I just ran across some video which CNN aired last month, of a supposed chupacabra found in Texas.  You can watch the video here and make your own decisions - personally, I am 110 percent sure that this is a coyote with mange.

We have seen this problem before, with coyotes, bears, foxes, and raccoons.  Although most cases of mange result merely in a patchy (or "mangy" if you will) coat, some cases can be so extreme that the animal loses every single hair on its body.  These poor suffering animals - who look quite alien by this point - are then driven to unusual lengths in order to get a meal.  Like raiding a rancher's barn, as happened with this Texas incident.

El Chupacabra (it's never "LA chupacabra," even though the word ending in -a should be female, shouldn't it?  And aren't there any lady chupacabras?) is a beast which hails from south of the border.  Central and South American ranchers and indigenous peoples have talked about the "goatsucker" which bites their livestock, then bleeds them dry.  In many cases, for unknown reasons, the chupacabra bites twice in the same hole.  (That's a weird detail, but it's common to many reports, so I wanted to pass it along.)

The original chupacabra was described as a sort of short, ground dwelling pterosaur.  It had a pointed beak-like face, and membranous wings stretched between its front and rear legs.  The kind of "wings" you would see on a gliding animal.  It was spotted at night in the darkness, either by flashlight or by a car's headlights, reflected upon the animal's eerie glowing eyes (probably just an everyday tapetum lucidum, like your cat or dog has).  In many reports, the animal had a row of sharp spines from the neck down to the base of the tail.

The earliest chupacabra sightings happened in 1995 in Puerto Rico, where the bodies of sheep and goats began to turn up with large puncture wounds.  At first, the reports blamed the killings on Satanic cults who needed the blood for their sacrifices.  Soon people began spotting the alien creature, and blaming it for the killings.  (Is that really fair?  It could just be a coincidence!)

Something about the chupacabra legend has proven to be quite "contagious," which is of intense interest to those who study the spread of urban legends.  Chupacabras have been reported as far afield as Maine, Russia, and Italy.  Just about everyone has heard of the chupacabra, which is a little surprising, considering that it was only "discovered" fourteen years ago.  Think of how many people have never heard of a capybara, and that's a real animal!

Many chupacabra sightings and carcasses have been tracked down, and so far all signs point to "mangy coyotes" or just plain old "overactive imaginations."  But that isn't to say that the chupacabra does not exist!  After all, one theory held that they were aliens visiting from another planet (or from the world inside the hollow core of our own).  In which case, maybe they just had to phone home for a little while!