Wright-Patterson Air Force Base’s reputation as the number-one resting place for alien entities with distinctly bad flying skills is legendary in UFO research circles. Insiders and whistle-blowers talk about off-limits hangars and the The Blue Room. Supposedly, they are rooms, buildings, and underground bunkers that are home to the carefully-preserved remains of numerous dead extraterrestrials – if one has the correct, high-level security. If the stories are true, of course.

It turns out that, for years, Puerto Rico allegedly had its very own equivalent: the Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. But it wasn’t alien bodies that were cryogenically housed at Roosevelt Roads. Nope: it was a bunch of dead chupacabras. There just might even have been a couple of living ones there, too. So, at least, I was told on several of my excursions to Puerto Rico, between 2004 and 2015. I was not surprised to find that sifting fact from fiction, and legend from rumor, proved to be a very difficult job when it came to trying to unravel the controversial truth about Roosevelt Roads’ chupacabra stash.

The origins of Roosevelt Roads date back to just one year after the end of the First World War. It was 1919 when the then Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Navy visited Puerto Rico. That man was none other than a future American president: Franklin D. Roosevelt. The visit was no vacation, however. Roosevelt was there on a secret mission. He was focused on finding a suitable location where a military facility could be constructed, one that could act as a strategic outpost for Uncle Sam in the Caribbean. Roosevelt toured the island, finally pinpointing a northeast town called Ceiba, which was founded back in the 1830s, and that, today, has a population of around 13,000.

At the time, while the creation of such a base – with an airfield – could have been beneficial, it was not perceived as absolutely crucial. Things changed dramatically, however, when crazed, evil nutcase Adolf Hitler came to power in 1930s-era Germany. The world was soon to face complete and utter carnage, the likes of which it had never before seen, or since. Steps had to be taken to combat the Nazi threat. One of those steps was the creation of Roosevelt Roads, which began in 1940, one year before the terrible events at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii occurred. Roosevelt Roads ultimately became the biggest U.S. Navy base on the planet and the headquarters of the U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (NAVSO). It remained so for decades.

On our visit to Puerto Rico in July 2004 with a crew from the SyFy Channel, monster-hunter Jon Downes and I heard a story of a UFO crash in the hills of Canovanas in 1957, one which reportedly, and quickly, led to gross mutations in the local populace. On his first trek around the island, back in 1998, Jon himself was given a number of independent accounts of this 1957 event. One of Jon’s sources was a man named Reuben, a Puerto Rican brought up in New York, but who returned to the island as an adult. Arguably, Reuben was Jon’s most significant source, since he personally took Jon and a team from the U.K.’s Channel 4 TV crew to the very spot in Canovanas where, he claimed, the craft from another world slammed into the ground, back in 1957.

Jon told me that they came to a big clearing where the path became narrow, and, on one side, disappeared altogether, into a huge saucer-shaped arena. This, according to what Reuben had to say, at least, was where the UFO had crashed. Admittedly, there was a huge indent in the side of the mountain, said Jon. No trees grew there, and it did look as if some huge object had crashed into the mountain, scooping out trees and vegetation and leaving a bare area intermittently covered with patchy grass. Returning to 2004…

While on Puerto Rico, Jon and I met with a woman named Norka, a Chupacabra witness and someone who had heard of this 1957 tale, too. This was not surprising, given that it’s hardly an unknown case among the people of Puerto Rico. Norka told us that most people identified the location as a steep hillside in Canovanas, one that military forces quickly sealed off, for a period of around three weeks. Time constraints unfortunately prevented us from taking Norka to the location identified by Reuben back in 1998, but Norka’s description of the place strongly suggested they were one and the same. There was something else too: most of those that had commented on the incident – specifically when I returned to Puerto Rico in 2008 – said that when the UFO was accessed by the military they found within it the dead bodies of a number of unearthly creatures: Chupacabras.

I had to remember that although the crash report had been around for decades, the Chupacabra aspect of the story surfaced specifically post-1995, when the Chupacabra phenomenon began in earnest. The Chupacabra link to the 1957 crash was fascinating, but it would have been even more fascinating had it surfaced prior to the 1995 outbreak. That it specifically didn’t, kept me very mindful of the possibility (maybe even the probability) that this was an elaboration, a new twist, on an old tale.

There is also a story of a UFO crashing in the heart of El Yunque in February 1984. I know that, because the basics of the account have reached me on three occasions over more than the past decade. It was early one morning when a large, circular-shaped object slammed into the ground, immediately after flying over the rain forest in a decidedly erratic fashion. To prevent people from learning the truth of the matter, a diversionary tactic was put into place that the UFO was a meteorite. Military personnel were soon on the scene – in part, to scoop up the pummeled body-parts of a couple of dead chupacabras, whose lives came to sudden and bloody ends when the alien craft hurtled violently into the forest at high speed. That’s how the story goes, anyway.

To this day, I don’t really know what to make of all this. Some of the people I spoke with came across as completely truthful and credible. Others admitted that their stories were not just second-hand, but third- and even fourth-hand, which is definitely not a good thing. I still find the stories interesting, but it will take a hell of a lot more to convince me that there are dead Chupacabras secretly hidden somewhere on Puerto Rico. Or deep below it…