El Chupacabra

A modern legend, born in the 1990s and documented as it spread

Almost every legend on this map is centuries old and cannot be traced to a first teller. The chupacabra is the exception. It was born in 1995, in Puerto Rico, and we can name the month.

In March 1995 eight sheep were found dead, each with three puncture wounds in the chest, and reported drained of blood. In August a woman named Madelyne Tolentino, in Canóvanas, described the thing responsible: about four feet tall, walking upright like a person, with huge dark wet eyes, and looking, she said, like something from another world. The description spread across the Caribbean, into Mexico, and up through the American southwest inside a couple of years.

Then somebody did the work. Benjamin Radford spent five years on it and published the result in 2011. The film Species had been released in Puerto Rico in 1995, before Tolentino's sighting. Its alien, Sil, was designed by H. R. Giger: bipedal, roughly human sized, with large dark eyes and spinal ridges. Tolentino had seen the film. In Radford's account she believed what she had watched on screen was actually happening on the island. The creature everybody has been describing ever since is, in its details, a movie monster.

The bodies people keep producing are a separate and simpler story. The mangy, hairless, grey-skinned "chupacabras" shot in Texas and northern Mexico are consistently identified as coyotes, foxes and dogs with advanced sarcoptic mange, which strips the coat, thickens and darkens the skin and makes a familiar animal unrecognisable.

None of that makes the legend less worth knowing. It makes it the best documented case anywhere of a monster forming in real time, and you can watch the whole thing happen inside thirty years.