Monster Menagerie

One year later I was back on Puerto Rico – with Red Star Films of Canada. Our guide was a man named Orlando Pla. He had heard of a few sightings of large reptiles on Puerto Rico. They reportedly looked like velociraptors, those savage beasts that roamed around in the latter part of the Cretaceous period of 75 million years ago. More correctly, the creatures sounded like the raptors as they were specifically portrayed in Jurassic Park.

The reality is that the real velociraptors were much smaller than in the movies and they sported feathers. It’s a testament to the movie’s success, however, that the public’s image of the velociraptor is that created by Hollywood, rather than by nature. Far more like the raptors of the movies was Deinonychus, an 11-foot-long, clawed, killing-machine that lived around 110 million years ago – but not on Puerto Rico, I should stress.

Also in 2005, and on the same expedition, we interviewed a man named Pucho, a resident of a small village that was home to a cool-looking church, one which rather reminded me of an old English castle. He had an encounter in early 2005 with…well…something. It clearly wasn’t your average Chupacabra. The month, Pucho thought, was February, and the time was definitely late evening. He was walking past the old church when an ear-splitting roar filled the air.

It came from an area dominated by tall, thick trees and barely fifty feet away. Frozen rigid in his tracks, he stared intently at the woods. Suddenly, something terrifying happened: a huge, feathery beast burst through the trees and took to the skies. Whatever the creature was, it was no ordinary bird. The incredible size of it, somewhere in the region of a man, made that abundantly clear.

In December 2008, I investigated sightings of a large “black panther” seen creeping around the Rio Piedras area of San Juan, exclusively at night. Around four feet long and muscular, it was believed to have killed and eaten at least fifteen pet cats in the area, and savaged a goat or several. And, apparently, it terrified a handful of people who crossed paths with it in the backstreets of Rio Piedras, late on one particular Saturday night.