Is Drone Video of a Bear Chasing a Person in Snow Real?
Origin
On Jan. 26, 2022, Reddit user u/namey_mcnameson
posted a video that purportedly showed the view of a drone flying between trees in a snowy wilderness to reveal a man or woman being chased by what might have been a grizzly
bear. The caption of the video on the
r/Unexpected subreddit read: “Such a lovely day to test out my drone.”
Reddit
The top comment
said: “WE NEED ANSWERS!”
Some commenters believed the video might be the work of a CGI artist. “The snow doesn’t flick up very naturally from the footsteps,” u/wealllovethrowaways
said. “It’s very likely CGI, but it’s damn good CGI.”
The highest available resolution for the video appeared to be 418×480, which was quite low. If the video did contain some CGI work, one good strategy to hide that fact would be to lower the quality of the clip to make it more difficult for viewers to study details.
One user
believed it to be animation created with the graphics software Blender.
Others discussed just
how fast bears can run, saying that the person in the video would have been bear food within seconds. “That bear is a paid actor,”
joked another person.
However, others weren’t so sure it was fake. “I’m under the impression that this is a real video without audio, but the audio was added for comedic effect,” a user
said. That comment had more than 200 likes in agreement with believing the video was real. Another person
concurred: “I second this theory.” Several people also
mentioned a
theory that it might have been a “trained bear.”
The sound in the clip appeared to have been recreated and was not the original audio. The audio from drones can often sound like little more than loud whirring or buzzing from the mechanics that enable it to fly.
The one thing that all of the Reddit comments had in common was that no one had yet uncovered definitive evidence of the origins of the supposed drone video.
We’re continuing to look for where the video originated in order to figure out if the purported drone video really did show a grizzly bear (or another kind of bear) chasing a person through the snow. We found no trace of the clip on Facebook or the Russian-language social media website
VK.com (V Kontakte), for example. We will update this story when we know more. Initially, we have rated the claim as “Research In Progress.”
Full article:
The video was posted to the r/Unexpected subreddit on Reddit with the caption: "Such a lovely day to test out my drone."
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