Los Vampiros de Humahuaca

As they went to sleep that night, they had no idea that they would never wake again. It was nighttime in Mexico, sometime during the mid 20th Century. I can only presume that they left their windows open that night - because something awful soon entered their household. This thing had a rotund body covered in hair, and leathery wings tipped with small claws instead of arms. Large ears adorned its pig-snouted head, and it approached the sleeping couple slowly. Biting down on the woman's neck, it started to lap up her warm blood. The same fate would soon befall her male companion. Their corpses would soon be found, the telltale mark of the vampire bat upon their necks. However, these toothmarks were massive. The coroners presumably thought they must've been mistaken when they realised that the bat responsible for the two deaths would've been approximately the size of a dog! 

A Chiropteran Colossus? 

Unfortunately, hardly anything is known about the Mexican case. It is simply documented as having involved the deaths of a man and a woman at the hands (or indeed fangs) of a grotesquely oversized vampire bat - all of the rest of the details you just read unfortunately had to be extrapolated by yours truly. However, what requires less authorial extrapolation is the description of the events that occurred in the small city of Humahuaca in the Jujuy Province of Argentina in January of 1969. One Meliton Juarez, a local muledriver, told an unnamed Mexico City newspaper about his encounter with a creature of a 'horrible' aspect. He was riding his mule when an enormous winged entity passed over his head several times, terrifying his mount before apparently attacking him - forcing him to repel it by beating it several times with his whip. He would later tell the paper that he thought the creature intended to land on his mule and drain it of blood. The paper stated that the monster was thought to weigh between five and six kilograms, but unfortunately gave no other details as to the dimensions of the thing - leading me to speculate that the monster was approximately the size of a small dog. This is, obviously, far too large for an ordinary vampire bat. 

Juarez's neighbours in the Quebrada de Humahuaca valley correlated his bizarre and terrifying encounter with several unexplained livestock deaths that had taken place at local ranches in recent memory - numerous domestic fowls having had their blood drained. According to Jacques Bergier in his 1975 book Extraterrestrial Intervention: The Evidence, scientists in the area believed that the existence of such a monstrous bat was indeed possible based on the story of the couple killed by such an animal I discussed in the beginning of this article. 

Driving Me Batty 

Apologies for the shortness of this article. I found this story in the aforementioned book and figured that I should give it a bit more attention than it seems to have gotten from the cryptozoological community around the time it was published. It is disappointing that Bergier simply lists his source as 'an unnamed Mexico City newspaper', which was apparently published on January 7th of 1969. If any of my readers can find this article, I would be honoured to accept your help!