Riverside residents are shaken up as they say they've seen the mythical chupacabra roaming their neighborhood.
Cary Shuker says he saw it when his cat ran back inside his home, scared of something.
“This thing was standing out there, looking at me. It was the ugliest looking thing.”
Shuker describes it as being hairless, with the tail of a rat or a possum, with rippled pink skin, teeth pointing out at all sides and was “at least two feet or more longer than the biggest coyote you’ve ever seen.”
He yelled at it to leave and vanished after snarling at Shuker.
“It was cussing me out, basically. … I stole its breakfast. It was hunting my cat. This wasn’t no coyote, by any means.”
MJ Blunt also saw the creature a year ago, eating fruit from a neighbor's tree.
“The ears of a deer, long snout, no hair, tail like a rat, long hindquarters. I thought it might be a sick coyote, a sick wolf. But it had too many different characteristics from any of them.”
Chupacabra sightings were first happening back in 1995 in Puerto Rico and the stories soon spread all across Latin America.
Tom Brundige first saw the creatures this past spring in an area that was burned in the Opera Fire in April.
“We’re looking at it dead on. It has a body like a chihuahua, stretched out, with a large thoracic cavity. And it has huge hind legs. It has a very narrow, ratlike face, with undulations in it, more like a marsupial.
The donkeys that come from central Mexico, Texas, they come right through my gate. These guys, I believe, followed them from central America.”
Despite all the sightings, a lot of people are still skeptical .
California Department of Fish and Wildlife spokesman Andrew Hughan says chupacabras aren't a recognized species.
“Chupacabras are not a thing.”