Benjamin Radford, a leading scientific paranormal investigator, believes he has debunked the legend of  the bloodsucking beast known throughout Central America as the Chupacabra. According to his new book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore (University of New Mexico Press),” the creature originated in the imagination of Puerto Rican movie fan Madelyne Tolentino.

Tolentino claimed in August of 1995 that she saw the Chupacabra (gringo translation: sucks goats) outside her mother’s house in the town of Canovanas at 4 p.m. She described it as being four-to-five-feet-tall, having dark gray eyes that sometimes glowed orange, spikes down its spine, and walking on its hind legs. A sketched rendering of her description eventually went viral and the Chupacabra legend was born.

In his book, however, Radford suggests that the monster Tolentino described is really a re-imagining of the half -human/half-alien SIL creature seen in the 1995 sci-fi classic Species. Tolentino admitted to Radford that she had seen the movie the very same year she spotted the Chupacabra at her mother’s ranch.

Says Radford:

There’s a phenomenon known as confabulation, where people confuse things seen in dreams or movies as happening in real life. It’s a natural, normal thing, and there was a fertile social ground for her story. In early 1990s Puerto Rico, there was a preexisting belief that something weird was attacking animals and draining them of their blood.

Radford, who spent years investigating the Chupacabra, traveling to Puerto Rico and Nicaragua, makes a compelling case against the cryptid, pointing out that DNA samples acquired from suspected Chupacabras revealed them to be dogs and coyotes suffering from the skin disease sarcoptic mange. Tolentino, to this day, sticks by her story.

Who do you believe? I, for one, am only certain about one thing: Species star Natasha Henstridge can chupa my cabra anytime.

SIL made Clatto’s list of The 11 Sexiest Maneaters in Horror/Sci-fi.