Encounters with the Unknown—Alternate Perceptions Magazine, February 2024
Another Look at the High Strange Mysteries of Puerto Rico
Eyewitness rendering of the Chupacabra
by: Brent Raynes
Puncture wound on the side of the chest of a guinea hen in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. Once inside, whatever extended into the animal changed its trajectory several times, looking for specific organs such as the liver, heart, and others.
Photo courtesy of Peter Jordan
"The victims appear with small perfect circular holes of about one quarter of an inch to half an inch in diameter arranged in pairs or in a triangular fashion, that penetrate deep into the necks or right lower jaws of the victims," journalist, UFO author Jorge Martin of Puerto Rico reported. "These small wounds have been examined by qualified veterinarians, such as Doctor Carlos Soto, who explains that they penetrate, as a regular pattern in many of the cases, into the head of the animal, one of the holes going all the way through the right jaw bone, muscle and tissues and up to the brain, more specifically to the cerebellum, puncturing it and immediately killing the animal."
Puncture wounds on the neck of goat.
Veterinarian inspecting another Chupacabra victim.
Photos courtesy of Peter Jordan
"I actually communicated with Dr. Carlos Soto," investigative journalist Peter Jordan recently explained to me in a skype conversation. "He sent me some of the original slides and photos that show you where the wounds travel from the outside to the inside. You can actually see this tiny little hole from which something is pushed through and then part of a liver is gone, the fluids seemingly absorbed in some cases by whatever this is." At this point, Peter shock his head, uttering, "It's crazy."
"There were some cases in which people actually came upon the animal attempting to kill a chicken or animal and when it would turn they saw what they thought was its tongue sticking out, but which appeared metallic. It's been speculated that it may create the wounds using a flexible proboscis of some sort.
"Now this again is total conjecture, but it may in fact be true that they go into the body to perform biopsies of some sort for whatever reason, removing various parts of the organs. In some cases, like the chicken they look inside the skull and it's completely hollowed out. They don't even know where the brain is. It's completely hollow. Some of the veterinarians at the time said this looks to us to be the kinds of procedures that one would see in a lab, like in a modern lab with new equipment. A predator doesn't do this. A normal predator simply doesn't possess the ability to do this." "In some cases, the skin around where these incisions were made appeared to have been cauterized," Peter added.
Peter mentioned how the well-known close-range and very detailed "chupacabra" sighting of a woman named Madelyne Tolentino, shared with her husband Jose Miguel Agosto, back in August 1995, around 4 in the afternoon, was the beginning of an explosive wave of similar creature occurrences that overtook the island of Puerto Rico. "She thought there was something mechanical about it," Peter noted. "Robotic, and that comes up a lot where people said there seems to be something physical and biological, but at the same time robotic. Like a cyborg or something of that sort."
A good number of people came to suspect these so-called chupacabras were creations of the American military. "I was asked back about 1995 to lead an expedition to Puerto Rico to study various phenomena that were going on there," Marc Davenport, author of Visitors from Time, had once explained to me. "The reason I was asked is because a lot of it involved time anomalies. 'Vortexes' they call them. Portals into other dimensions where people were reporting that they would see, for instance, a kind of doorway in space where it was daylight in there, and they would look in there and see that the surroundings were different there than where they were." It was during this time, however, that the chupacabra outbreak occurred there. As a result, Marc and his team ended up investigating those cases more than anything else. I asked Marc what his take was on the situation. "Having been there myself and interviewed the witnesses myself, I have no doubt that there really was a very strange creature," he said. "If I were to make an educated guess as to what it is, I would say that it is the product of some kind of genetic engineering. Because where it was originally was right around the El Yunque Rain Forest. When we went there we went up into the rain forest, at night, looking for this thing. When we got there, at the parking lot, there is a big bronze plaque and it says, 'El Yunque Experimental Rain Forest.' It's all under the American government. There are military bases all the way around there and it would be the perfect place to release something and see what happens because it can't get off the island. And I think that's probably what happened. It makes perfect sense because all of the people who have reported this thing, at the very first, were people who lived adjacent to the rain forest, in small communities, in rural areas where they had chickens, goats, rabbits and stuff - that was their meal. This thing apparently, if I were to make a guess, caught everything in the rain forest and then it started looking at domestic animals, because I spent two nights there with a whole big group and none of us ever saw anything. No animals. We never saw a bird, a monkey, or anything. I found that very strange myself. Since there were virtually no predators there before, all of these little creatures would be sitting ducks."
Marc had to admit that the descriptions of these creatures was quite unusual and unique and although he admitted that the witnesses may have somewhat exaggerated the following details, that the chupacabras had been said to have jumped 50 feet distance and that they could run about 50 miles an hour, he did feel they had seen something quite extraordinary. "Again, probably an exaggeration, but even allowing for that it's very, very fast. Very strong. It sucks blood like a mosquito, and it would make perfect sense that an American military experimental laboratory would come up with something like that." "What a terrible thing to unleash upon your enemies."
As I was preparing this article, I reached out to Scott Corrales, author of the quintessential Chupacabras and Other Mysteries (1997), with an introduction by none other than Marc Davenport, to acquire his current thoughts on the possible genetic experimentation and/or U.S. military implications that some had expressed. Scott replied: "Puerto Rico has been used as a lab by the U.S government since the 1930s - everything from birth control to thalidomide to radiation, so the possibility wasn't far-fetched. There was a lot of research involving apes at the time at the Cayos de Santiago islands (East coast of Puerto Rico) and in the Sabana Seca Naval Facility across from San Juan. Oddly enough, many of these apes did escape in hurricanes and would be seen running around the island and terrifying households. There was even a TV clip some 5 or 6 years ago...a woman saying that these 'simios' were quite tall and had escaped from a facility."
Photo 4: Author Scott Corrales standing next to washing machine that a Mrs. Maria de Gomez claimed a Chupacabra tried to hide behind.
Jorge Martin outside Mrs. Gomez’s house.
Photos courtesy of Peter Jordan
On a visit to Puerto Rico in late December 1996, Scott Corrales visited the home of a Maria de Gomez, a woman in her mid-fifties whose property, located in the town of Barrio Valenciano, had been besieged by a number of strange visitors. In one incident, just a few nights before his visit, Mrs. Gomez headed toward the high terrace that overlooks the backyard, to see what her three-month-old pup Suki was barking about. She was quite startled when she reached the kitchen screen door and saw standing near her puppy a four-foot tall, ash-grey creature, that she judged to have been about 75 pounds. In Scott's account of what happened next, detailed in his book, Mrs. Gomez made eye contact and uttered aloud, "If you're the Chupacabras, you're a pretty sorry excuse for a creature." It reportedly slowly covered its face with its wings, moved over against a wall, and for a time half hid itself behind a washing machine. Then, eventually, the creature walked over to the railing that surrounded the terrace, jumped up on it and then flew away into the night sky. [See above picture of Scott standing by that very washing machine. He shared this picture with Peter Jordan, writing on the back of it, "I'm standing exactly next to the washing machine the Chupa used to hide from Mrs. Gomez's scorn."] Something Mrs. Gomez had reported that others had as well in these creature encounters was a mysterious "eye glow" phenomenon. "The creature's eyes were somehow able to light the entire terrace with a clear, whitish light like that of a bulb," he wrote. Jorge Martin, who had been present with Scott and his wife Carys during their visit with Mrs. Gomez, added, "According to her, the eyes of the creature emanated light, illuminating the area of the terrace with a light as clear as a light bulb or an electric torch. This detail was described to us again in the sector of the municipality of Cambalache, Canovanas, where the mother of the young lady Mary Ann Quinones had another encounter… of the same phenomenon." Madelyne Tolentino had also described seeing a bright orange eye glow.
"Aside from the eye glow there was the odor - a strong chemical smell associated with the creature, likened to the pesticide Malathion," Scott Corrales also explained. Madelyne Tolentino made such a comparison herself. "It's a really strong smell, like Malathion poison," she noted. "It suffocates you."
"I was wondering if the smell is actually being used defensively," Peter pondered. "Police officers and civil defense people visiting sites suffered a variety of ailments. Some people had a hard time breathing." He began to wonder if something like this was being used to render animals unconscious or even dead. "We have so many cases in which people said they're in their farmhouse, they hear a noise out in the corral or out where the animals are penned up, and they'll hear a lot of screaming and then in seconds there's no noise at all. They said that's very unusual because even if it's coyotes or other predators that are attacking them as they will put up a fuss and the fuss will go on for quite a while before they're killed and some of these were like 20 - 30 chickens all killed completely. All dead, lying down." "In some cases, like we had with some of the mutilation cases and other cases that people have documented in the past, including Keel by the way, the animals are seen lined up in a row. I saw photographs in which you could actually see calves laid out perpendicular to one another, a short distance between each as if somebody was measuring and just doing it as a demonstration of: 'Look what we can do.' That type of thing." Scott Corrales reported on other strange things that Mrs. Gomez had claimed had also transpired on her property. "A black, hairy, Bigfoot-like creature had been seen through the trees on the plantation only a few years earlier, and Mrs. Gomez had seen small, silver-suited Greys hold hands and jump over a fence to escape from a watchdog," he added. "A local industry had dumped chemicals into a pond or small lake beyond the tree-covered plantation, she explained. Eventually it was used to dump so many different kinds of waste that it would have been impossible to sit on the terrace we were on without being nauseated by the odor. It was at this point that the strangeness began. While tending to the vegetable gardens at the far end of the property, Mrs. Gomez and her daughter had seen Greys running toward the vicinity of the contaminated pond." Scott also pointed out how Jorge Martin and his wife Marleen had "found that many cases involving supposed alien activity on the island revolve around environmental and ecological issues and a concern for how we humans seem hell-bent on polluting and destroying our own world."
This part of Scott's book reminded me of a conversation I had with noted author and paranormal researcher Rosemary Ellen Guiley at the Mothman Festival in 2015 at Point Pleasant, West Virginia. "Out in the TNT area, I've seen shadow people quite frequently in the igloos area," she told me. "They walk along the trails there and sometimes they actually lurk around the igloos themselves." (The igloos are dome-shaped concrete storage facilities that housed explosives going back to World War II) "Shadow people look humanoid but they're not. They're entities that take on like a very dark silhouette of a person. They're drawn to areas of intense energies; especially if there's been a lot of negative energy like the TNT area, very contaminated because of the explosives and the things that have leached into the ground. And then that often creates or enhances the natural portal area that opens the window for a lot of strange things."
Hector Jusino (R) and Brent Raynes (L)
Photo courtesy of Scott Harrison
Hector Jusino today lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, but he grew up in Puerto Rico. He's in fact retired from a career in the US Army. He had quite a story to share with me about creatures he and some friends of his experienced in his homeland back in October 1973. "I was 16. At this age I went on a trip around the Island with a group of friends from high school. Two of my friends acquired a couple of Jeep Vehicles that were what we call an SUV today. Puerto Rico is only 100 miles long and 35 miles wide. In other words, you can go around the Island in a day if you wish. We wanted to go around the Island, stay one night at the beach, and then go to the highest mountain on the Island and camp there for a night. The name of the mountain is El Yunque. It is a federal reserve, a rain forest. We made it to El Yunque late in the afternoon." "We did not have tents, so we were looking for a dry place where we could sleep. We found that the Ranger's station could be a great place to stay. The rangers were gone for the day. The station had a huge awning, and there was a gazebo with a grill where we could cook. At the gazebo was the first encounter that we had that night. I was walking to the gazebo with another two friends to start the fire. It was that time of the day that is not dark yet but is not full day either. Then, in the bushes behind the gazebo, we saw a humanoid figure, sort of a shadow, One of my friends asked, "What is that"? Then I asked him for a flashlight, and when I directed the light towards the animal, he ran so fast that we could not tell which way it was going. Then it came back, went between us and ran towards the vehicles knocking down one of our friends and leaving a trail of broken branches. We ran scared towards the vehicles. We were asking each other to be able to identify what kind of animal was that and we decided that there were mountain cats (there is no such animal on the Island). Later that night we went to sleep under the awning in our sleeping bags. Our sleep was interrupted by several bats flying under the awning. There were so many that we decided to abandon the place and move out and off the mountain. While traveling down the mountain we saw three humanoid animals standing by the road. The road is very narrow. I was sitting at the passenger's side of my vehicle, so I had a very good look at these animals. The tallest one was over five feet tall. The other ones were between 4 and 5 feet tall. The face was triangular and resembled a dog. The arms were long and skinny, ending in claw-like hands, and the legs were long and skinny ending in something that resembled hoofs. The eyes were orange, and they were shinning in the dark. At this moment we went into a daze, then we found ourselves out off the mountain, close to a baseball park. About 2 1/2 hours had passed. We have no recollection of what happened during that time. All my friends were like in a trance. I saw a police car coming and I got out of my vehicle with another of my friends and talked to the police. They asked us the reason we were parked over there so late at night and we told them that we were looking for a place to camp. We were told that we could not stay there, that camping was allowed only on the mountain. We decided to go back to the Ranger's station. Going up we saw two more of these animals. By the time we arrived at the station we were tired. We went to sleep in the vehicles. In the morning, during a conversation with the rangers, they told us that on the radio some people were talking about seeing UFOs in the area and seeing the animals we saw that night."
"My first experience was when I was 12. I was in an outdoor chapel in a religious retreat. We were praying and noticed a very bright and small light traveling towards us in the sky. It was about 7 p.m. The light became bigger and bigger and stopped in front of us. It was huge, perfectly round. It had no noise and was shining in a white-bluish color. The orb was floating above a cross that is on the chapel. Then it started to send rays of light up, down, left and right. At this time, we believed that this was a miracle. Then the orb sent a ray of light toward us, illuminating the whole area with a very bright light. Then the orb regained the original shape, became smaller and flew away very fast, disappearing into the sky. After this event people started to tell me that I was selected by God to fulfill a mission that never came. Since that experience, for the rest of my life, I have been having paranormal experiences that make people think that I have something special. I was for many years believing that there was something spiritual to these experiences. I joined many churches and ended up frustrated. Then I joined groups of New Age believers, only to get to the same spot I was with religion."
"After the two experiences mentioned before, I started to have some sort of psychic ability. I could tell what was going to happen a few minutes before it happened. I would develop a migraine headache and get sick after these episodes. I used to hate them. They were out of my control. My peers thought I was weird. Also, I didn't like getting sick. After these experiences, life went kind of normal for a whole. I graduated high school, went to college and graduated. Then I joined the US Army. During all these times I had these episodes where I could tell how people felt inside. Sometimes it was very disturbing to feel people that way that I did not know. I could feel their happiness, sadness, and sometimes I could see their 'dark side.' I would get visions in my mind too. They were like flashes of information with no particular order. Part of the time my mood would be affected by it. All of this had me very confused."
“The concentration of reported UFO and alien activity at the El Yunque rain forest, located in the eastern region of Puerto Rico, is really both overwhelming and astounding,” Jorge Martin told me in 2016. “There are reports of such activity at least since the 1930s. I have personally investigated a large number of such cases, which range from sightings of flying saucer type and cigar-shaped crafts (some of them of huge proportions) and encounters with alien beings of different types (both humanoid 'Greys' and tall blond human-looking aliens). Also, there have been encounters with strange, hairy creatures (not the bigfoot type creatures), as well as weird looking 'animals'.”
“There have been at least two UFO crashes in the forest (possibly three), that I've investigated. One occurred in February, 1984, and another one in March-April 1987. Another aspect of the situation in the El Yunque rain forest is a significant involvement of US military personnel that seem to be related to the UFO/alien events there.”
“I became aware of the manifestation of apparent wormholes over Puerto Rico back in the 1980s, but since 1991-92 the phenomenon has become more intense. Holes appear in our sky, from which flying saucer, cylinder or sphere-shaped UFOs emerge, and then fly away in different directions or go down and enter the sea.”
I asked Jorge about psychic phenomena being reported by UFO/contact experiencers following their encounters, to which he replied: “Yes, many such phenomena emerge during the witness-abductee testimonies about their experiences. Some have emerged on a conscious level and some when the witnesses were submitted to hypnotic regressions. Telepathy and poltergeist-like activity also emerge, as well as out of body experiences and abductions in that state. Also, the manifestation of small balls of light and levitation. They also mention very fast-moving entities that seem to be watching them at home.” “Also in Puerto Rico animal/cattle mutilations started in the year 1974. As the events started in the town of Moca, they were dubbed ‘El vampire de Moca’ victims (The Moca Vampire). Those who saw what was doing the attacks described it as a small weird hairy creature.”
What are we to make of such high strange anomalous reports? Military psy ops maneuvers? Mass hysteria? Jungian psychoid type archetypes of the collective unconscious? Or, are they literally what witnesses allege seeing and experiencing: actual ET or interdimensional visitors to our world? Who or what is the projectionist behind these many bizarre and extraordinary accounts? In the reports of the so-called Chupacabras, what of the unusual veterinarian reports related to the animal deaths in those cases?
As Rosemary Ellen Guiley used to ask: Who is the Oz behind the curtain?
Whoever or whatever it is, I’m with Vallee on how it seems doubtful that it’s going to be as simple and straightforward as the ufological mainstream has long contended.
