The Chupacabras Attack on Teodora Ayala Reyes, Alfonso G. Calderón, Sinaloa (1996)

Spring 1996. Mexico was gripped by stories of the chupacabras. In northern Sinaloa, goats were reportedly "found daily with their blood sucked dry," and farmers had formed night vigilante squads. One small corn-farming village sits at the centre of this story. The wire reports call it Alfonso Calderón. Later Mexican retellings call it Alfonso Genaro Calderón. It is most likely Alfonso G. Calderón, known as Poblado Siete, in the Ahome municipality.

The night of 27 April 1996, by one account. Another gives 1 May. Teodora Ayala Reyes was 21. She had stepped out into the yard of her house at night to relieve herself. Then she heard it. A flapping of wings.

What came at her is described differently from one source to the next. One account gives a creature one metre tall, with a long, sharp beak. Another describes something large, with a kind of trunk and claws. She said it attacked her. As best she could, she defended herself and escaped. Afterwards she told her husband.

She was left with marks. A 1996 wire story spoke of tooth marks on her neck. Another account mentions light scratches on the neck. The Tucson Weekly reported a bite on the arm. A Brazilian retelling describes marks on the face and bites on the body.

The Cox News Service reported that "a teary-eyed Jauna Tizoc" said she was attacked by a horrifying winged creature. She showed tooth marks on her neck. The interview was publicized by Televisa, Mexico's major television network. The name is almost certainly a garbled version, and the event the same.

The village did not wait. According to Zócalo, the whole community went out armed with sticks and machetes to hunt the chupacabras. People slept with weapons under their pillows. Security and civil protection agencies searched using a composite sketch drawn from Teodora's description. That sketch has never been found.

The Tucson Weekly went further. It reported that the monster had been captured in the tiny ejido. When a team of government researchers arrived, the creature had disappeared. "It flew away, the villagers said, north toward Arizona."

Desiderio Aguilar, director of Sinaloa's municipal police, was unconvinced. "She said a beast with horns attacked her, but that could be anything, like a bull." He saw a larger problem. "We have goatsucker psychosis," he said. "People won't send their kids to school, farmers won't work at night. It's a social and economic problem." No official report on the case has been located.

The sceptics had their say. In El Escéptico, Spanish sceptics noted that her marks looked less like bites than tears in the skin or burns. The Pensar article recorded a less charitable rumour. The cynical said the whole story was cover for marks left by a lover. Others saw the wave as collective hysteria driven by the media, or as a political smoke screen after the 1994 crisis. That last idea concerns the wave as a whole, not this woman.

The case survives under two names, Teodora Ayala Reyes in Spanish sources and Jauna Tizoc in the American press. In the same weeks, José Ángel Pulido Briseño of Tlajomulco, Jalisco, also claimed an attack. The Christian Science Monitor wrote of a woman attacked by "a flying, fanged beast" who showed neighbors the bites, possibly the same story. No photograph, no film of the creature and no medical report has surfaced. The Televisa interview itself has not been located. What remains is a village in Sinaloa, a sound of wings in the dark, and a young woman who said she fought something off.