A guy I knew had an interesting story about an alien corpse he found in the desert. He even had some old Polaroids to back it up. He proceeded to show me the following pictures.
A naive eighteen-year-old, I bought this tale hook, line, and sinker. Maybe even he bought it. He was rather gullible and I think that’s why he was so into drugs. He let the world get to him too much.
Fast forward many years and I found a blog about New Mexico urban legends. Lo and behold, one of the pictures toward the bottom was of a supposed Chupacabra. It perfectly matched my ex’s alien! It turns out that this particular “goatsucker” is a mummified sea skate.
Undoubtedly, the creature is creepy. There is something oddly human about its face. Its body and pointy head and tail do look rather marine. But combined with the humanoid face and spongy lips, it is easy to believe that the sea skate is, in fact, an extraterrestrial creature with nefarious designs on the human race. The fact that the creature is dead and calcified does not make it any less foreboding. It’s rather like Jeepers Creepers.
It turns out, a similar beast (possibly even the same one) was found on Albuquerque’s West Mesa by a man named Robert Wheeler. People freaked out, thinking Wheeler had found a real-life chupacabra, a legendary beast known for sucking goat’s blood in Hispanic and Native American legend. After some deliberation and examination, the Department of Game and Fish said that this was the mummified skeletal remains of an ocean skate, a close relative of the stingray. No one knows why or how it wound up on the West Mesa, but there are theories.
So how do you get this bizarre alien-looking thing from an ocean skate? Well, it takes a little work, but it’s possible. Here is an ocean skate in its fresh form:
Here is a dead sea skate that has been trimmed and shaped to resemble a sea monster:
This is a dead and dried sea skate, not shaped and whittled:
From this image series, it’s easy to see how the above sea monster shape is achieved with a little work. In reality, the face is not a face at all, but simply cavities in the back that form a face due to pareidolia, a phenomena where people’s brains form faces out of patterns that have nothing to do with faces at all.
But what’s an old ocean skate doing in Albuquerque? One possibility is that they used to be peddled as circus curiosities, carried all over the world. Fishermen would catch sea skates, dry them out, make them into “sea monsters,” and then sell them as curiosities. Conmen would then charge gullible people to look at them – claiming that they were demons, mermaids, monsters, or even Chupacabras. Gullible people would happily pay to view them because they believed that these bizarre creatures really were aliens or demons or whatever else. They even believed the made-up backstories behind them, too. It’s sort of like the Thing in Arizona.
Maybe the sea skate Robert Wheeler found was brought to Albuquerque and lost or dumped on the West Mesa. Maybe Wheeler bought it and pretended to find it out there to increase the mystery. Who knows? But this “alien” was most likely not deposited by a crashed spaceship.
I don’t know how my friend acquired this alien. All I know is that the “alien” he freaked me out so much with is actually very much from this earth. A lot of things from the ocean are even more bizarre than our most bizarre imaginings and fantasy creatures.
This was one of my first lessons in life about how some things are not what they appear.
Sources
http://unexplainedresearch.com/in_the_news/new_mexico_chupacabra.html
https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/16arctic/logs/aug10/aug10.html