The Miami Chupacabras: A Booklandia Essay
Islandia has launched a publishing partnership with Bookleggers Library called Booklandia. Our first essay? The Miami Chupacabras by Rob Goyanes. Read an excerpt and more about Booklandia below...
Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo
When we first encountered Virgilio Sanchez-Ocejo, it was in his role as president of the Miami UFO Center. We’d read articles about presentations he’d given and publications about undersea ufo bases, and local abductions.
But it turned out that his book The Miami “Chupacabras” was the one that would captivate me most. I found a copy online and decided it would be an excellent first installment for Islandia’s partnership with Bookleggers Library: Booklandia.
Booklandia
In partnership with Bookleggers, Islandia is digitizing rare and out-of-print books and ephemera which shine a light on the experience of living in South Florida. We’re commissioning essays and artwork inspired by those items.
The Miami Chupacabras
Read this excerpt from an essay about The Miami Chupacabras by Rob Goyanes:
In Miami Chupacabras, Sanchez-Ocejo recounts a visit to a ranch in Hialeah Gardens belonging to Rafael Moreno and his son Osvaldo. On the first raid, eleven of their goats were killed. When the second attack happened, Osvaldo was waiting with his 12-gauge shotgun. He fired and heard a high-pitched shriek. The creature ran, jumping like a kangaroo and disappearing into the Everglades. Hair and blood were left behind, and “the blood tracks seemed to glow in the light of my flashlight,” Osvaldo said. However, the blood and hair were gone the next day. “Someone came and took them,” he claimed. On the morning of another visit to Moreno’s ranch, Sanchez-Ocejo reported seeing a black helicopter “without marks, flying low over the ranch and disappearing.” Sanchez-Ocejo speculates that the U.S. government may have bred the chupacabras and that the helicopters were tracking them.
Most of the authorities investigating these attacks in Miami—including wildlife expert Ron Magill of Miami’s then named MetroZoo—concluded that the puncture wounds were totally in line with dog marks and that the slain animals were not, in fact, drained of any blood. In the book Cryptozoology: A to Z, the authors make a strong case for the fact that the chupacabra was one of the first folkloric monsters of the internet age: a couple dozen “goatsucker” home pages could be found online at the time, including one on Princeton University’s website, which is still accessible (and which Sanchez-Ocejo ripped most of his chronology from). This, along with traditional media such as El Show de Cristina, helped generate the chupacabra, or, depending on your stance, bring it to light.
Fugue states, hallucinations, delusions—one might be tempted to attribute belief in aliens and monsters purely to mental phenomenon. But the weird comes for everybody. Emile Blair Milgrim, a longtime resident of Miami, was tripping on acid at her friend’s house in Coral Gables one day, around 1998. They heard a rustling in the bush, so Milgrim and a friend went to check it out. “It was big and snarling and appeared bipedal, but hunched over,” she recalls. “Definitely wasn’t a dog. We ran like hell and told everyone else to get inside. Granted, we were tripping, but it was scary regardless, and since two of us experienced the same thing, it didn’t seem to be a hallucination.”
To read the rest, click below: