. Her mother, however, seemingly made of sterner stuff, ran immediately towards the patch of trees where they'd last seen it,

shouting to a neighbor to help her catch it. With the creature now nowhere to be seen, Madeleine eventually caught up with her mother across the street. They were apparently joined soon after by a young man who worked for Madeleine's husband. He'd come running out of the shop when he heard the commotion in the street. After Madeline quickly told him what had happened, the young man, who was said to be used to wrangling large animals, ran to his van and grabbed a pair of heavy duty gloves.

He pulled them on, then plunged hastily into the wooded lot in search of the creature. A short time later, the strange thing re emerged onto the street further down the road before sprinting away and out of sight. The young man reappeared from the wooded patch, flustered and out of breath. According to Madeline, he managed to track down the creature, but when he tried to grab it, the feathers on its back suddenly sprang up, revealing themselves to

in fact be long, sharp spines. They changed color under his hands as he tried to pin them down. The young man then apparently grabbed the creature's face and prised its mouth open. To reveal large fanglike teeth inside. The creature eventually wrestled itself free. Madeleine later told interviewers that she believed the creature had supernatural intelligence due to the strange way in which it supposedly moved. When her mother gave chase after it, Madeleine claimed that for a moment,

it had levitated as it raced away from them. Later that evening, two men who drove the local church buses were said to have seen the creature in the barrio again, and in the darkness, its eyes had appeared to light up. When Madeleine's husband, Jose, returned home, Madelein hesitantly told him what she'd seen, but Jose wasn't as surprised or disbelieving as she'd expected. In fact, he apparently told her that

he'd encountered the same creature earlier that very morning. It was around seven a m. And Jose was in its workshop fixing a truck. He turned on the ignition, but when the engine came to life, it didn't sound right. When he got out of the vehicle to investigate, Jose froze in shock at the sight of a weird looking

creature emerging from underneath the truck. The creature that was apparently just as Madeleine had described hers to him, locked eyes with Jose for what seemed like minutes before darting off like a kangaroo at spectacular speed. Madeline Tolentino is said to have told her family to keep quiet about the encounters, fearing what people might say about them, But

word soon leaked out, and before long it was national news. Then, incredibly, a number of similar reports about what people were now calling a tupa cabra began pouring in from across Puerto Rico. But now there was a new edge to the story. The tuoper cabra had apparently developed a taste for the blood of farm animals. About a month after her encounter, Madeline worked with Joge Martin, a journalist specialized in supposed UFO and alien phenomena occurring on the Caribbean Islands, to

develop a drawing of the creature she'd apparently seen. The sketch was widely circulated and published on the front page of a local newspaper, and by November nineteen ninety five, it had gone global. Meanwhile, in the wake of his own apparent experience, Madeline's husband, Jose Augusto, was drawn deeper

into the search for the so called Tupa cabra. He claimed repeatedly the creature was making surgical incisions in the animals it attacked, insisting that those incisions were much too precise and clean to have been made by a mongoose or a wild dog, as others speculated. He also believed that the Tupa cabra was partly or completely draining their blood, which he insisted it would neither flow or coagulate after

an attack. It examined sheep and goats said to have been killed by the Cupa cabra that was still flexible, showing no signs of rigor mortars, a good twenty four hours after they died, he said. Augusto was one of the first people to suggest the creature might be the result of some kind of experiment by humans involving extraterrestrials,

and this is when things get really weird. It was some time after August nineteen ninety five, according to Augusto, when one night one of his neighbors was drawn to an odd movement in the sky. Gazing up at the stars, he apparently saw a large saucer shaped object about ninety to one hundred and twenty feet wide, suspended in the air fifty feet above him. The saucer apparently hovered for

about three minutes before shooting off into the night. Augusto said that he also saw a starlike thing, as he put it, shooting colored laser beams sideways in the sky over the l Jungk forest before it too vanished. Augusto then claimed he was contacted by residents of Dorado, a town just west of San Juan on the north coast of the island. They had apparently witnessed a spaceship landing

in scrub just beyond the town. A ramp had then opened up from the vehicle, down which a number of Tupa cabras were apparently escorted by some other kind of extraterrestrial being. It was as if the Chupa cabreras was some kind of attack doc belonging to the other beings. The lagoons in the region were said to bubble strangely

whenever the Tupa cabras were around. Another report from Jose Augusto concerned Dorado police officer Juan Colatso, after hearing his dog barking in distress outside Colatso ran out to investigate, where he apparently found the dog being attacked by a tupa cabra. Galazzo was said to have immediately grabbed his service revolver and fired at the creature. Having been struck by a few bullets, it bounced off the back wall,

then disappeared into the darkness. The dog was apparently recovered alive, but strangely with a section of its coat seemingly shaved away, supposedly in preparation for a surgical incision. Puerto Rican veterinarian doctor Carlos Soto was reported to described wounds on slaughtered animals supposedly killed by the Tuba cabra as being small and perfectly circular, about a quarter to half an inch in diameter, and arranged in pairs, sometimes penetrating deep into

the neck of the victims. Such wounds could have been made by a feral dog, mongoose, or rhesus monkeys. Others, however, claimed that in some cases the wounds went deeper and some of the animal's vital organs had been extracted. Up and down the country, concerned Puerto Ricans were making reports to the civil defense, the police, and fort a laser the governor's residence, but authorities remained reluctant to get involved. But as the numbers of dead livestock mounted, the pressure

for some official action intensified. And so it was that on Sunday, October twenty ninth, nineteen ninety five, a man with a weather beaten face, Indiana Jones style felt hat and steely gray eyes stood on the steps of the town hall, sweating in military fatigues as lights and multiple camera lenses focused on him. Jose Kimo Soto was the mayor of CANOVANUS and for over a month his office had been flooded with frantic phone calls and visits from

worried citizens. The carcasses were piling up, Many had mysterious puncture wounds, and, as the claims went, had been drained of their blood. Soto's requests to government agencies for men and material to help fund the search had either been ignored or turned down. Left with no other option, the mayor, who was a former police officer, finally decided to organize a hunt for the super Cabra himself. Brandishing a large knife under the media lights, Soto briefed the assembled crowd

and expectant reporters on its plan. As well as enlisting the services of a spiritual adviser to help locate the strange creature, It also acquired the help of Papo Swing, a well known clown from Puerto Rican television played by

actor and comedian Raoul Carbonel. As Soto explained to the slightly amused crowd, Papo Swing's scary clown face would be perfect for scaring the monster into a special trap involving a hidden net and a goat mannikin filled with fake blood, and just in case the Tuba Cabra was a real vampire, Mayor Soto would also be bringing a twelve inch crucifix and a water pistol filled with holy water on the hunt too. Mer Soto failed to find and trap the creature,

despite organizing several expeditions to do so. However, his fervent belief in the creature and the clear desire to at least do something, always a winner with voters, did at least get him re elected. On January fourth, nineteen ninety six, five months since her first apparent encounter with the Tupa Cabra, Madeline Tolentino was driving home with her two year old son around seven o'clock in the evening when she apparently

saw it again. She was just approaching the town of Arasibo, some thirty miles west of San Juan, when she apparently noticed a powerful odour reminiscent of battery acid inside her van. The smell apparently grew increasingly noxious until she began finding it hard to swallow and her throat became numb. Then her two year old son started gagging and coughing. Madeline immediately stopped the van just outside of Barrio Cambalatche, a

tiny neighborhood of around forty people. It was then that she apparently saw the creature standing in front of her vehicle. Its eyes lit up like Christmas lights, blazing of fiery orange in color. Fearing for her life, Madeline sped home and told her husband Jose, what she'd seen. It was a short time later when Jose and Madeline's uncle pulled

up just outside of Barrio Camberalatche. Finding no evidence of the creature there, the pair apparently decided to search a local wood where there'd been reports of rabbits being recent and mutilated with a bright full moon lighting the way, The pair walked cautiously into the woods, where they later claimed to see a silhouette of the creature. It was floating in the air they sat, suspended about twenty five

feet above the ground. The men claimed to have been scared witless by the encounter, but there's no record of how it supposedly ended. While no hard evidence of the cupicabra, no clear photo corpse, or material from which DNA could be analyzed, was ever found on Puerto Rico, something was killing the livestock there. During nineteen ninety five and ninety six alone, there were over two thousand unexplained animal deaths

in the country. Stories of the culprit were frequently bizarre and contradictory, often nothing more than a mixture of hearsay and local folklore, making it hard to tell fact from fiction. But gradually Puerto Rico's epidemic of alleged tuoper cabra attacks and sightings died down, and by two thousand and ten, Madeline Tolentino and her husband Jose's detailed reports of the creature had subsided in the public awareness. However, there was

one tenacious investigator still very interested in the creature. American writer, investigator, and self proclaimed skeptic Benjamin Radford had been intrigued by

mysterious and unexplained phenomena since childhood. In his career as an investigator and writer, he'd looked into incidents such as the Pokemon Panic, in which thousands of Japanese children seemingly suffered seizures while watching an episode of the Pokemon anime series, as well as the Santa Fe Courthouse ghost and the White Witch of Rose Hall, previously explored in Unexplained Season seven,

episode seven, Mansion on the Hill. Since two thousand and five, Bradford had been on the trail of the Chupa Cabra for a book he was writing about it. He followed up on reports, sightings, and carcasses of the alleged creature across the US Mexican border region, and had even made an expedition to the Jungles of Nigeria to investigate a

rash of reports of a Tuper Cabra like animal there. Now, in twenty ten, he had come to Ground Zero for Tupa Cabra Stories, Puerto Rico to interview Madeline Top and Tino. Bradford was troubled by a number of things he'd read in the transcript of her original interview, conducted a few months after her first supposed encounter with the tupacabra, and as he questioned her, he noted that some of the details of her story appeared to have changed with the

passage of time. For instance, Madeline now said that the height of the creature had been exaggerated. It had been no more than three feet tall, with five fingers, not three on each hand, and they were fingers, not claws, she insisted. Bradford also found the incredible detail in Madeline's story a little suspicious. How could she have seen and remembered so much while looking through a window some distance away?

And parts of her story seemed contradictory, he thought. At one point she said the creature walked or ran, while in other parts it hopped and even levitated. And why had Lucy Pla and Jose Rodriguez, who conducted the original interview with Madeline, not managed to corroborate her account with those of the man in the car, the young man who worked in her husband's shop, or even her own mother.

When Radford asked Madelin how the worker had managed to grab the creature and prize its mouth open to see its teeth without sustaining any injuries. She dismissed the young man's story as either an exaggeration or a lie. Radford noted that Madeline and her husband Jose were part of

a tightly knit Pentecostal Christian community. It's a brand of faith which shares beliefs with other Evangelical Protestants, but with more emphasis with the gifts of the Holy Spirit as they're called, such as speaking in tongues, faith healing, and prophesying.

Radford wondered if perhaps stress from the many struggles that Puerto Ricans were facing at the time, an HIV crisis, dengey fever, drought, the over abundance of rats, and an impending hurricane, combined with the couple's religious beliefs, had in some way led them to manifest some kind of evil creature into being in addition to the many obvious terrible

things affecting Puerto Rico in nineteen ninety five. Benjamin Radford decided to find out what other unusual things might have been happening at the same time, and there was one other possibly important event that had not been so high in the news cycle. Back in July nineteen ninety five, just a month before Madeline Tolentino and her husband Jose had their first alleged encounter with the Tuba Cabra, a major American science fiction film opened in theaters across the country.

Although poorly received by critics, it was very popular with audiences, combining science fiction and horror to give MGM one of its biggest box office successes of the year. That movie was Species. It features the creature Sil. Initially appearing in human form, Sil morphs into a sexualized insectoid alien human hybrid with long claw like fingers, reddish, upward slanting eyes, and spikes on its back. Like some of the rumors surrounding the Syl also escapes from a laboratory before going

on a voracious, murdering rampage. Sil can fly, leap, climb walls, and hop in non human ways. The opening scene of the film even puts Puerto Rico specifically very much at the epicentre of the action, with the movie's opening credits and subsequent plot linking the Puerto Ricans Arecibo observatories search for extraterrestrial intelligence to fictional research on merging human and

alien DNA. Madeline Tolentino admitted to Radford that she'd seen Species in the cinema when it was released shortly before her Cuba Cabra encounter. Radford asked her if the film had possibly made her think that there might have been an experiment and an escaped human alien hybrid at large on Puerto Rico, to which she answered yes. She added that she'd also heard from a journalist whom she considered credible that an unknown experimental creature had indeed escaped from

the El Janke forest. With that, for Benjamin Radford, at least, it seemed that all the strange apparent sightings of an unknown and terrifying predator had merely been conjured by over active imaginations triggered by the release of what was then Hollywood's biggest blockbuster. What then, of all the livestock that had very much been genuinely and mysteriously killed in vast

numbers across large areas of Puerto Rico. One Puerto Rican zoologist Edwin Velasquez, who researched the killings of Puerto Rican livestock in the nineteen nineties, believed they were simply attributable to a combination of feral dogs, the over abundance of hungry mongoose and perhaps sometimes reeseus monkeys too, that had escaped from the search labs over the decades. But what

then about the vampiric nature of the tupacabra reports. In his writings called Natural History from seventy seven to seventy nine CE, Pliny the Elder describes how night jar birds were often observed flying through goat pastures in the twilight hours, darting between the legs of cows and goats. The birds were wrongly assumed to be sucking the milk from the

goats odds, causing them to shrivel away. They were given the name Caprimorgus, which in Latin means goat sucker, which ultimately became the genus name for that family of birds. During the Middle Ages, night jars were blamed for killing the goats they supposedly sucked at. As a result, in England, they even became associated with the evil spirit park and

the devil. When Europeans discovered vampire bats in Latin America around the eighteen forties, the association between the bats and the supposedly goat sucking night jar was made, a connection likely strengthened because both animals are seen at twilight. But as it happened, stories of vampiric creatures were already well established in Puerto Rican folklore long before the arrival of colonial Europeans. Vampire stories are often considered Slavic in origin,

but they are widespread in many cultures. Pedro Vidal, a professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, has researched the origins of Latin American vampire stories and found that they go back to the Mayans, who worshiped a vampire deity

centuries before bram Stoker's Dracula story was conceived. Back in nineteen seventy five, some twenty years before the supposed Tuba cabra attacks, a number of mysterious livestock killings were two reported throughout Puerto Rico, beginning in the small town of Mocha in the northwest of the island. The deaths were initially attributed to something called El Vampiro de Moca before

they began to occur elsewhere. Just as with the Tuba cabra reports of the mid nineties, the corpses were said to have been bled dry through a series of small circular incisions, and just like the nineties were reports, no absolute proof of the culprit was ever established. For now, what Madeline Tolentino and her husband Jose really saw during those strange months of ninety five to ninety six and what was really responsible for all those animal killings on

Puerto Rico remains unexplained. Thank you as ever for listening to the show. Please subscribe and rate it if you haven't already done so. 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 McLain 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 is 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

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