Viral Woolly Mammoth Spotting Video Turns Out to be a Hoax
A video that ended up becoming an internet sensation that supposedly featured the spotting of a Woolly Mammoth, a creature believed to have been extinct is now believed to be a hoax, according to experts.
The posting showed this long extinct creature crossing a river in Russia, but one major issue with the footage was that it appeared quite blurry.
Immediately viewers became skeptical over it. Derek Serra, a video effects specialist for Hollywood video effects artists told ABC news that the video "appears to have been intentionally blurred."
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Some viewers suspected that the animal in the video was a computer generated mammoth digitally inserted into a real river scene, but experts such as Serra feel that there is a better chance that this could be another animal being tampered with to look like a mammoth.
One of the proposed theories was that it could be a bear crossing the river carrying a fish in its mouth blurred out.
Another expert named Ludovic Petho recently filmed similar footage in the area where this mammoth was supposedly roaming.
Not only did the river in the video appear to be the same one filmed by Petho in his 10-day solo hike in the mountains as part of a video project he was creating that was about his grandfather's escape from a Siberian POW camp in 1915, but it actually was his video being used in order to create this so called mammoth footage.
"I don't recall seeing a mammoth; there were bears, deer and sable," he said in an interview with Life's Little Mysteries. "But no woolly mammoths. I had no idea my footage was used to make this fake sighting."
Petho's original video had been available on YouTube since July 2011 and apparently it had been taken and edited to show a woolly mammoth crossing the river.
