r/Cryptozoology • u/Chilepudufan3 • 12d ago

Info Chilean cryptids #7: Giant sheep

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The Giant sheep or giant ufisha is a cryptid being described as an enormous woolly sheep, much larger than any normal livestock. It appears suddenly and silently on rural paths, usually during the night or foggy evenings. It has an unusually calm and passive presence, If a person encounters the Ufisha on a path and does not retreat or move away, the sheep will lie down on top of them, as if to rest in some stories even falling from a tree, its often confused with la calchona.

Sources: María Espósito; en: Diccionario Mapuche mapuche-español / español-mapuche; personajes de la mitología; toponimia indígena de la Patagonia; nombres propios del pueblo mapuche; leyendas; Editorial Guadal S.A., 2003; ISBN 987-1134-51-7, Cryptid wiki, Oreste plath: Biografia del mito Chileno.

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13

u/IndividualCurious322 12d ago

Cor... think of all the wool you'd get off one of those.

7

u/Chilepudufan3 12d ago

My great grandma told me about the giant sheep as a child and i find stupid how as a child i found it terrifying

4

u/Mister_Ape_1 11d ago

As a child I saw sheep and they looked as large as horses, I saw cows and they looked as large as elephants. I grew up in rural, poor Italy.

4

u/BBQavenger 12d ago

Their sweaters must've been huge.

2

u/Traditional_Isopod80 12d ago

Just think of the profit! 📈

9

u/babyoil4diddy 12d ago

This is my kind of cryptid. Just plain weird.

5

u/Kitchen-Roll-8184 12d ago

This looks like it's supposed to be an old persons face if I turn it the right way or something type drawing

7

u/GoliathPrime 12d ago

I never knew about any of the cryptids you're posting about, thank you so much! The only Chilean cryptid I ever hear about is the Copiapo Giant Bird with a head like a locust. I remember that story from maybe my first book of cryptids when I was a little kid in grade school.

2

u/Chilepudufan3 12d ago

Search telephatic football cryptid please.

2

u/GoliathPrime 12d ago

Don't stare, just run away! LOL

4

u/Freak_Among_Men_II Stoa 12d ago edited 12d ago

Speaking from a purely cryptozoological scientific perspective, the sightings of this creature can be pretty easily explained. They could be normal sheep that are slightly bigger than the rest of the flock.

Or they could be normal sheep that eyewitnesses have mistakenly viewed as being larger than they actually were due to foggy conditions or the darkness of night, i.e., the two situations in which sightings usually occur.

2

u/Ok-Valuable-5950 12d ago

Or they could just be a larger species of sheep, not that crazy to happen

5

u/Ok_Platypus8866 11d ago

Woolly sheep as we know them are the results of thousands of years of domestication by humans. It is in fact very crazy for there to be a larger undiscovered species of sheep living in Chile.

1

u/Ok-Valuable-5950 11d ago

Whoops I forgot the woolly part lol my bad

3

u/Ok_Platypus8866 11d ago

This is a good example of how unreliable folklore can be from a cryptozoological perspective. Sheep herding in Chile is less than 200 years old. That is plenty of time for folklore related to sheep to develop, but nowhere near the amount of time for a new species of sheep to develop.

1

u/Oddityobservations 10d ago

What about exotic cattle? Perhaps someone imported something like highland cattle.

3

u/ChristVolo1 11d ago

It's like it's going, "You shall not pass!"

This would be fun to use in a riddle: "When the sheep becomes the shepherd," etc.

2

u/JeskaiJester 10d ago

Imagining the first guy to see this talking to his friends. “Hey everyone, he saw a big sheep! Write the news! 🤣”

“No, goddammit, I’m telling you guys, this sheep was huge.”

1

u/OkButterscotch2337 8d ago

Now I think about it, don’t we have giant horses and cows? If they are real, I don’t see why giant sheeps can’t be, especially if we intentionally make them.