Creature record / 2022
Metán, Salta. Tuesday 12 April 2022. About 21:30. Ángel Armando Pacheco had just finished listening to a football match on the radio. Then the dogs started barking hard and charged toward the cornfield. He took a flashlight and walked out into total darkness. About 25 metres away, the beam found something "como un mono grande". Hairy. Dark. Very robust, around 1.70 m tall, with red eyes. It looked toward him. Then it went into the monte. A former boxer and rural guide, Pacheco had heard the old stories of the ucumar and never believed them. That night changed his mind. He began locking himself in after dark. "Todavía sigo asustado."
The ucumar belongs to the legends of northern Argentina. Sputnik Mundo explained the name as an Aymara word for bear. In southern Salta, around San José de Metán, the stories have never gone away. A year before this sighting, the horror film El Ucumar had been partly shot in Metán.