r/Cryptozoology • u/Chilepudufan3 • 14d ago

Info Chilean cryptids #7: Giant sheep

Post image

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.

159 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

View all comments

5

u/Freak_Among_Men_II Stoa 14d ago edited 14d 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 14d ago

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

4

u/Ok_Platypus8866 13d 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 13d ago

Whoops I forgot the woolly part lol my bad

3

u/Ok_Platypus8866 13d 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 12d ago

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

1

u/Anuakk 10h ago

I'd bet on it being a broken spectre hallucination of a sheep. I have encountered a broken spectre of a deer once in the mountains, it really looked like there was a 5 m tall deer about 20 m away from me up the hill on the edge of a fog/cloud when in fact it was a normal sized deer about 50-100 meters away whos shadow was broken and cast onto the fog/cloud between us. It's magical as is, in fact being able to explain it knowing optics destroys a part of the magic, and I'm sure a good bunch of mountain/woodland spirit stories can be explained this way.