The Chupacrabra pt 2: The $10,000 reward offer and the Cryptid's Origin w/ Ben Radford

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Welcome back to MVPs.

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What the f**k, what the f**k, what the f**k, what the f**k?

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Paranormal Podcast, where we talk about, well, everything the paranormal encompasses.

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So you ready?

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Let's f**king do this.

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Hey, welcome back everyone.

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We're going to finish our interview of Ben Radford, the world's foremost expert on the Chupacabra.

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Remember, this is the dude that actually traveled to Puerto Rico and throughout South America to conduct witness interviews, investigate sites and alleged evidence and extensively researched the Chupacabra for five years.

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He left no stone unturned.

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So, without further ado, ben, take it away my position is always if I'm wrong, um then, uh, then then show me.

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Like, for example, I talked earlier about how the chupacabra only dates back to 95.

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Yeah, this comes as a shock to most people because they're like, how could that be?

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Like, I Like I, and so I, when, when my book came out and I've I've talked about this, uh, in in interviews and written articles, I've had people come up to me and say you're wrong.

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I know for a fact that you book cover exists because you know I heard about it in the 1970s in Texas.

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Or or you're wrong because my grandfather told me about it in the 50s, or else.

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And my answer is always prove it Right, show me.

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And I actually have a standing reward of $10,000.

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It's a legitimate reward.

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I got the money, it's all there.

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It's a legitimate reward, I got the money, it's all there.

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I said, if you can show me a pre-1995 or pre-1990s reference to a chupacabra that sucks blood, not milk.

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So we're not talking about the whippoorwill bird, we're talking about the chupacabra that we all recognize bipedal, quadruped, whatever else that sucks blood.

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Find me a reference in a magazine, a newspaper article, something that I can go to that's dated not.

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I remember my mom saying something, not you know.

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They say that because that's not how these things work.

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So right, even.

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Even if.

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Even if you tell me that you remember your grandfather telling about the chupacabras in the 1970s, what did he hear about?

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Some folklorist, some researcher, some newspaper article?

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Somebody must have written that word down somewhere.

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So that's been my standing offer and that's always been my response.

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Like you think I'm full of shit, you think I got it wrong.

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That's fine.

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What do you got?

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Do your research, show me what you got.

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And so far no one's come up with anything but it could be that some people think that they remember their grandparents telling them something like with the mandela effect.

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Like I swear, I remember watching the chinese guy in tiananmen square getting run over by a tank and, lo and behold, here I am 50 years old, real, finding out that, no, that shit never happened.

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But I can remember it like it's yesterday and we did an episode on the Mandela effect.

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So I'm thinking, you know, maybe they think, maybe they do have a memory of something that never happened.

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I think that's.

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That's the case.

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I mean again, I, you know I, when people tell me, I don't think they're lying, I don't think they're trying to pull one over on me.

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I believe they're sincere, I believe they genuinely believe that they remember that.

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And I tell people I'm not saying you're wrong, You're wrong and you're a grotesquely ugly freak.

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Thanks, If you're right, then you can earn yourself $10,000.

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I'll be happy to credit you in my book.

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I'll add a new chapter.

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You're not wrong.

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Yeah, so there's that.

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I don't think that's going to happen.

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We always say there is no expert in the paranormal, but this is one time where I can honestly say this fucker is the expert on this topic.

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I mean, he wrote the fucking book, literally, literally, on this topic.

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I mean he wrote the fucking book literally, literally after five years.

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When you came to the conclusion that, yeah, this was just bullshit, were you disappointed.

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Well, a little bit maybe, just like this, like just a tiny, just a skosh.

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I don't know if I was disappointed because to, to my mind and this is going to sound kind of cheesy, but it's true, it's like to my mind, the journey was the value.

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You know what?

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Let me, let me, just, I'm gonna, just, I'm gonna read you like the last, because I I wrote it.

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Well, I might as well just quote myself, if, if you'll, if you'll, forgive me yeah absolutely.

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Why, then, write this book?

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Why spend considerable time, effort and money to disprove something that skeptics never believed existed in the first place and which believers will ignore?

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There are two answers.

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The first is that this book was written for people with open minds, not those closed with certainty on either end of the spectrum.

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I've done my best to research, understand and explain the entire Chupacabra phenomena using logic and scientific analysis.

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Ultimately, readers will make up their own minds.

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The more important answer is that my research is not really about the Chupacabra.

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The vampiric beast almost certainly cannot and does not exist.

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This book is instead about folklore made real, how ancient superstitions inherent in the human mind gave the European vampire a fearsome new face at the end of the 20th century.

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It is about how sincerely respected eyewitnesses who claim to have seen monsters can be completely wrong.

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It is about how careful investigation in science can solve mysteries created by rumor, speculation and sloppy research.

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It is about how rumor combined with sensationalized news reports helped create a monster and about how the Chupacabra label fills the gap between what lay people guess and what scientists know.

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So that's Fuck.

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Yeah, that was awesome.

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Damn it, boy.

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Thank you, I worked on that.

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He's like thank you.

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Thank you very much.

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I'll be here all week.

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I mean it's weird, being sort of like the expert.

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I mean you can look at this and say, dude, you spent five years on this, what the fuck is wrong with you?

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And I get that.

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I mean it's like you know.

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It's like it's like if you I mean it was a lot of time, it was money, it was research, but it was something that I was passionate about church, but it was something that I was passionate about.

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And I love mysteries, I really do.

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And this is one of the cool things, for you know, as you said, I mean I'm literally I'm not bragging, I just no one else put in the time and the effort to do this.

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And so you know and I say this a lot about my investigations and I'm sure Mel has heard me say this before it's not that I'm the smartest guy in the room, it's not that I have some special talents or knowledge or else it's just that I put in the time and the effort and put in the legwork and piece it together.

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Any one of you could have done that if you had put in that time and the effort.

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So well, no, because there's a lot of people.

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Let's be honest.

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Okay, let's just keep this shit real for right now, and our listeners know this too, because they've watched these shows on tv.

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I think there's a lot of people who like to use the term researcher or investigator, but they've got the research skills of a bowling ball yeah, the frustrating thing I find is that the people who claim to be the most interested in these things don't seem to give a shit about whether it's real or not.

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They don't want to put in the time and the effort.

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They want the mystery they want.

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Oh, this is spooky, this is weird, I'm shit in my pants, this is crazy.

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That's all well and good, but then I've had a conversation with these people and I'll sit down.

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It's like we're both interested in Bigfoot, we're both interested in ghosts, we both think these are cool.

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I'm trying to help you do better research.

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Here's how you can do it.

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I'm not trying to be mean to you.

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Or ghost or paranormal is too stupid or silly to investigate, because I do that.

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My position is if you want to do this, then try and solve the mystery, like weed out the wheat from the chaff, you know.

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Try and you know, discredit the bogus evidence and go with what's actually there.

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And that's what I find frustrating is that so many people who, who should care about the truth.

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They either don't know or they don't care, or they they're just.

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They're just content to have this mystery, whereas I'm like, yeah, this is cool, but is it real?

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Let let's make a little more fucking effort to actually solve the mystery.

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Ignorance is bliss, isn't that what they say?

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I still say that anybody could do this If you just put in the time and the effort.

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I mean, I've got degrees in education, public health, and I'm also a folklorist and all that.

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So it's a case of where I mean my MPH from Dartmouth didn't help me solve the Chupacabra mystery, no, but it also.

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But you have to agree that it does help frame the way that you're able to do sound research.

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That's, I mean, that's what you know, my master's.

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It changed the way that I did research and how I pulled data.

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And I see that's so distinct in your work, as opposed to other people who are just, you know, pulling it from their ass and making it up, because they're pulling it from website after website after website.

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There's a stark difference.

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No, you're right and I do appreciate your saying that.

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Do you want to believe in it?

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When you first approached the topic, did you want it to be real?

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Well, I mean I would like all these to be real.

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I mean I, you know I would.

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I would love if Bigfoot was found tomorrow.

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I mean I'd be celebrating, I'd be on the first plane out there.

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I mean this is not same thing with ghosts.

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I mean, you know, I, I don't have a vested interest in them not existing at all.

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And it always baffles me when I hear people who think, oh, you're a skeptic, you don't want them to exist.

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What are you talking about?

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I would love for these things to exist.

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I would be celebrating.

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It would be a whole new paradigm in science.

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Look, if they found a chupacabra tomorrow, that was could actually be documented as a chupacabra, I would be overjoyed.

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And I say that in all sincerity because I'd be like this is so cool.

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And one of my first things was how did I get it wrong?

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I'd want to research it.

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Like why did I think that there's no tracks?

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Why did I think X, y and Z?

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So I would be self-reflecting and trying to figure out for my own purposes, like how did I get it so wrong?

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What was that if they could be proven real scientifically, and so on.

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Then the question to me is you know, where did all the evidence suddenly come from, and how wasn't that known before?

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Why were we fucking it up?

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I'm, I'm a hopeful skeptic.

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I have and I think everything has to be taken case by case.

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I can't, I don't think that it's fair to say across the board you know, nope, none of this is real, this can never happen, oh yeah but, in this case with chupacabra.

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So far, if, if I'm not mistaken, every case and every incident that you've looked into, it's, you've been able to for lack of a better term debunk it yes.

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Yeah, I mean I actually in in my book I have appendix two is literally called how to identify chupacabra.

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I saw that on your website too.

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Yeah.

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So again, it's totally serious.

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It's like you know.

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I'll just read it real quick part of it.

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Since the true nature of the chupacabra, if it exists, is unknown, there's of course no way to conclusively identify an animal as a chupacabra.

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However, there are scientific ways to tell whether or not a given live or dead animal could possibly be an alleged chupacabra, based on the reputed characteristics.

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This list, derived from a close analysis of alleged chupacabra discoveries, will help future farmers, ranchers and others who find an unusual animal to decide whether or not their animal could be a chupacabra.

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And then I have 10 things.

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For example, was it actually seen attacking other animals?

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Was it seen sucking blood?

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Did the pathologist or veterinarian conclude that blood was actually drawn from the animal?

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Has sarcoptic mange or other skin disease been ruled out, and so on?

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So I put that in the book specifically to give other people tools to prove me wrong, basically, and look for themselves.

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That's awesome.

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I saw there was an article in the Christian Science Monitor where you were able to trace it to the 1995 sci-fi film El Chupacabra, you know.

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Yes, yeah, so that was sort of my species, right, yeah, so that, that, so that was sort of an interesting thing.

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So so you know, as I was finishing the book, I again I'd been researching this for almost five years at that point and I had pretty much, I had pretty much answered most of the questions that I had.

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So, for example, you know, is it really vampirism?

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Could these animals and that was the other part in going back for a second to how do we know that these animals aren't chupacabras, for example, again, the chupacabra sucks blood.

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That's by definition what it does.

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But if you look at the mouth structure, for example, from the coyote that Phyllis Canyon found, it can't suck blood.

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It literally, anatomically can't suck blood because it can't create a vacuum.

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You and I can suck out of straws or rubs because of the way our cheeks are made, but dogs and cats, they literally can't suck blood yeah so I mean they use their tongue to lap it, yeah exactly so.

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But so you, they can lap it up there, they it's.

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It's physically impossible for these things to suck anything, uh, except time.

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This is how we know, for example, that that can't be chupacabra.

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About three, four years into it I had basically all the big questions I had were pretty much answered to my satisfaction, but the remained.

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Well, where did it come from?

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Why couldn't I find a 1982 reference to Chupacabra, or 76 or 1892?

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I mean, what was it about 1995?

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Puerto Rico that made it appear there, and so that was sort of the big mystery.

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So I would humbly say that that was sort of my biggest contribution was connecting the dots.

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So I mean the other stuff, the fact that these animals weren't actually drained of blood.

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You know, you can poke around and find that there's all those other things, but the big question, the $10 million question, as I was finishing my research, was well then, where the fuck did it come from?

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I recognize that I need to go back to the original sources, original eyewitnesses, because by this time most of the Chupacabra stuff it's all this half-baked, half-assed, poorly researched, tabloid, sensationalized shit that most of it's just badly done.

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Nobody solved the mystery.

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It was all this sensationalized stuff that most of it's just just badly done.

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No, nobody put in the, nobody's tried to solve the mystery.

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It was all this sensationalized stuff, mystery mongering.

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So I said, okay, well, if I'm going to, if I'm going to figure out where it came from, then I need to go track down the first person that saw it.

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And again this this woman met Madeline Tolentino, who by this point was pretty much ignored.

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Everybody had forgotten about her because she wasn't part of the story anymore.

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Nobody cared about her because she wasn't relevant anymore.

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But I'm like, hold on, she is relevant and she's alive and I want to talk to her.

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So I tracked her down and I interviewed her and I also found a 1996 interview with her, written by a guy named Scott Corrales.

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So as I'm talking to her, I realized that there was one very specific phrase that I noticed in this book Again, this is a 1996 interview with her, so I hadn't come into it until 15 years later and in that book she says she's quoted.

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She says you know what she saw that day that became the Chupacabra looked a lot like this monster in this movie Species and if you've seen Species, it's, of course, pretty well-known film.

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I had a couple of sequels.

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It stars Natasha Henstridge, the beautiful, hot Canadian model.

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Hell yeah, brother.

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Hell yeah, yeah, you know, I'll go for that.

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Uh, but so that in her, that's in her human form, in her alien form, uh, she's a creature called sil s-i-l.

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And so she, she literally says you should watch this movie species, because that's what the monster that I saw look like.

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I'm like, ah, that's convenient.

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I'm like hold on.

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So but what was what?

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So what was interesting to me was that what I could tell.

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Everybody who had who'd mentioned that thought it was just a coincidence.

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I'm like, no, there's, this is not a coincidence, she's right, she's telling you.

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So I asked her, I said did you see the movie Species?

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Because she said she saw it.

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And I said did you see the movie Species before her sighting?

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And she said yes, ah, and that's when the light bulb went off in my head.

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I'm like, holy shit.

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It's like she's literally telling me and us when she got it from.

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That's where she got it from right.

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And at first I'm like, well, people are going to think that this is me sort of retrofitting her words to my hypothesis.

00:18:02.308 --> 00:18:11.808
No, she told that to somebody else, a believer, 15 years ago in an interview.

00:18:11.808 --> 00:18:14.059
I didn't make this up, that's what she said.

00:18:14.059 --> 00:18:17.422
She literally said that it looked like the thing.

00:18:17.422 --> 00:18:22.940
So what was fascinating to me was that once I made that connection, all the pieces fit together.

00:18:23.902 --> 00:18:29.702
Because if you've seen Species then you know what did I mention are the two theories about the origins of the Chupacabra.

00:18:29.702 --> 00:18:32.271
Number one are the two theories about the origin of the Chupacabra.

00:18:32.271 --> 00:18:35.356
Number one it's an extraterrestrial.

00:18:35.356 --> 00:18:37.881
Well, syl is an extraterrestrial.

00:18:37.881 --> 00:18:38.982
That's what the movie is about.

00:18:38.982 --> 00:18:42.470
It's about an extraterrestrial, yeah.

00:18:42.470 --> 00:18:50.680
And the other theory about what the Chupacabra was is that it's some sort of top-secret genetic experiment gone wrong that escapes.

00:18:50.680 --> 00:18:52.863
That's what the movie Species is about.

00:18:52.863 --> 00:18:56.156
It's in the script.

00:18:56.156 --> 00:19:03.920
I'm like, holy shit, this is all it's like having a puzzle and there's one, one big chunk in the middle, and then I, I find this chunk.

00:19:03.920 --> 00:19:07.547
I'm like, oh my god that there it is.

00:19:07.547 --> 00:19:14.268
It fits, but it's very, very clear, not only in its anatomy and what it looks like a description, but also in its backstory.

00:19:14.268 --> 00:19:20.788
So she she admits that she did see the movie Species shortly before she saw the Chupacabra, which again, no one else saw.

00:19:22.915 --> 00:19:32.015
Again, going back to my my degree in psychology, if you don't know anything about how media influences work or psychology, you might think this is a known thing.

00:19:32.015 --> 00:19:34.923
This is people confuse things from films and TV.

00:19:34.923 --> 00:19:37.892
It't happen all the time, but it does happen.

00:19:37.892 --> 00:19:38.875
It's not pathological.

00:19:38.875 --> 00:19:42.743
The fact that no one else saw this and she said it, that's where it came from.

00:19:42.743 --> 00:19:45.498
To my mind, that sort of that was the final piece of the puzzle.

00:19:45.498 --> 00:19:49.606
That's uh, that's, that's hilarious, that's awesome.

00:19:49.948 --> 00:19:51.798
So earlier, mella, you'd ask about wings.

00:19:51.798 --> 00:20:04.902
So one of the aspects of Chupacabra is, if you look at the original report, like after Tolentino told her story to the tabloids, rumor, gossip, people are telling, you know, of course people are hearing about it, and then they see something out of the corner of their eye.

00:20:04.902 --> 00:20:08.083
It's dark and they think, oh, there's wings.

00:20:08.083 --> 00:20:13.343
So you'll find a handful of sightings that have like a tail, wings.

00:20:13.343 --> 00:20:25.648
You know sort of little additions here or there, but the first time that the Chupacabra was said to actually be four-legged was in 2000.

00:20:25.648 --> 00:20:30.646
So something interesting happened was Tolentino's sighting again in August of 95.

00:20:31.458 --> 00:20:32.722
She described this weird thing.

00:20:32.722 --> 00:20:40.269
There were lots of uh depictions in in on tv, so you had a case of where people were seeing it but not finding it.

00:20:40.269 --> 00:20:48.356
In other words, people were seeing things, or, you know, influenced by her description, and they would they say I saw something weird like that, but there's no bodies.

00:20:48.356 --> 00:20:52.083
It was always this something seen but not found.

00:20:52.083 --> 00:21:03.327
That changed in 2000 when something was found and not really seen, and that happened in Nicaragua, in a ranch outside of Managua, the capital.

00:21:03.795 --> 00:21:12.421
There's a rancher named Jorge Talavera and he, something was attacking his, I think, cattle and goats and things like that.

00:21:12.480 --> 00:21:21.612
So he one night, he and his farmhand stayed up all night with guns waiting to shoot at whatever was attacking his animals.

00:21:21.612 --> 00:21:32.559
And sure enough, they came one night and something in the darkness again this is rural Nicaragua they shot at something that was attacking animals and they ran off.

00:21:32.559 --> 00:21:48.228
So a couple of days later his farmhand found a skeleton of some some distance away, a couple miles away on the, on the farm, on the ranch, and he saw this and and Talavera assumed that this was the Chupacabra.

00:21:48.228 --> 00:21:56.009
He thought this is the Chupacabra he'd been hearing about because, again, by this point, for five years there had been stories out of Mexico, stories out of Puerto Rico.

00:21:56.009 --> 00:22:00.279
It was in the news, people talking about it, weird mystery, blah, blah, blah.

00:22:00.279 --> 00:22:01.304
He's like holy shit.

00:22:01.304 --> 00:22:05.836
He didn't get a good view of it, but you know it was.

00:22:05.836 --> 00:22:07.938
He shot something in the darkness.

00:22:07.938 --> 00:22:09.240
Here's this dead thing Now.

00:22:09.240 --> 00:22:14.705
Had he thought more about it, he might have realized that it wouldn't be a skeleton after only a couple of days.

00:22:14.705 --> 00:22:17.067
I mean, it might be, but probably not.

00:22:17.248 --> 00:22:19.550
Anyway, Decomposition is like a real thing.

00:22:19.550 --> 00:22:20.551
Decomposition Right, exactly.

00:22:20.714 --> 00:22:22.521
So it probably wouldn't have been picked clean.

00:22:22.521 --> 00:22:26.566
But anyway, he tells everybody like I found the chupacabra, I shot the chupacabra.

00:22:26.566 --> 00:22:34.938
We've all been hearing about this, rumors about this, rumors, gossip.

00:22:34.938 --> 00:22:35.460
I actually shot one.

00:22:35.460 --> 00:22:37.449
So he claimed to be the first person in the world that had actually killed a chupacabra.

00:22:37.449 --> 00:22:41.163
Of course the media come in like, oh my god, we have, we, we finally have a body with bones and we're wrong.

00:22:41.163 --> 00:22:44.676
So all of a sudden, like chupacabra actually found this is the whole thing.

00:22:44.676 --> 00:22:50.720
So he takes it over to the university in nicaragua uh, the university in managua and they look at it.

00:22:50.720 --> 00:22:53.105
They're like dude, it's a dog, that's just a fucking dog bro.

00:22:56.759 --> 00:22:58.324
So he pulls the phyllis canyon.

00:22:58.324 --> 00:23:05.463
He's like no, no, you switched the bones on me of course, oh yeah, give him back his bones, right you?

00:23:05.463 --> 00:23:07.449
This is, this is what you gave us.

00:23:08.131 --> 00:23:13.540
Mine had no butthole, it was all taint what is a taint and where does the term come from?

00:23:13.540 --> 00:23:27.186
Technically, a taint is the space between your genitals and your anus, otherwise known as the perineum, and the origin of the term is that it taint your balls and it taint your butthole.

00:23:27.186 --> 00:23:32.974
Supposedly, it's taint all the way down, just like the turtle.

00:23:32.974 --> 00:23:38.824
So they give him the bones back and he's like's like no, no, you know, these aren't the bones I gave you, you switched them.

00:23:38.824 --> 00:23:50.682
So he brings in this conspiracy theory and then they're like we didn't switch fucking dog bones, dude we don't have an extra set of dog bones laying around the lab just to fool you into thinking that it's not chupacabra.

00:23:50.701 --> 00:23:54.229
So finally he admitted that yeah, maybe it was a.

00:23:54.915 --> 00:24:16.883
Maybe it was a dog maybe, maybe I shot the neighbor's dog, maybe I shot the neighbor's dog, but anyway, the the significance of that in the chupacabra story was that that was the the first time that marked the transition from the bipedal spiky backed sill alien species creature to, uh, Reiki-backed sill alien space creature, to, to this, this dead dog, mangy quadruped.

00:24:16.883 --> 00:24:23.619
And at that point, because it had been fixed in in people's minds, oh, this is, you know, I guess, the Chupacabra.

00:24:23.619 --> 00:24:25.516
We didn't know what it was for years.

00:24:25.516 --> 00:24:26.596
We now have one.

00:24:26.757 --> 00:24:28.857
It must be now we know, yeah, yeah.

00:24:28.938 --> 00:24:36.903
So that sort of got locked into the public consciousness and then later on, sort of the definition of chupacabra became more broad.

00:24:36.903 --> 00:24:44.988
So this is when you start getting the raccoons, the random stuff like that that basically bear no connection to the original chupacabra.

00:24:45.788 --> 00:24:51.440
You mentioned to me something that the chupacabra was used as a political boogeyman.

00:24:51.440 --> 00:24:52.865
What did you mean by that?

00:24:53.346 --> 00:25:00.190
uh, I touched on a little bit before, like, for example, I mentioned, uh, uh, jose quinozoto, the, the mayor of canovas.

00:25:00.190 --> 00:25:05.560
That basically was like vote for me, I'll protect you for the chupacabra, right, okay?

00:25:05.560 --> 00:25:22.339
But what you find is that, um, pretty quickly, the chupacabra was being talked about, of course, in mexico and elsewhere, which is why, to this day, a lot of times when people talk about, the chupacabra was being talked about, of course, in Mexico and elsewhere, which is why, to this day, a lot of times when people talk about the chupacabra, they think it's Mexican, they assume it's, they've always assumed it's Mexican.

00:25:22.339 --> 00:25:30.059
It's actually, of course, american, because America is, puerto Rico is part of America, but it just, it makes sense that it's Mexican, right?

00:25:31.373 --> 00:25:34.730
I thought that yeah, a lot of people do it's, it's, it's pretty common.

00:25:34.730 --> 00:25:38.559
So because it's associated with, you know, spanish, and and and mexico.

00:25:38.559 --> 00:25:50.271
But what happened was that the, um, the president at the time, uh, president, uh, salinas gattari, um, he, he was started being called the chupacabra.

00:25:50.271 --> 00:26:27.569
There was like like, there was like street graffiti and editorial cartoons and things like that where, where the president was being identified as the Chupacabra Now, probably mostly sort of in joke and jest, but but the, the the connection was that he was widely hated and so so the the popular perception was that, in the same way that chupacabra is draining the blood, uh, and the sort of metaphorical resources and things like that from the puerto rican public, the president was draining resources and money, corruption, this and that.

00:26:27.569 --> 00:26:30.536
So the president's a goat sucker got it.

00:26:30.776 --> 00:26:32.038
That's interesting, though, man.

00:26:32.480 --> 00:26:33.441
Yeah, it's a.

00:26:33.441 --> 00:26:35.084
I mean there's other parts as well.

00:26:35.084 --> 00:26:42.430
The thing is like these days the Chupacabra has been homogenized Like there's a movie came out last year, I think.

00:26:42.430 --> 00:26:43.691
The Chupacabra is like one of the.

00:26:43.691 --> 00:26:46.034
It's like there's an animated cartoon, I forget which one.

00:26:46.453 --> 00:26:51.138
My interest, as you might imagine, is in the early Chupacabra, like 90, 95 to 2000,.

00:26:51.138 --> 00:26:58.905
Because that's the sort of more authentic original stuff, not after it goes sanitized and commercialized by X-Files.

00:26:58.905 --> 00:27:17.894
So I have a collection of about maybe 20, 15 or 20 T-shirts from Puerto Rico and Mexico from the late 90s and it's fascinating to sort of look at these and sort of see, um, see the political commentary, um.

00:27:17.894 --> 00:27:24.913
One of the shirts I have is um, it has a chupacabra and he's got a straw sucking the blood out of a chicken.

00:27:24.913 --> 00:27:28.862
It's like it's a cartoon um, and there is a um.

00:27:28.862 --> 00:27:32.859
It looks like a warthog, like from the lion king, but I guess it's a goat or something.

00:27:32.859 --> 00:27:43.877
Anyway, it's running and it has this sort of dark thing where there's two of them running away from the chupacabra and one of them says yo tengo diabetes.

00:27:43.877 --> 00:27:47.459
So he's saying don't suck my blood, I have diabetes.

00:27:47.459 --> 00:27:49.734
The other one says don't suck my blood, I have AIDS.

00:27:49.734 --> 00:27:52.481
Oh shit, god damn.

00:27:52.770 --> 00:27:53.438
They went there.

00:27:53.438 --> 00:27:53.761
They went there.

00:27:53.761 --> 00:27:56.856
You know they weren't the middleman, they just went right for the nads.

00:27:57.298 --> 00:28:02.233
Well, and again it goes back to to the the cultural context of these things.

00:28:02.233 --> 00:28:09.776
Right, so if you look at what was happening in in in the mid 90s in puerto rico, uh, there was hurricanes, as I mentioned.

00:28:09.776 --> 00:28:12.361
Uh, you, there was a political crisis.

00:28:12.361 --> 00:28:17.609
There's always been an economic crisis, and AIDS was hitting the Caribbean especially hard.

00:28:17.609 --> 00:28:27.384
You have this connection of AIDS, tainted blood, vampirism, all sort of packaged together and that's what you get Damn goat suckers.

00:28:28.471 --> 00:28:35.162
I mean, I didn't believe in it before, but now that I've heard you explain it, even more so it's not real.

00:28:35.162 --> 00:28:39.875
It's a no-go for me, dog, yeah, straight up.

00:28:41.220 --> 00:28:41.949
I love the process.

00:28:41.949 --> 00:28:44.358
Again, it was a lot of work.

00:28:44.358 --> 00:28:55.916
It was a lot of effort writing and research, but it's cool that it's I mean, in my obituary they're going to mention chupacabras and evil clowns, so I guess I'll take it.

00:28:56.357 --> 00:29:10.684
I guess I'll take it, but you know, there's got to be some sort of like, I know for us when we can whittle things down and find the root of something and be able to definitively say that's, that's not what happened here, this is no.

00:29:10.684 --> 00:29:14.520
There is that feeling of satisfaction, of closure?

00:29:14.520 --> 00:29:18.240
Yes, do you feel you have that by now that you finished your book?

00:29:20.153 --> 00:29:20.493
I do, I do.

00:29:20.493 --> 00:29:21.455
I am satisfied with it.

00:29:21.455 --> 00:29:24.782
I'm I'm happy that people are still talking about it.

00:29:25.911 --> 00:29:28.557
It's kind of it's interesting, I'm not going to lie.

00:29:28.557 --> 00:29:30.041
It is fascinating to me.

00:29:31.070 --> 00:29:34.922
And again, I'm still finding weird ass angles, like politics, Right.

00:29:34.922 --> 00:29:36.375
So you know, I wrote the book.

00:29:36.375 --> 00:29:37.251
I'm still.

00:29:37.251 --> 00:29:40.260
There's still weird little avenues and shit that I find interesting.

00:29:40.260 --> 00:29:43.715
Whether people do or not, I don't know, but I do, so I'm going to keep writing about it.

00:29:43.715 --> 00:29:51.073
Oh yeah Again, if I look, I mean if I, if I was absolutely certain that these things didn't exist, I wouldn't waste my time.

00:29:51.192 --> 00:29:53.961
I mean I, just trying to look for the truth.

00:29:54.269 --> 00:29:58.538
I'm just trying to look for the truth wherever it takes me and I'm trying to solve some mysteries along the way.

00:29:58.538 --> 00:30:08.430
And if somebody can take some of the lessons of like what I've done and apply it to their own mysteries or apply it to something else, all the better.

00:30:08.931 --> 00:30:16.522
Do you still come across like cases or cryptids where you're just like holy shit, let me look into this.

00:30:16.603 --> 00:30:18.045
That still interest.

00:30:18.045 --> 00:30:24.742
Yeah, I mean it's I every now and then I'm finding I'm so busy with stuff.

00:30:24.742 --> 00:30:27.817
I mean my podcast Squaring the Strange.

00:30:27.817 --> 00:30:29.761
I'm doing the articles for magazine.

00:30:31.352 --> 00:30:38.444
So you kind of got a lot going on, maybe a little bit yeah, I'm doing the documentary in the chupacabra that may be coming into to fruition.

00:30:38.444 --> 00:30:51.881
I just I've always got stuff and and people send me stuff all the time and I appreciate it, but I just like I only got so many hours in the day and I want to catch up on uh, on netflix, so yeah, hell yeah.

00:30:53.343 --> 00:30:54.124
You're awesome.

00:30:54.124 --> 00:30:55.465
Never-ending task there.

00:30:55.465 --> 00:30:59.075
We appreciate you coming on so much.

00:30:59.194 --> 00:31:02.084
You have no idea well, it's very kind of you.

00:31:02.084 --> 00:31:03.970
Thank for having me this has been awesome.

00:31:03.970 --> 00:31:10.251
We really hell yeah I promise I'll have a cool avatar next time fan fucking task we're gonna hold you to it.

00:31:10.732 --> 00:31:13.862
so on that note, all right, well right, well listen up kids at home.

00:31:14.730 --> 00:31:18.020
Don't keep your ice cream in the same freezer as your chupacabra heads.

00:31:18.020 --> 00:31:19.476
It's probably not good for your health.

00:31:19.911 --> 00:31:22.859
And if your dogs don't have a taint contact Ben.

00:31:24.471 --> 00:31:25.256
Good night everybody.