thumb|220px|Modern representation of a golden Alicanto. The alicanto, in Chilean mythology, is a nocturnal flightless bird of the Atacama desert, which is said to run at night with glowing outspread wings, glittering in the gold or silver color deriving from the precious ores it supposedly eats. Some say it has strangely shining eyes. If the bird can be successfully detected without being noticed, it will lead the miner or prospector to a mother lode of gold or silver. But if the bird detects a human, it is said to extinguish its illumination, then disappear into darkness, or worse, lead the h
thumb|220px|Modern representation of a golden Alicanto. The alicanto, in Chilean mythology, is a nocturnal flightless bird of the Atacama desert, which is said to run at night with glowing outspread wings, glittering in the gold or silver color deriving from the precious ores it supposedly eats. Some say it has strangely shining eyes. If the bird can be successfully detected without being noticed, it will lead the miner or prospector to a mother lode of gold or silver. But if the bird detects a human, it is said to extinguish its illumination, then disappear into darkness, or worse, lead the human to a perilous fall from a precipice.
== Sources == An account of the alicanto was published by folklorist in 1914/1915. A similar description can be found paraphrased in the English-translated version of Book of Imaginary Beings (1969) by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges, under the chapter of "Fauna of Chile", which was one of four chapters not found in the original Spanish version by Borges but expanded in the English translation.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).