As I sit here listening to Arlo Guthrie singing about Alice’s Restaurant while I eat lunch, I decided to peruse once again one of my favorite sites.

After I read the article, it reminded me of other things that I have pointed out to friends and family as we gather ’round the old “Boob Tube” (Yes I still have an RCA console TV). I love to watch the oldies, specially SciFi and Monsters. The reason for that being that there was little research done, most of it was entertainment.

What your post reminded me of was one of my favorites since it takes place in Puerto Rico (my birth place). The title, Last Woman On Earth; the scene, occurs at the beginning, after the divers come back to land, they are walking through a “jungle” close to the city. But that is not the problem. The problem is that during their walk one of them pulls up a dead bird from the floor, and it happens to be a Toucan. Needless to say I was surprised since I come from the real inland jungle which we normally call rain forest, and in all the time I lived there no one that I know off ever recalls seeing Toucans except in the zoo. As a matter of fact most of the country folk probably have no idea what one looks like.

As far as Nightjars being chupacabras, that must only occur in the Americas. For what I have read they are supposed to drink or suck from a goats tit. How does this change into killing a goat I don’t know, specifically if you have seen the size of a Nightjar. By the way, all the Nightjars in the Carribean are on the endangered list so they are even scarcer (hope I used the right word) yet. And for anyone that has made their treck to Puerto Rico, you pretty much know that the farm animals are treated in a much better fashion than people in most cases, since they are the families livelihood. Any and all noises that are not regular make the farmers get up and check. And I never heard of Nightjars drinking milk from any of my neighbors in the Island.

As far as bats, how many does it take to suck a goat dry? And how long would that take? What is the bats intake of blood, ounces, gallons? And what are the chances that if there are more than one bat, they will all drink from exactly and only two perforations? And if you have ever seen bats come out of a cave, what are the chances that only one or two will get to a single victim?

There was a Mayor in Puerto Rico that wanted the study done and funded by the government, but of course, we all know how far that goes. I believe, this crypto-being may have a very long history, we are just not looking in the right places. These 50′s movies may have exploited something exotic or en-vogue at the time, you can never tell, but whatever it was, it was not made up just for that movie.

With such scarce fundings among Latin American universities, I wouldn’t hold my breath on that one.

I remember how much coverage those Chupacabras stories got during the late 1990s on the Mexican television. After a while it became evident that the networks chose those stories as a kind of disinformation campaign, to divert attention to more important and pressing matters, like the zapatista guerrilla for instance.

And because of the Chupacabra hysteria provoked, many scared Mexican farmers went out to the caves where bats sleep during the day and killed hundreds of them with torches. Since bats are the natural pollenizers of the blue agave plant (azul tequilana), the chupacabras was indirectly involved in an important decreasing of Tequila production during those years… another thing to curse those ugly critters!!

http://www.newberry.org/smith/slidesets/Images/07-4.jpg

It looks nothing like a Chupacabra, even assuming the artist had a fanciful imagination. The next two woodcuts are of a bison and a whale, and although not accurately depicted, the textual descriptions are pretty accurate.

Here is the text from the website which accompanies the picture (http://www.newberry.org/smith/slidesets/ss07.html) –

“One of the difficulties in assessing the value of Thevet’s work is his practice of transferring data from one part of his text (and geographical region) to another, both within and among his works. An excellent example of this practice is his treatment of the animal pictured in this woodcut, from Cosmographie universelle. In Les Singularitez de la France antarctique, Thevet located the Succarath in the region near the Strait of Magellan, but in Cosmographie universelle he placed it in Florida. In both cases he described the animal in similar terms: it lived near the banks of rivers and, if it were pursued, took its young on its back, covered them with its tail, and fled. Thevet added that the Timucuans of Florida captured these animals simply by building moats into which they fell. Thevet’s Succarath later appeared in Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Four-Footed Beastes (1607).”

Sixteenth-century Images of North America: The Woodcuts of André Thevet Text by Roger Schlesinger (Washington State University) © The Newberry Library, 1987″