Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
In December of 2020, four schoolteachers were driving on a road outside of La Rumorosa, a town of about 2,000 people located between the cities of Mexicali and Tecate in the northern part of the Mexican state of Baja California. The town is situated in of one of the harshest deserts in the world and outside La Rumorosa the landscape is bleak. On this drive, the four teachers witnessed a gigantic bird-like creature fly in front of and around their car. They stopped the car and watched it soar off in the distance. They described the creature as being as tall as a man with large wings and covered in feathers. It also had gigantic claws and what they called a chato face, meaning a face with flat features like a human’s and not like a bird’s. This being also had lighter colored feathers around the neck area like a collar. The teachers told people what happened when they returned to La Rumorosa. Word made it to a local Mexicali television station which interviewed them about their strange encounter. This broadcast caused other “experiencers” to come forward. In the spring of the same year, 2020, a local man was driving on a rural road to the east of Mexicali just west of the town of San Luis Rio Colorado and had a close call with a similar creature. The man clipped it with his truck and wondered what had just happened. He stopped his vehicle and the creature landed in front of him, standing upright with its wings bent as if it were a human with its hands on its hips. After staring at the driver of the truck for a few moments, the gigantic birdlike being unfurled its wings, beat them to the ground a few times and lifted itself off the ground a few feet, hovering for a few more seconds before taking off. The poor rural truck driver told his family and friends about what happened, and they didn’t take him seriously, claiming that he drove his vehicle into a gigantic duck. The television interview with the teachers a few months after his event seemed to validate what he saw, however.
On the July 3, 2021, episode of the internet-based Mexican paranormal show called “Insólita Experiencia,” or “Unusual Experience,” in English, host Yohanan Díaz Vargas devoted an entire two-and-a-half-hour show to what is being called El Hombre Pájaro, or “The Bird Man.” From his Mexico City studio, Díaz interviewed a man named Stalin Valle Osuna, a paranormal researcher based out of Mexicali, in the area of the aforementioned sightings. After the publicity surrounding the teacher interviews, Valle assembled a small group of researchers to track down the creature in the deserts surrounding Mexicali and La Rumorosa. Much of the terrain is rocky and inaccessible. Unimproved dirt roads lead to small ranchos where families eke out a meager existence in the harsh environment. The team went off these roads and further into the desert backcountry on advice from locals. Yohanan Díaz chuckled when Stalin Valle mentioned that he personally was too fat and old to hike through some of the rougher terrain, but the younger and fitter members of his little team did climb the rocky hills and found what they were looking for. The men saw the same thing seen by the rural man driving the truck and the four teachers: a gigantic birdlike creature that appeared to be part human, with an obvious intelligence. It stood a little under 6 feet tall, like a man, and was covered in feathers, except for the face. They spotted it sitting among the boulders and photographed it. Valle presented the blurry photo on the Insólita Experiencia show, but the casual observer might have a hard time seeing any supposed creature on the hill in the picture. The strange being seemed to blend into the landscape.
Did Valle offer any explanation? His answers to the Mexico City interviewer were lengthy and very broad. Valle has lived in the area all his life and has heard rumors of a gigantic Bird Man for many years. He explained that the Yuma Indians have a creature in their myths and legends like what has been sighted recently in Baja California. The Yuma, or Kwatsáan People, whose ancestral homeland included the lands around Mexicali and to the east and north, called this gigantic bird man the Cargunclo or Cargunco. Valle said that he could not get any more information from indigenous people on this creature because they didn’t want to talk about it. A basic internet search of these names turns up absolutely nothing. Is this Hombre Pájaro a cryptid – a real but yet unidentified animal – or is it something else? As a paranormal investigator, Stalin Valle Osuna went off into the more esoteric in his interview with Yohanan Díaz Vargas. He said that some 
people in the northern part of Baja who know of this creature believe that it is a creation of black magic. Others believe that it is interdimensional or extraterrestrial. The existence of many faults and rifts in the tectonic plates in the area, in addition to high amounts of radon gas present, may aid the creature in its travels in between dimensions or physical locations. This explains why there has never been a body recovered or any other physical evidence of this bird man ever found; it slips in and out of our world with ease. Unlike the Chupacabra, Valle explained, the Hombre Pájaro does not attack livestock or people. He believes that it feeds off the energy emanating from the rocks in the surrounding desert. As an energy being, this could explain why some sightings say that the creature’s eyes or even its chest emit light. Valle added that outside the cities and towns of northern Baja there are places that are inaccessible to humans and have not even been explored in modern times. A gigantic birdlike creature could easily have a large habitat if it were a real, but yet unidentified animal, or cryptid. Valle explained that the largest bird in Mexico is the Harpy Eagle, but its habitat is the forested mountains of the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Veracruz, almost 2,000 miles away from northern Baja. In this interview, host Yohanan Díaz Vargas added that many years ago in Mexico City there were sightings of a very similar creature. The modern and somewhat upscale Santa Fé area of the city was once the site of some of the largest tiraderos or dumps in the whole Distrito Federal. A few decades ago, a creature was spotted in the landfills rummaging around in the trash, and it was witnessed by hundreds of people across many months. For a few weeks the same gigantic flying humanoid was also spotted in the Iztapalapa neighborhood of Mexico City. Díaz emphasized that it was only one creature and not a family or group of creatures.
Mexico Unexplained has explored three other similar large flying humanoid creatures spotted in Mexico in previous shows. The most popular of the three is episode number 22 from June of 2016 about La Lechuza. https://mexicounexplained.com/the-lechuza/ The Lechuza is a gigantic owl creature that some believe is a shape-shifting witch. The only things in common with the Hombre Pájaro or Bird Man is that the Lechuza is man-size, is covered in feathers and emits cries like a baby. The other two shows have to do with Mexican sightings of what has been call the Mothman and another creature called the Man-Bat, which are both large winged humanoid creatures. For reference, the Man-Bat show is Mexico Unexplained episode number 51 https://mexicounexplained.com/man-bat-northern-mexico/ and the show on Mothman sightings is episode number 153 https://mexicounexplained.com/mothman-sightings-in-mexico/
The earliest recorded reference to the Hombre Pájaro is from 1908. A story from an old newspaper tells the tale of a man walking his dog near Santa Catarina in the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon just west of the city of Monterrey. Suddenly the dog began to stir and sniff around. Along the way, the man found a footprint, like that of a human, but with claws. It was at that moment that his dog began to bark at the bushes, so the man decided to throw a stone and discover what was hidden. He could hear the flapping of wings and see a dark figure fly from the spot. The creature fit the description of the gigantic bird man described in the 2020s in northern Baja.
On the “Insólita Experiencia” show which aired on December 14, 2021 host Yohanan Díaz Vargas interviewed an Hombre Pájaro “experiencer” who lives in Torreón, in the Mexican state of Coahuila. The man’s name was Sinuhe Valenzuela and his sighting of the creature took place outside the small town of San Lorenzo located about 20 miles northeast of Torreón. Valenzuela’s description of the Bird Man was familiar: It was a little under 6 feet tall and covered in gray feathers. It had no beak, but a human face. It had a collar of feathers like a vulture. When he came face to face with it, Valenzuela described the creature as having what he called a “serious intelligence.” When this being took to the air from its standing position, the flapping of its wings was silent. Valenzuela added that when he told his 87-year-old grandfather about what he saw, his grandfather said that he had known people who had seen the Hombre Pájaro from as far back as the 1940s and that he wasn’t surprised that the creature was still around. When Yohanan Díaz asked Valenzuela what that gigantic, winged humanoid could have been, he was quick to say that it could be a yet unidentified species of large bird. He further stated that Coahuila is probably the state with the most wilderness in Mexico and there are still vast regions that have not been explored, including many inaccessible canyons, mountainous areas and large caverns. From the comfort of his studios in Mexico City, Díaz probably thought this idea unimaginable, but there are extensive areas of Coahuila that remain very wild and could serve as possible habitats for unknown creatures of various kinds. Díaz emphasized that the Hombre Pájaro has been sighted in many states throughout Mexico, from Baja California to Michoacán to Veracruz, and not just in the remote wilderness areas of the north. We are left wondering what this creature is, where did it come from, or if it is even real. More sightings and more investigations are sure to be forthcoming.
REFERENCES
Gracias a Yohanan Díaz Vargas of “Insólita Experiencia”