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Monster Hunting
By Scott Corrales
FATE :: April 2004
The lobby of Mexico City’s Hotel Majestic on the city’s main square, El Zocalo, reflects the 19th century’s most baroque tastes. The hotel, housed in an 18th-century structure, rises over the ashes of a forgotten Aztec palace as it looks directly at the city Cathedral and at the Presidential Palace—usurpers of the prime real estate once filled by the massive temples of ancient Tenochtitlan.
It was among this fin-de-siécle decor that I would meet one of Mexico’s most energetic and restless researchers of matters cryptozoological: Dr. Rafael Lara Palmeros, Director of Research for that country’s respected Center for the Study of Paranormal Phenomena (CEFP, by its Spanish acronym).
While Dr. Lara had been a long-distance colleague and the contributing editor to my newsletter, it was not until 1997 that we were actually able to meet face to face (something which is becoming of rapidly diminishing importance in these days of the Internet) to discuss the latest happenings in the world of high strangeness.
“You’ll find,” Dr. Lara explained, “that the divisions of opinion regarding UFO and paranormal phenomena are much more pronounced here than in the U.S., at least among the experts. Many former researchers have even joined the ranks of skeptics in order to achieve respectability.”
“But the public is much more receptive to the subject, ” I interjected.
“Ah, but not to the Chupacabras, which is perceived as a smoke-and-mirrors technique by the government to distract popular attention from the current economic crisis—the legacy of the Salinas administration.”
There could be no arguing that particular point. A visit to a small collectables store in Mexico City’s fashionable Zona Rosa (“the Pink Zone”) yielded a treasure trove of figurines representing the Chupacabras, most of them depicting former president Salinas’ head grafted onto a clawed, animal-like body, holding bags of money pilfered from an already depleted treasury. Other depictions were equally creative and far more rude.
“Psychosis” was the word bandied about by the Mexican media to describe the public’s reaction to the Goatsucker’s trail of woe across Mexico in 1996. It was refreshing to hear a member of the medical profession use the term more seriously. “The animal deaths were real. My visits to the Tlalixcoyan region dispelled any doubts we may have had,” Dr. Lara explained soberly.
The hotel lobby was now becoming filled with dozens of tourists forming part of an excursion having little or no interest in the paranormal. We decided to move to the hotel’s inner courtyard, where the silence was punctuated only by the songs of tropical birds living in cages among well-kept greenery.
“The bulk of CEFP’s research,” Lara continued, picking up the thread of our conversation, “was hampered by the fact that local residents thought we were government agents or undercover operatives for the Judicial Police. They refused to say anything. At first.” ....
Read the rest of this article in the April 2004 issue of FATE
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