Thursday, September 3, 2009 Chupacabra Cracked

I used to read Cracked magazine on occasion back in the day, but it was never something I actively sought out. Mad was funnier, Crazy was a bit edgier, and humor magazines as a whole were more expensive and had less reread value than my precious precious comic books. Still, I acquired dozens of issues over the years; from grown-ups looking to keep me quiet during car trips, in plastic bags sandwiched between the Warren comics and UFO magazines I really wanted, and via the complicated underground network by which kids inadvertently end up with other kid's belongings.

I encounter articles on Cracked.com much the same way. It's never a destination for me, it's not a site I have bookmarked or that I deliberately seek out. But damn if I don't drop by there on a fairly regular basis. It helps that the many of the articles have a distinct geek bent - superheroes, monsters, SF flicks, and uh, sex - that cause them to get passed around by us nerds in much the same way we did the magazine.

I bring this up because yet another chupacabra story is making the rounds - I've even been forwarded a video link via e-mail - and I can't help but think of the wisdom found in the Cracked article, The Truth Behind 5 Real Monsters That Fooled the Internet:

And, to a one, have all turned out to be coyotes or coyote hybrids with some kind of mange. Seeing as how all "eye-witness" reports describe the creature the same way – "about the size of a coyote, but hairless" – it should come as a shock to no one that the creature was actually some kind of hairless coyote.

And I'm surely not the first to point out that the current beastie is in the possession of a freakin' taxidermist!

I've posted the CNN video that everyone's talking about below. But trust me, you're much better off rading the Cracked.com article and poking about the site for a while. Hell, I've wasted twenty minutes there just writing this damn post.

And if you're interested in checking out freaky animals that actually exist, the author of the Cracked article has a series on The Most Disturbing Animals on Earth at Atom.com (the rest of the series can be found here). Warning: Do not follow the links if you get freaked out by ginormous bugs or fish with human faces.