You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

If you like this podcast, can we recommend another one?

It's called Big Picture Science.

You can hear it wherever you get your podcast and its name tells part of the story

The big picture questions and the most interesting research in science

Seth and I are the. Seth is a scientist.

I am Molly and I'm a science journalist

and we talk to people smarter than us

and we have fun along the way.

The show is called Big Picture Science

and as Seth said, you can hear it wherever you get your podcast.

Let's go back to 1996. The X-files were fresh and popular.

The nightly AM airways were ruled from the desert compound of Art Bell and in the tropics a new

menace troubled ranchers a blood-sucking animal known as El Tupacabra.

Before it became the go-to explanation for every mysterious animal corpse, the Tupacabra was a serious threat for poor

hardscrabble ranchers who feared this blood-sucking monster and what it could do to their

livestock.

Fifteen years have gone by, and the Tupacabra has become a punchline for many people.

Hairless dogs are hardly the stuff of nightmare.

But Ben Radford remembers the original claims, the strange hairless humanoid creature which

seemed to have amazing powers of leaping, flying, and more.

Inspired to get to the bottom of it, Ben worked for five years to find out what was behind the story, and now his findings are available in his newest book,

...