END OF DAY 5: Fri 23 Jan '98

Attempts at contacting Sr. Martin by telephone or by e-mail failed miserably. On the evening of our first full day's investigation on the island I finally managed to get hold of the newspaper photographs of the so-called alien embryo and my worst fears were indeed confirmed. It was a fake plastic toy which may or may not have been from a key chain, and unless the mystery was indeed a conspiracy of labyrinthine proportions the mystery was solved.

However, we still wanted to actually meet Senor Martin. On Friday nights he had a 'phone in programme on the local radio station, so we decided to try and call in. Graham's attempts were rebuffed on the grounds that it was a Spanish-speaking radio station and that the listeners would not understand him. One of the crew, who spoke passable Spanish, then tried to telephone in to be met by another implausible excuse.

Feeling somewhat annoyed we then gave up. I have no idea what actually happened but it did seem very much as if someone somewhere did not want us to talk to Jorge Martin. It may have been, of course, that it was Martin himself who did not want to speak to us. Maybe something that I had written about either the chupacabra or the alleged alien embryo had offended him, or maybe it was just one of those things.

Whichever, it seems likely that like the mystery of the chupacabra itself, the mystery of the disappearing UFOlogist who didn't want to talk to the boys from the CFZ will remain unsolved until we return to the place whose car number plates refer to it as the 'Paradise Island'.

EXPEDITION REPORT - Sat 24 Jan 1998

The next day started unpromisingly enough. We were supposed to be meeting a bloke called Ulysses in the town of Aguas Buenas in order to visit some caves. The uncredited Internet documents on which I have drawn so freely during this document describes the supposed links between these magnificent caves and the chupacabra attacks:

"Word on the streets has it that the Chupacabras is hiding out in the vast natural cave systems that riddle Puerto Rico like a piece of Swiss cheese. Hundreds of residents of the town of Aguas Buenas, famous for being the birthplace of Luis Munoz Marin, the Commonwealth's founder and first governor, believed that the renowned bat-infested caves of their region were providing shelter for the Chupacabras.

Mayor Carlos Aponte, taking a page from Mayor Soto's book, decided to organise a posse and go after the creature, which had already left its calling card in Aguas Buenas. The entity appeared in broad daylight and killed a rooster and two hens at a private farm located at Barrio Camino Verde, before being scared away by the screams of local residents who witnessed its deeds. Those self-same residents allegedly saw it enter the gloomy caves. The police, members of the Civil Defence, and dozens of townsfolk headed to the cave area, but none dared venture into them for fear of cornering the creature.

Aguas Buenas has actually been the site for a number of UFO and chupacabra related episodes over the years. The uncredited Internet document again:

The UFO question rears its ugly head again. An anonymous resident from Aguas Buenas claims to have seen fiery spaceships shooting "elevators" of light against the ground, primarily at sites where bloodless and mutilated animals have been found. In this anonymous witness' opinion, the dreaded Chupacabras is simply a being from another world in space. The man, age 37, insists on the need for anonymity out of concern for his wife and children. He lives near the renown Aguas Buenas cave system.

When asked to describe the luminous elevators, he explained that they resemble "cones" of opaque light whose interior cannot be seen. He theorises that some kind of suction must lift whatever is on the ground toward the unidentified object above, whose dimensions cannot be made out due to the alternating green, red, and yellow lights surrounding it. By tying loose ends, the Aguas Buenas resident believes that the recently slain ox and two goats found near his home could have been sucked upward to the vehicle, had their blood extracted, and then been deposited back on the ground when discarded.

Other residents elaborated upon this theory, surmising that the Chupacabras may have been a creature "lowered" to earth from a spaceship which was then unable to retrieve it due to some technical difficulty, thus leaving it to roam the countryside in search of sustenance....

It was therefore with quite high hopes that we entered the small town in search of the elusive Ulysses. Here, however, we found that the Latin American stereotype of everything being put off to 'manana' was not just a racist generalisation but was only too true.

Three hours after Ulysses was supposed to turn up there was still no sign of him. We whiled away the hours in between by improvising a scene where I was on the telephone trying to get hold of the bloke with Graham getting more and more annoyed at my lack of organisation. In reality, nothing of the sort happened. Tom, the researcher spent his time on a cellular phone trying to contact someone in the local government offices whilst Graham and I looked at lizards and the local girls (not necessarily in that order).

Two thirds of the way through the morning the local Mayor turned up. No-one in the crew was expecting him, and to this day we have no idea why he arrived at the time that he did. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was because he possessed the unerring talent that is seemingly possessed by politicians everywhere - he had a nose for a good photo opportunity and he availed himself of it. I suppose shaking the hands of two scruffy geezers from England made a difference from kissing babies, and probably won him just as many votes!

We then went to lunch.

Not really fancying food per se, Marcus, Norman and I disappeared off into a local bar where we drank medella (lager) and watched the old men playing dominoes as the rest of the crew went off to do their own inimitable thing. After we had been in the bar for about forty minutes, Tom and Graham arrived, and Tom excitedly informed us that although Ulysses himself had been as elusive as so many other entities (living, dead and undead) on the island, the local Civil Defence had been mobilised and were going to take us to what the crew had fondly christened the 'Batcave'.

Whistling the theme from 'Batman' in a discordant and completely unmelodic manner we retrieved our vans and then proceeded to get lost around the labyrinthine back streets of Aguas Buenas. Once again more by luck than by judgement (or so it seemed to the jaundiced eyes of the CFZ contingent who were lolling on the back seats of the van), we managed to find our way out of the town, and we made our way through several acres of dusty plantain plantations before we reached what was obviously some sort of Government Depot. It was a low, white bungalow with a red tiled roof and reasonably well-kept gardens that would not really have been out of place in the suburbs of a westcountry seaside town like Falmouth. Unlike any suburban villas in southern Cornwall, however, it was surrounded by a chain link fence surmounted by rolls of barbed wire, and the machine pistols on the belts of the two enormous, uniformed security guards struck a jarring note.