“A bipedal, hairy mountain creature of the Andes whose cry echoes 'ucu-ucu' across the high passes.”
In the cloud forests and stone passes of Argentina's northwest, muleteers and villagers describe the Ucumar: a heavy-shouldered biped five to seven feet tall, covered in thick dark hair, with small eyes and massive limbs, walking upright like a man and dropping to all fours when it wants speed. Its name descends from ukumari, the Quechua word for bear — which is either the explanation or the problem.
Reports run along the Andes from Salta and Jujuy into Chile and Bolivia, and the file is thicker than most South American wildman legends: seventeen-inch footprints logged by a geologist in 1956, a village kept awake by mountain howls in 1957, a police-investigated encounter in Chile the year after. Cryptozoologists rank it with the Yeti and Sasquatch; skeptics see a bear remembered upright.
The Legend
Andean tradition knew the wildman long before cryptozoology arrived. The Ucumar — Ucu for short, ukumar-zupai in the older Quechua-inflected form — is a creature of the remotest gorges, said to raid crops, carry off the occasional person, and send its cry of 'uhu, uhu' echoing across the passes at night. Local lore gives it an oddly homely appetite: a fondness for payo, a wild cabbage-like plant of the high slopes.
It is a border-crossing legend, at home wherever the Andes are emptiest — northwest Argentina above all, with cousins reported in Chile and Bolivia. Accounts split between an ape-like giant and something frankly bear-shaped, and the tradition happily contains both: a half-bear, half-man of the mountains, too human to shoot and too wild to meet.
Documented Sightings
The modern record opens in 1956, when the geologist Audio L. Pich reported seventeen-inch human-like footprints at over 16,000 feet on the Argentine side of the Andes; similar tracks turned up in Salta province the following year. In 1957, residents of Tolar Grande told newspaper reporters of a nightly chorus of eerie calls from the Curu-Curu mountains, which they attributed to the ukumar-zupai.
In May 1958, campers at Rengo, Chile, reported an 'ape-man' to the paper La Gazeta; police investigated and found no tracks. The reports never quite stopped: one compilation counts more than 33 sightings around Salta within a decade, including a farmer's account of a red-eyed creature nearly two meters tall stealing corn, and phone-camera footage from the northwest still periodically stirs the Argentine press.
The Lore
Ivan T. Sanderson, the founding figure of American cryptozoology, took the Ucumar seriously, comparing its reported 'uhu, uhu' call to the cries described by Albert Ostman, the British Columbia man who claimed a family of Sasquatch held him captive in 1924. In the cryptozoologists' map of the world's wildmen, the high Andes made a natural refuge — empty, vertical, and barely surveyed.
The sober explanation is the spectacled bear, which does rear up on two legs and whose Quechua name the creature wears. The difficulty, as even skeptics concede, is fit: spectacled bears stand barely four feet, are absent from Argentina today, and do not chorus in the mountain passes at night. Between the bear that is not there and the wildman that should not be, the Ucumar keeps its footing.
Field Notes
- ✦ Sometimes interpreted as a folk memory of spectacled bears walking upright.
- ✦ Reports cluster in remote, sparsely populated Andean zones of Salta and Jujuy.
- ✦ Considered the Argentine cousin of the Bolivian and Chilean wildman tales.
- ✦ Geologist Audio L. Pich logged 17-inch man-like footprints high in the Andes in 1956.
- ✦ Said to favor payo, a wild cabbage-like plant, and to cry 'uhu, uhu' in the night.
Case File
- Classification
- Wildman cryptid
- Category
- Humanoid/Wildman
- Territory
- Andes of northwestern Argentina
- First Sighted
- Andean indigenous tradition
- Habitat
- High Andean mountains and forests
- Reported Size
- Roughly human to bear height
- Also Known As
- Ucu · Ukumar · Andean wildman