The DeWitt County Dashcam Chupacabra

Cuero sits between San Antonio and Victoria, in DeWitt County, Texas. By the summer of 2008 the town was already at the centre of the Texas chupacabra story. A year earlier, Phylis Canion of the 7C Ranch had found a dead, hairless animal outside a neighbour's property. She photographed it and froze the head. Tests at Texas State University in San Marcos identified it as a coyote. That was a separate case. It would not stay separate in the telling.

August 8, 2008. Cpl. Brandon Riedel was a field training officer with the DeWitt County Sheriff's Office. That day he was training a new deputy, whose name has never been reported. The two were checking fence lines on the back roads outside town.

Something was running down a dirt path along the fence.

It looked like a coyote. But not quite. Grey skin. Short hair or no hair. Long back legs and short front legs. A snout-like nose and two very distinct fangs. Riedel turned on the dashboard camera. Later he explained why. "You need to record something like this because it's not every day you find something that looks like this, running around out in the middle of the county."

The animal did not break for the brush. It kept to the road, ahead of the patrol car. "It just doesn't look like your average coyote or dog or anything," Riedel told reporters. He was a man who knew those roads. "I've been patrolling these back roads for a long time and I never run across anything like this."

On August 12, KSAT 12 in San Antonio aired the footage, with reporter Tim Gerber. CNN, NBC affiliates and Fox followed. For many viewers it was the first film of a live chupacabra. Sheriff Jode Zavesky was candid. "You know, it's just kind of one of those things to hear about and talk about, but to actually see something on video that may actually be a live one, that's pretty amazing." He offered to work with any credible researchers who wanted to look at the video and solve the mystery.

In 2011 the Syfy series Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files took up the clip. Ben Hansen, Chi-Lan Lieu and Devin Marble travelled to DeWitt County and collected DNA samples from a rancher's carcass. They tried to recreate the dashcam footage with a miniature horse and a Mexican Hairless Dog, a Xoloitzcuintli, both bred locally. Neither matched the animal in the video. The episode aired on April 20, 2011.

No one accused the deputies of a hoax. The answer offered most often is a coyote with sarcoptic mange. Zavesky himself suspected it was the same type of coyote identified in 2007. In 2010, University of Michigan biologist Barry O'Connor concluded that chupacabra reports in the United States were coyotes infected with the mite Sarcoptes scabiei, which causes fur loss and thickened skin. On Loren Coleman's Cryptomundo blog, commenters raised a Xoloitzcuintli or a hybrid dog. Some asked whether a stretched picture and a zoom about 43 seconds in made the legs and snout look stranger than they were. Others saw skin that looked worse than ordinary mange.

In 2019 the Texas Cryptid Hunter blog called the clip "the Patterson-Gimlin footage of the chupacabras world." It also pushed back on the mange theory. "Whatever this creature was, it was clearly healthy." Author and illustrator Xavier Garza says the chupacabra's dog-like image took hold after the deputy's dashcam video. Before it, the creature was a spiny, upright thing. The animal on Riedel's tape was never caught. The footage is all that remains.