If vampires existed in modern society, how could they not be well known by science and the public

Question

If vampires were around today, not too common, but widespread,it would only take one doctor examining them realize they're different. I assume scientists would hear about it and want to study them.

Every news outlet would love to run a story about some well known fiction turning out to be true. People would look into it.

All it would take is a single vampire either slipping up or willingly sharing their secret.

So how does this (sub)species exist among us without being well known to actually exist?

I prefer solutions without magic, but please share any ideas.

Answer 1

Increase the noise to signal ratio

How many people think that Elvis lives? Or Jimmy Hoffa? Or that Neil Armstrong didn't land on the Moon? Or that the 9/11 terrorists came from Iraq? Or that there is reasonable doubt left on climate change?

So the people who try to hide vampirism would try and encourage any sort of conspiracy theory or weird tale, including vampirism. Make sure that many contradicting descriptions of vampirism are published by media like the History Channel.

Answer 2

The problem is with the conception of vampires as these hunky sexy kung-fu doing young folks. Even Dracula had a little bit of this stuff, with the vampire hunters chasing around his carriage and then Drac busting out to work kung fu when the sun went down. The real vampires were supernatural shapeshifters and their movements in the world are not easy to understand.

https://archive.org/stream/draculabr00stokuoft/draculabr00stokuoft_djvu.txt

For the vampire of legend, read the (best) section of Dracula where they know Lucy is being fed upon, and they see her dying little by little, and although they keep her alive with transfusions of their own blood, they cannot stop the process. The vampire is a metaphor for a wasting disease. The disease is based in the body of a dead person and manifests as a spirit that causes the disease. In Dracula, it is not always clear how the vampire visit: sometimes she goes to it, and sometimes there is a bat or a bird around, but the visits always happen. The vampire causes other weird stuff to go down also, as you will see in Renfields bizarre vampire-induced doings.

That absolutely could happen now. It would be easier now. In the middle ages people might suspect by the signs that a vampire was at work and so seek it out and dispose of the body where the power was based. In the first world no-one would suspect such a thing. A person with a chronic illness might be visited, maybe nightly like Lucy, maybe intermittently, but either way would gradually die. No-one would think to look for a body in a grave which was the source of the illness. Nobody bothers graves at all.

A vampire of this sort - the wasting, gradual sort - would not go to school or fight kung fu. It would not be captured and locked up. You would not talk with it. It is a supernatural force for sickness, madness and gradual death, and one that no-one believes in any more. It could persist because science has explained it in other terms and no-one is looking for it.

Answer 3

Simple. Encourage the vamp subculture.

Vamp, obviously short for vampire, was/is an offshoot of the goth and industrial subcultures that celebrate​s vampirism through dress, music, literature, and so on... Some actually claim to be real vampires of various sorts, such as psychic, sexual, energy, and even sanguine or blood drinking.

It would be pretty easy to hide amongst a bunch of humans who like to play vampire. Any actual evidence of real vampires could be easily explained away by attributing it to "vamps" or fake vampires.

See the Vampire lifestyle and Rod Ferrell.

Answer 4

All it would take is for vampires collectively as a (sub)species to really want to stay undiscovered.

In most lores, they're powerful enough beings that it seems if each one was convinced of the necessity of staying a secret, they'd be able to with relative ease.

It would only take one doctor examining them to realize they're different.

In what situations would a vampire be examined by a doctor?

1. A vampire murders a human (to drink their blood for sustenance) and is caught by the police and medically examined in jail. If the vampires have traditional supernatural powers, such as the ability to shapeshift, or enhanced strength and stamina, they'd be able to escape such physical capture with relative ease.

2. A young vampire is going to school and, in an effort to seem completely normal, volunteers (like the other kids) to be examined by the doctor for one reason or another. The doctor, surprised by strange and unusual features of the vampire's body, contacts the young vampire's parents in order to request permission for further study of the peculiarities. The vampire parents realize what will happen and they whisk the young one away before the doctor's testimony can be corroborated. In the worst case, they change their names and move to a new town, state, or country.

3. A vampire is caught in a serious accident and is rendered unconscious. Bystanders take him/her to the hospital. The doctors start talking about a vampire, but either

   a. when/if the vampire regains consciousness, he/she would use his/her supernatural powers to run away, or

   b. when the other vampires of the community find out that this one's secret has been discovered, they whisk the still-living vampire away from prying eyes, destroy the body, or silence any witnesses.

Of course, these aren't all the situations where a vampire would be examined by a doctor, but since vampires don't have the same medical needs as humans, they would need to either want to reveal that vampires are real, or be involuntarily exposed to a doctor.

All it would take is a single vampire either slipping up or willingly sharing their secret.

Given the number of people that subscribe to certain "conspiracy theories," and how willing they are to show others the "evidence" that their theories are true, and then considering how rarely these theories are actually widely accepted, it seems like it would take more than just one doctor's opinion on the matter.

"But here we have a real, live (or dead) vampire body--it's obviously and scientifically different from a normal human!" you might imagine the journalists saying. But there have been vampire sightings reported in modern society (here's just one), and they are not taken seriously.

In many sci-fi and fantasy shows that aspire to realness, there is a governmental (or otherwise) agency whose entire purpose is to cover up any evidence of supernatural activity. This seems like something the US government would have a vested interest in doing, to reduce panic and so forth.

Even if the government wouldn't or couldn't do it, if the vast majority of the vampire community was willing to use their supernatural powers to discredit any media coverage, it would be relatively easy for them to do so. Evidence could be destroyed; the doctors' authority could be questioned ("he tampered with the body!" or "the police planted the evidence!"); a vampire who was well-known as a human celebrity or political authority could use their social influence to testify that vampires are indeed a legend.

Answer 5

Essentially the vampires would need to be extremely difficult to detect that they are present in modern society. There are three obvious routes to achieve this.

One, vampires may have a worldwide distribution, but they are extremely rare. For example, if only one in a million persons were vampires this will make them hard to find. Lower ratios will make vampires even harder to detect.

For example, in Jack Butler's novel Nightshade (1989) there is only one vampire and he lives on the planet Mars (the novel is set in the future).

Two, vampires only need very small amounts of blood to feed and survive. Presumably, this will mean they eat and drink other food for their primary sustenance and survival. So there will be no exsanguinated corpse to worry about or dispose of. Also, perhaps, no puncture marks in the neck too. The taking of blood might involve, for example, lapping the entry point of minor wounds.

If vampires needed to feed often, there would be an epidemic of people with puncture marks. If their victims were drained of blood, then it would be easy for legal enforcement to detect exsanguinating serial killers. Nothing says Vampire! more clearly than this.

Three, vampires are quite different from traditional supernatural vampires. No exclusively hanging around during the night. No fangs. No harm from sunlight.** No allergies to garlic. They may die like normal human beings from having a stake driven into the hearts. No crumbling into dust. In this case vampires could be given a medical examination and no-one would realize they were looking at a vampire.

On the other hand, if vampires are more widespread and less rare and are closer in function and behaviour to traditional supernatural vampires then there is one aspect of vampires that can explain their apparent non-existence in the modern world. This, of course, is the vampire's powers of mind control. Usually victims can be manipulated and controlled by vampires for easy feeding. What if those mind-control powers were much more powerful?

Now vampires could manipulate the minds of anyone who came in contact with them. Institutions and social organizations could be set up and controlled by vampires for the benefit of vampires. Perhaps, feeding stock could be organized on specialist farms. There could be covert blood banks where vampires could make withdrawals. Deposits could be arranged to be supplied by donor farms. Blood might even be diverted from legitimate blood banks.

This answer looks at two models of vampires to explain their non-visibility n the modern world. The first model considers vampires are rare, micro-heamophages and quite different from traditional vampires. The second model is based on traditional vampires but considers their cryptic*** nature is a consequence of powerful mind-control powers. This model included the creation of social institutions and organizations to support vampires and keep them hidden.

**: In Bram Stoker's Dracula the King Vampire himself could go about during the hours of daylight and was unaffected by sunlight. No sparkling or crumbling. Vampires crumbling into dust when exposed to sunlight was introduced in the German silent movie Nosferatu (1922).

***: "cryptic" in sense of being hidden.

Answer 6

Population centers

Hiding in cities is a key; no farmer-joe-vampires out in the country. People notice when folks go missing in small towns. Or when they get strange illnesses. But in a large city? Who would notice if a few homeless people went missing? And of those who notice, who'd have the power to do anything about it? And of those who notice and have any political power, who'd believe their insane rantings?

Most cities have abundant hiding places. Places where no one goes. Places where no one searches. Places where sunlight never shines. A vampire could be safe in the abandoned tunnels under New York City for decades, coming up to feed on homeless or stragglers at night on the subway.

Cities have thriving night-lives. Being out at night isn't unusual at all. No need to skulk about or be sneaky. If anyone asks, you work a night shift. Or you just like the "night life." Stay near night clubs or bars and no one would notice you.

In large cities, people actively try not to notice other people. Blending in is easier. Being nearly invisible is something almost anyone can learn to do, after hours, in a city.

Tactics

Dump bodies in the river. By the time they're found, no one would be able to find evidence of vampiric feeding. Drink from arms, not necks. Now they're going to be drug abusers according to medical examiners. Dead homeless druggies found floating in rivers don't get thorough police investigations.

Don't feed on people to the point of death. Drink a bit, then move on to someone else. Or learn how to bypass security systems and raid the Red Cross blood bank. Or get a job as a night janitor / orderly / nurse at a hospital and raid their blood bank. As you grow in power, you can take more risks, but you don't have to.

Bribe at least a couple of police. Make them think you're a powerful drug lord or whatever. Feed them actual gang members from time to time to help their careers. Help them stay safe. Their loyalty will help you in many subtle ways. Rinse and repeat with county clerk staff, courthouse staff, hospital staff, DMV staff. They don't have to be powerful people, just people on the inside of various bureaucratic offices and places that your handiwork might wind up. Even janitors usually have all the keys to the building. No telling how many ways that can be useful to hide your tracks.

Self-policing

One issue would be those naughty vampires who don't want to hide. The self-preserving, conservative vampires would have to watch for these idiots and put them down hard and fast. They are a threat.

If the fiction is to be believed, vampires don't just die in sunlight. They are destroyed down to dust. If an overly active vampire puts the city's population at risk, the conservative locals will simply tie him down to a rooftop and let the sunlight destroy all evidence of his existence. Clean and simple.

Answer 7

Catch me if you can

A common trait of vampires is shapeshifting. Mostly by turning into animals or into another shape that allows flight. A being that can change shape into an animal is amazing at hiding from nosy people.

Sure you were chasing that fellow that ripped the throat out of that woman but there is nobody here. There by the traintracks is a dog, but that's just a dog. If they can fly it gets about as easy, very easy to shake persuers in a city, just fly to a roof when they can't see you. Or turn into mist like some myths claim they can do.

Science

If vampires were around today, not too common, but widespread,it would only take one doctor examining them realize they're different. I assume scientists would hear about it and want to study them.

This implies they look differently. If it's a parasite that changes the human host into a vampire the process might reverse when it leaves. It might leave the host when the host gets damaged severely. All that remains is a human corpse.

While alive and concious no vampire would seek medical help, the blood drinking will heal any ailment. So the chance of getting caught by the medical committee is minimal. Especially if the vampires refrain from doing dangerous things like signing up for the army.

Diseases shouldn't impact them if they're undead either, nor aging. So again this would minimize trips to the doctor.

Why hide?

Most vampires have clear weaknesses, sunlight, a vulnerable body, feet or skin when they're hunting at night etc. They're ambush predators who hunt humans. Being hidden is to their advantage. And someone who evolved as an ambush hunter should prefer it to be hidden.

Most of them are solitary creatures that ignore their own species unless they directly compete for food. Maybe there is some form of order among them, some civilization. Perhaps it strictly enforces secrecy, any who break it die along with the witnesses. Their plenty of stories around disappearances of groups and villages to account for this.

Answer 8

If vampires are just like people but need blood to survive, then they can pass off any appearances as cosmetic surgery and implants they had done to look like a vampire because they are fans. Heck, IRL actual people have had horns installed (permanently), scales, vampire incisors, forehead ridges, snake-split tongues, not to mention all kinds of hardware.

So your vampires hide in open sight. Why do they keep themselves a secret? for the same reason pedophiles and rapists keep their activities secret, self-preservation. Vampires kill, or at least violently assault.

If any vampire outs themselves, other vampires collude to kill that one, also out of self-preservation: The world cannot know or they will all be rounded up and burned at the stake. It isn't like vampires will be morally opposed to murder. That also makes the stakes higher for any vampire that thinks about outing themselves.

Answer 9

It's possibly that you could hide an entire culture by not hiding it at all. The old concept of "hiding in plain sight" could be apropos here. Our current society is filled with a variety of subcultures who embrace cosplay and other aspects of role-play. The vampires in your story could pretend to pretend. It could even be rumored that the more hardcore members of that group indulge in blood doping, which would affect blood tests, etc . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_doping

As blood doping is used by athletes, it would also explain increased strength and endurance in the vampire community, and give further credence to the rumor that members of that community engage in the practice. Why just dress as a vampire when you can artificially enhance yourself too?

Perhaps there are counseling programs available for vampiric patients whose blood oxygen levels are off the charts, much as there are for alcoholics and other substance abusers? There would be far-reaching social/cultural side effects as well as medical ones.

Answer 10

The answer is pretty simple: vampires run things like the ministry of magic in HP only with more viciousness and fewer wands.

There's also considerable participation from powerful governments. Only a few people within those governments know about it, and they keep the secret for stick and carrot reasons: they're promised the gift of eternal life if they do so and a swift and certain death if not.

Answer 11

Enact a ridiculously large conspiracy

If many positions of power within any credible media organisation (including academic media such as journals) and all governments all over the world were controlled by vampires, or by humans who want to keep the existence of vampires a secret, then the access to this information could be heavily restricted. People who try to publicise the fact of vampire existence could be discredited and most of the world's population would be none the wiser/just think vampires are a myth. This conspiracy would need to be on a huge scale and would be vulnerable to members wanting to reveal it so is perhaps an unrealistic option long-term.

For the conspiracy to work at all it would probably require the following:

Vampires that are not very obviously vampires (have subtle vampiric abilities and traits)

There are certain vampiric traits that real humans have (such as being "allergic" to sunlight) that wouldn't raise suspicion if they were sufficiently subtle (if sunlight killed a vampire then that would be noticed pretty quickly whatever happened). This would mean that your vampires would not be able to have many of the more outlandish traits in vampire mythology, especially if you want to be proof against vampires revealing themselves. For example, someone turning into a bat in front of your eyes would be difficult to ignore.

Answer 12

Make the vampire and humans more closly related. So the difference is more vauge. Humans of different cultures already eat blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_soup

Black pudding. Bloodpudding...

Combine this with canabalism (in history) or events happening in present.

You will find it wouldent be so easy to find these vampires.

Exactly how they would get their special powers - I do not know. It could have something to do with chemistry or genetics (combined with human blood intake).

You also have some people (lunatics) that actually think they are vampires - but no one is bealiving them... No matter how hard they try to act like it. Why don´t we bealive those that actually think they are vampires?!. (Probably it has something to do with that we only would accuse someone a vampire if we fear them/it)

Create a distrusting critcal world as well. (I mean no one bealives people who preform cannabalism and drink blood - saying they are vampires). If we do not bealive people that act like vampires - would it really be so hard for the real ones to hide?

A human in a culture that consume lots of animal blood - that for some reason are/turn to become a cannibal. He fakes schizophrenia. He comes from a wartorn country with no medical records of him? "A few times he have gotten the illusion that he is a vampire" - psychiatrist. Maybe this actual vampire acts like an idiot that think he is a vampire... etc.

A special arranged medcine seem to calm him (but in truth this hides his actual vampirism) - but he only acts calm when he gets it to fool his care takers. Everybody understand this man is a lunatic and we might feel sorry for him - so we do not accuse him of real vampirism (as he dont cause any fear I guess).

Answer 13

Make them a cult. If you do that you'll have a group of people running around who "know the truth" and the society actively ignoring the "evidence". This essentially turns anyone who realizes that vampires are actually a thing in your universe into a conspiracy theorist falling for a meme like people who believe in the Illuminati or Oculists.

Governments who become aware of the cult of vampires won't say anything because it makes them look stupid. Imagine if the US government started releasing statements about the Illuminati. Would those statements be taken seriously beyond memes? The answer is yes because memes are a serious business whose reach extends beyond itself and on into Harambe. RIP gorilla in the sky. The general public would not take government statements about the Illuminati seriously at all.

Answer 14

The answer depends entirely on what characteristics of vampires you have. One that doesn't need blood to survive, that doesn't do the "one bite and you're a bloodsucker" viral spread, and doesn't have blatant physical clues to its nature (I don't care how often you mention "porphyria", normal humans don't start smoking on exposure to sunlight, and normal people tend to appear in mirrors), could go undetected for quite some time. Computerized record keeping would be a pain beginning in the late 20th century if they live longer than humans, but there's ways around it.

Once you postulate bodies stacking up, however, there's significant issues. While people point to lists of missing people, the fact is that most people don't stay missing; people get added to the number of people missing, but almost as many come off the list because they're found, one way or another. If you postulate vampires, however, the list grows significantly, and once you have things like national centers tracking that sort of thing, the statistical anomalies will start showing up and people will start investigating. There's computer programs now that troll through databases looking for patterns, and that's only go to become more prevalent.

A handful of vampires of that type might be able to get under the radar.

If you've got the "viral spread" version of vampirism, forget about it. They'd be well known.

Answer 15

To answer this properly, you need to know what powers they have. The more powerful they are, the more they stand out.

In a basic form, they would desire blood and would avoid sunlight but neither is necessary. These could hide in many human sub cultures such as goths without being noticed.

If you go for everything, hiding would be extremely difficult and vampire society would be required to rule from the shadows to cover everything up. They would need their own people and/or minions running the police, hospitals and the government. Anyone trying to expose them would be gotten rid of quietly, made to look like an accident or just vanishing without a trace.

The next thing is how they spread. The more virulent, the harder to hide. If a single bite is required, hiding would be almost impossible. If they need to drink a vampire's blood to be created, it could be hidden. If they are born from normal parents but due to some genetic anomaly become vampires, they would be virtually unknown.

Answer 16

Vampires could be a species closely related to humans. Most “vampires” could be mixed-race due to interbreeding with humans over the centuries. So someone whose great-grandmother was a vampire might have some vampiric traits (longevity, strength, fondness for rare meat and blood sausage, easily sunburnt, a knack for hiding) but nothing too far out of the ordinary for a human; consequently they may not even realise that they are a vampire.

If they became ill, most human doctors wouldn’t even know what they were seeing—they’d issue a battery of tests, come up with a vague conclusion like anemia, give you iron supplements, and send you on home, since they’d have no reason to suspect you’re of a different subspecies. On the other hand, you could use suspicious human doctors as a source of conflict in the plot.

The relatively few “pure-blooded” lines would have more pronounced versions of these traits. They could use their extreme longevity to easily gain money (just shuffle your money around from bank to bank and accrue interest over the course of hundreds of years) and power (patiently infiltrating long-lived financial & legal organisations) and also skirt such problems as inbreeding.

The purebred vamps would monitor half-breeds around the world to guard the secret more closely, in order to protect their species. As another source of conflict, you could have a small organisation of humans that does know about vampires and tries to find, study, or exterminate them. This organisation would also be incentivised to keep the secret, to avoid interference from the public, such as “vampire rights activists”.

Answer 17

Well if we assume that vampires maintain their health and longevity by drinking other people's blood and not by going to doctors, then we can safely say that it would be easy for them to avoid the risk of doctors and scientists discovering their biology.

As far as the media is concerned... consider how a serial killer manages to stay on the loose. The media can't catch a serial killer. Only the police can. But the police depend upon certain expectations, for example that the killer exists in the system and has credit cards, driver's license, etc. A vampire might have no need for these things and therefore be too difficult for even the police to track down. If the vampire has lived for hundreds of years, it would be especially difficult for police because the police would never even think to investigate someone who was born in the 1800s.

Answer 18

The definition of "vampire"

would have to be defined first to be interpreted for modern times as we can find no evidence for literal interpretations. The probability is so poor at this point we have more hope of detecting extra terrestrials light years away.

As we know, stories are greatly exaggerated and reasons misunderstood based and the lack of knowledge in the prescientific era. Individual events get lumped together even if unrelated. The myths are poorly defined themselves.

Therefore to take such a question seriously, effort should be made to define specific properties of being a vampire that could be verifiable without labeling it as supernatural or spiritual as those things are already debunked and literally mean "things outside nature". Guess what, we can't go outside nature to verify it so labeling anything "supernatural" cannot be used to define anything in any rational way to be used in an argument.

An example of a partial definition would be: "A vampire is the label given to a member of a religious cult that partakes in drinking human blood." No mention of the supernatural necessary. Given a clear definition, one can then address how such people could avoid detection.

Answer 19

Vampires turn to dust when killed. Everyone knows that. So there are no bodies to examine. It could be extremely difficult to capture them, or even render them unconscious without killing them.

[optional] They also cast no reflection, in modern times it's not a big leap to also think they cant be photographed. So they wouldn't appear on any surveillance footage, nor could you produce a vampire mug shot, short of a artistic rendering.

Answer 20

Ancient vampires will likely be obscenely wealthy and socially/politically connected, they don't hunt their food or even buy it instead politicians and multinational CEOs compete for the right to accommodate and feed them. A vampire is a neigh perfect assassin and all the more deadly for the fact that nobody really knows how many there are or what they're truly capable of. Nations without the favour of a few ancient vampires will find themselves at the mercy of those that do, their leaders dying from brain aneurysms, blood borne diseases or just going insane for no apparent reason.

You could try to capture and study one, but what if the others find out, indeed how do you know they're not constantly telepathically communicating with each other all the time?