The Chupacabras

Supernatural ideas like the Tralfamadorians are common everywhere, in fiction and life. Billy believes that he was kidnapped by these aliens right before his daughter’s wedding  and taken for months, while he only missed out on Earth for a few seconds. he questions them on why they captured him and they tell him that it’s because they are trapped in a blob of amber. The Tralfamadorians probably mean that the two worlds are coming together, in a “blob of amber.” Coming back to a point I mentioned before in this blog, imagining these mysterious creatures is Billy’s way to fill in the unknown and deal with his memories of the past. As humans every time know more about the universe and overall about what we don’t know, some people start believing in supernatural things and claiming them to be the reason for things we can’t explain. 

This alien encounter Billy has reminds me of a common myth from Puerto Rico, where my mother is from. A few decades ago large numbers of goats started to die in rural small farms. Their owners claimed to have founded them with their blood sucked out from what looked like a vampire bite. Thanks to that, they started calling the unknown creature that supposedly killed the animals the Chupacabras, or the goat sucker. I am completely sure that such thing doesn’t exist, but I find it interesting knowing about what made people start believing in things like that or how they react to it. I didn’t know much about this myth, only what I had heard from family in Puerto Rico, so I decided to look up what people thing about it. Farmers in the Puerto Rican pastoral mountains said tens of goats were killed at night. They found bites on their bodies and, as I said before, without blood. As a response, people decided to have the goats be analyzed. No one knew what was happening, but experts almost never agreed on that it was a creature from outer space. Even the University of California did some DNA tests on the marks and found that it was probably a coyote. This lead to the people who believed in the existence of the Chupacabras to started questioning how did a coyote get to Puerto Rico. Their only reasonable explanation was that they were alien coyotes. Taking about all this into consideration, I think that supernatural beliefs are inevitable. Humans will never know everything and most of us need an explanation for what we can’t understand, so we use superstitions for as something to lie on.