Experts baffled after chilling cam footage captures creature branded a 'skin-walker' and 'chupacabra'
A bloke might have found the mythical 'chupacabra', a creature from American folklore which is said to drink the blood of livestock - hence the name which in Spanish means 'goat-sucker'.
Texas resident Michael 'Dumas' Demel had a bunch of cameras set up in the great outdoors and the images he's captured has left experts baffled.
When he checked the trailcam, he set up near Dubina he was planning on looking through roughly 100 pictures which he expected to see the regular crew of critters on.
However, when he looked at one of the pictures, the trailcam snapped and saw something pretty weird on there.
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Demel said: "I have three different cameras at three different hunting areas – they catch coyote, deer, bobcats, rabbits, raccoons, foxes.
“I look at approximately 100 plus pics a day from the three cameras, but that was the only photo that it showed up on.
“My first reaction was something doesn’t look right, so I stopped on the picture to zoom in.
“My first instinct was that it was a monkey."
However, the more he looked the less he managed to identify the curious creature, so he started showing the picture around to a whole bunch of people.
He got a varied range of responses including people telling him it was an alien or a 'skin-walker', a witch that can disguise itself as an animal.
However, the most popular suggestion was that this was the work of the chupacabra, and experts are none the wiser as to help Demel figure things out.
He said: "I showed it to neighbours, family and friends. I got everything from a skin-walker, a monkey, a chupacabra, an alien.
“You hear stories of chupacabra in south Texas areas. The craziest was a skin-walker – I had to look up what that even is.”
Appealing to higher authorities, he asked the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to try and ID his mysterious creature, but they drew a blank and just don't know what it is.
A spokesperson said: "I reached out to our mammologist and due to the quality of the image a positive identification of the animal is not possible."
They separately told The Fayette County Record that the mystery animal was 'too small to be a white tail deer fawn'.
Michael, who works in construction equipment sales, said he’d 'never' seen anything like this animal in his 10 years of taking wildlife pictures.
"It's just out of the ordinary,” he said.
“I've seen hundreds of thousands of game pictures over the years and spent my whole life in the woods hunting – and this was a first."
Joe Harker