The Chupacabra is perhaps the most famous ‘modern’ cryptid, sort of a new kid on the block next to Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, with stories of the creature only coming into vogue in the last two and half decades or so. In his book “Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore” author Benjamin Radford does an excellent job investigating the creature, its origins and its affect on pop culture.
Radford opens the book with a run down of the origins of the Chupacabra mystery before describing the folklore surrounding the creature. Radford settles on the Chupacabra essentially being a vampire and stories of the creature stemming from vampire lore, and radford does a fascinating job describing a history of old world and new world vampires. He also throughly investigates and analyzes the place of Chupacabra in the both the Spanish speaking and English speaking worlds.
Radford also devotes a portion to the book to the search for the chupacabra, but where many authors and armchair investigators would be content to analyze the searches and results conducted and retrieved by others,(Which Radford does as well) Radford actually goes to investigate for himself. Radford spent some time searching for the creature in Nicaragua, a region known for more recent sightings of the mystery creature. He throughly outlines and describes his experiences searching for the creature and his time in the jungle. Radford approaches all of his investigations from a grounded,rational and fair point of view.
“Tracking the Chupacabra” aims to not only track the creature, but also to attempt o solve the mystery. Radford is a skeptic, but approaches the topic with an open mind, always asking the question “What is this thing, and what else could it be?” Before jumping to the conclusion that its a mystery creature with no analogues in the fossil record or contemporaries in the animal kingdom. He points out problems in logic, and guides the reader through his thought process rather than just dismissing the subject. In reading the book one gets the feeling that Radford really did give the creature’s existence a fair shake, walks the reader through his investigation and outlines how it works. Radford is also transparent about how he comes to his conclusions about the Chupacabra.
I am a fairly skeptical person, and I am definitely prone to dismissing things I find absurd out of hand, which is not always popular in the Cryptozoology community. It could be easy for Cryptozoology fans to assume that Benjamin Radford, the managing editor for the Skeptical Inquirer and research fellow at “Committee for Skeptical Inquiry” is not going to give the Chupacabra and its existence the time of day, but my read of the book outlining his 5 year investigation is just the opposite. He takes all the tools he has as an investigator and asks difficult questions, tracks down primary sources, and analyzes the effect the creature has had on society. The book “Tracking the Chupacabra” is one hundred percent worth the read and time spent for anyone interested in the Chupacabra phenomenon.
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