The Calama chupacabras wave, Chile 2000

Early April 2000. On the farm plots at the edges of Calama, in Chile's Antofagasta Region, smallholder Pedro Villegas, 78, went to his corral. "I went to the corral and it was a mess," he said. "There were dead animals everywhere." Some accounts give 31 sheep. Revista Paula gives 60 pregnant ewes.

Across La Banda, Ojo de Opache and Chunchuri, more animals died. Two punctures at the neck. José Salinas found no tracks, and not a drop of blood in the corral. One animal had its belly opened "with incredible precision." One count reached 147 animals in 20 days.

Then people began to see something. Farmer René Cabrera, 57, watched it move in leaps beside a frightened horse. "It was a thing about one metre twenty, with hair and no horns," he said. "It didn't have wings either." Others described glowing eyes, enormous fangs and long clawed arms. Lidia Fuentes saw luminous eyes. Her dogs, Oso and Osa, crossed into the shade and began to whimper.

19 April. Carabineros searching the north bank of the Río Loa fired shots at an unknown intruder. They reported strange footprints, which were sent to Santiago. The next day about 60 people joined the search. Firefighters, Carabineros, Investigaciones and SAG staff combed the riverbanks in a sweep, the "operación rastrillo", authorised by Governor Francisco Segovia.

The reports spread south. 29 April, 8 pm. Near Huépil, farm worker José Ismael Pino, 59, went looking for a loose bull and met an ape-like creature about 4 ft tall, with long clawed arms, huge fangs and wings. His dogs attacked it. His dog Cachorro came back with a bloodstained neck. On 30 May at Baquedano, Evelyn Esbry said the creature jumped on her back. She fainted, and was treated in hospital for scratches. At Tocopilla, residents watched it climb a hill "making reptilian like movements like a small lizard."

Víctor Espinoza, described by Paula as an agronomist with Investigaciones, took casts and hair samples. "The paw prints do not match those of horses, cows, goats, pigs, felines or wild dogs," he said. "I never saw anything like it." The PDI drew a composite sketch from witness testimony.

Others read the evidence differently. A large print analysed by the Universidad Católica in Antofagasta proved to be an abnormal dog print. The Loa search found only dog tracks. Major Pereira of the 1st Comisaría spoke of a "psicosis colectiva." Officials blamed hungry feral dogs from the municipal dump, and said the missing blood had clotted in the tissue. Lucas Burchard of the hospital's environmental-hygiene department culled stray dogs with strychnine-laced fat. According to Paula, the killings stopped.

Three pigs found "exsanguinated" had been punctured with an ice pick. A story spread that soldiers had captured three creatures near a Calama mine, and that NASA took them away by helicopter. No confirmation exists. Other theories blamed circus monkeys, Satanic cults and arsenic mutation from Chuquicamata.

Investigator Jaime Ferrer of the Calama UFO Center "closed" the case in February 2007. He maintained that "the so-called Chupacabras phenomenon is a real fact," and complained that the PDI never released its analyses. A Megavisión special drew more than 30 rating points. Critic Paulo Ramírez answered: "The Chupacabras doesn't exist… turn off the cameras."

Diego Zúñiga later wrote on the social impact of a media-driven belief. Benjamin Radford, writing more widely, found that "drained" victims were never confirmed by necropsy. In Calama, the memory stays. In 2018, Juana Espinoza described it as "like a monkey, with a dog's head."