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In southern Texas, Sheriff Joe D's Avesky's police department presides over a remote rural area. Dewitt County is a large county, 910 square miles. There are a lot of uninhabited areas of the county. The more the population spreads out, you begin to see more of these animals or creatures that you didn't really know inhabited the same county you did. On August 8th, 2008, two deputies are on a routine patrol down a country road. Their dash cam captures a bizarre creature. This animal is a little bit more than weird, it's unnatural. They did not know what it was.
It seems dog-like, but this misshapen animal is no ordinary canid. It's almost had an alien look to it. It's got pointed ears that stick up atop its head. It's got an elongated snout, fangs, protruding canines. First instinct is to be repulsed. The deputies believe this is evidence of a legendary blood sucking vampire dog. In South Texas, this close to Mexico, there has always been legends of different animals. We have this mythical creature called the chupacabra. Descriptions of the chupacabra vary throughout the Americas, but in Texas, it takes the form of a hideous blood sucking hellhound. With a growing reputation, more and more stories came out about
these livestock that were killed in the strange manner, and these were all attributed to El Chupacabras. And there is strange supporting evidence that a blood-sucking monster is terrorizing Texas. Nutritionist Dr. Phyllis Canyon owns a ranch in Tarrant County. In 2007, an unidentified beast slaughters her livestock. Its method of attack is chilling. Whatever was getting in was just killing one chicken and leaving it. Always open up in that thorax area. And that's where they would lick all the blood out.
Never touched the meat. They were just sucking all the blood out of it. Experts acknowledge that on rare occasions, when something spooks a predator, it may leave similar bite marks. What happens is that a dog or coyote will attack an animal, they'll bite it on the neck, and then they'll run away. And the animal will die from internal hemorrhaging. But on Phyllis Canyon's farm, this is not a rare event. It's a persistent way of feeding. It happened through 28 chickens. 28 chickens were identical. It craves blood and not the meat.
The vampire beast stays in the shadows until Phyllis has a close encounter with the macabre creature. Something caught my eye, and when I looked over, I am shocked. I've seen a lot of things, but I've never seen an animal that looked like that. The chance sighting leads Phyllis to a chilling conclusion. Whatever it was that I was seeing was killing my chickens. The sheriff's department hears of Phyllis's sightings and shows her their video for comparison. The creature she saw in her pasture exactly matches the beast on the dash cam. That moment that it looks to the side was the icing on the cake. The top mandible was longer than the bottom mandible, and it was very evident. It is the most unusual animal that I've ever seen in my entire life.
Dr. Kenyon makes it her mission to identify the bizarre beast. I didn't know what I had seen. I had no idea. Whatever it is, I'm going TO FIND OUT. INVESTIGATORS STUDY the video's details to try to explain the bizarre creature. [screaming] One freakish feature of the beast is its strange hairless hide. It was kind of a bluish gray, and it looked like you were looking at the skin of an elephant on it. It looked rough and At first, researchers suggest the lack of fur could be consistent with a parasitic infection.
Animals get what's called mange, and it's a skin disease caught by mites. The mange mite burrows down in the skin, uh and it actually makes the hair fall out in little areas, and the skin kind of crusts over. But a skin infection cannot explain the other distinctive features in the footage. It turns his head to the side and his profile is really weird. This thing is strange. Researchers struggle to explain dashcam evidence of a bizarre predator in Texas. Some suggest the beast may be the victim of a chemical mutation.
We do live in a farming and ranching area in this part of South Texas. Um there are chemicals that are put out uh some animal could come into contact with. Perhaps the creature in this footage is a product of some mutation from when it was in the womb. Chemical mutations can create nightmarish deformities. But rather than showing signs of a debilitating birth defect, the Texas vampire seems to be thriving. It's clearly well adapted to the environment and is a very fast predator. Able to avoid people and still find enough food and therefore pass their genes on to THE NEXT GENERATION.
EXPERTS REMAIN PUZZLED, but a phone call finally gives Dr. Canyon a chance to identify this bloodthirsty predator. The chupacabra met its demise when somebody hit it with a car on the highway. The flesh and blood version of a mythical beast is now in her grasp. I could actually start to study it and figure out what it was. To get an accurate reconstruction of the beast's bizarre features, she hires a taxidermist. And the result reveals a Frankenstein combination of animal parts. The texture of the skin reminds me of some type of an elephant hide.
The bottom mandible is about an inch shorter than the top mandible. When we look at the animal and we put all of these abnormalities together, the mystery still is what is this? But Phyllis now has access to the beast's genetic blueprint. Veterinary forensics experts at UC Davis in California process a cell sample and send back the results. I had the DNA. And as I sat there and read it, I was totally amazed. They said, "It does not fit any animal that we have in our DNA bank. It had coyote on the maternal side and Mexican wolf on the paternal side."
