Upright grey-green creature about the height of a child standing on bare ground at dusk, hairless, with large solid black eyes and a row of stiff spines down its back, a wire fence behind it. The chupacabra as first described in 1995.

the first description

This follows the 1995 description and not any of the ones that came after it: standing upright, hairless, spined along the back, with eyes that have no white in them. Everything the creature later became was built on top of this.

Basis: The first Puerto Rican eyewitness description, 1995 · AI-generated

About the Chupacabra

A folk creature born in 1995: the only one whose birth can be dated, sourced and followed week by week.

Benjamin Radford, Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore (2011)Book-length investigation of the legend's origin and spread, including interviews and a reconstruction of how the first detailed description entered circulation. The argument about where that description came from is Radford's own.

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