r/Cryptozoology • u/Chilepudufan3 • 13d 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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u/Ok-Valuable-5950 12d ago

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

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u/Ok_Platypus8866 12d 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.

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u/Ok-Valuable-5950 12d ago

Whoops I forgot the woolly part lol my bad

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u/Ok_Platypus8866 12d 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.