Follow Up of the Day: A video that went viral last week supposedly depicted a woolly mammoth — believed extinct for thousands of years — crossing a Siberian river.
While some were convinced by the blurry video, most dismissed it as a hoax, suggesting the supposed mammoth was just a regular elephant or a bear with a fish in its mouth.
As it turns out, the mammoth video was a hoax. Although a report in The Sun claimed the footage was shot by a government engineer, the actual author of the video is a writer and videographer named Ludovic Petho, who filmed it for a documentary project about his grandfather.
Petho says the real video has been on YouTube since last year. It’s not blurry, and it doesn’t show a creature in the river.
“I don’t recall seeing a mammoth; there were bears, deer, and sable,” Petho told Life’s Little Mysteries. “But no woolly mammoths. I had no idea my footage was used to make this fake sighting.”
Myth: busted.
