The Argentinian Werewolf Scandal: Why You Shouldn't Believe Everything You Read

Posted: 01/13/2015 4:10 pm EST Updated: 01/13/2015 4:59 pm EST

On 23rd December, 2014, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the President of Argentina, formally adopted Yair Tawil, a 21-year-old Argentinian Jewish boy, as her godson. The adoption wasn't really a media circus, just a little candlelight ceremony at the Tawil residence. Of course, with the adoption came the usual benefits, a full educational scholarship for Yair Tawil as well as the title of being the President's godswon, complete with a gold medal. However, what President Kirchner described as a "magical moment", soon turned into a publicity nightmare.

Following the Independent, several media outlets of the world began reporting that the real reason behind the President of Argentina adopting a young boy of twenty-one was to save his family from a mythical East-European curse of the nineteenth century.

As per the legend, the seventh born son or daughter of an Argentinian family would be born accursed, doomed to turn into a deformed mythical werewolf-like creature that'll reveal itself on the child's 13th birthday. The creature, called El Lobison or El Lobizon, would from then on feed on excrement, babies and fresh corpses.

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Brazilian werewolf alert

Every once in a while, I'll run into a story that just gives me the shudders, despite my generally rationalistic approach. All this does, of course, is to highlight a truism about the human condition; when it comes to a fight between logic and emotion, emotion usually wins. We like to flatter ourselves, and think that our highly-developed prefrontal cortices make us smarter than our non-human cousins, but when it comes to a real throw-down match between the parts of the brain, I'm putting my money on the limbic system every time -- the part of the brain that, along with the hypothalamus, governs the "four F's" of behavior: feeding, fighting, flight, and... mating.

A story this week out of Brazil highlights the third "F" -- which stands for the flight response. It could also stand for "fear," because that's what usually motivates an animal running away. The story, which comes out of the town of São Gonçalo de Campos, near Feira de Santana, in the state of Bahia, is about a rather terrifying cryptid that has been sighted more than once in local neighborhoods.

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