Regular Episode
049 – INTERNET VIDEO HOAXES: A MAMMOTH UNDERTAKING
The intro music for this episode samples “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. Fitting.
🦣 The Siberian Mammoth Video: How a Hoax Gets Built
The mammoth video — promoted by serial paranormal content promoter Michael Cohen and published in the British tabloid The Sun — purported to show a woolly mammoth wading through a Siberian river, allegedly filmed by an anonymous Russian government engineer. Blake, Ben, and Karen break down what made it immediately suspicious: the video’s uniform, resolution-reduced blurriness (not consistent with optical focus behavior), camera motion that lacked the natural rotational “bank” of a truly handheld shot, and a subject that repeated the same limited movement loop with the regularity of an animated GIF rather than a living animal.
Ben had initially outlined three hypotheses: outright digital insertion, a real bear carrying a large fish, or a bear-with-fish that had been deliberately reframed as something else after the fact. The skeptic community largely converged on “bear with fish” as the most parsimonious answer — an interesting misapplication of Occam’s Razor. As the hosts note, invoking parsimony only works if you’re considering the full set of hypotheses, including the null: that the creature simply wasn’t there at all.
🧊 The Icelandic Worm: A Different Kind of Mystery
The second viral clip — informally dubbed the “Iceland River Worm” (the hosts wisely decline to attempt the actual Icelandic lake name, Lagarfljótsormurinn) — represented a meaningfully different case. The original videographer never claimed to have filmed a monster; that label was applied by tabloid coverage. Ben’s investigation, augmented by analysis from a MonsterTalk listener named Misa, showed that the object in the water wasn’t making any forward progress — it was oscillating with the current, not swimming. The worm’s apparent motion was entirely a function of camera movement.
This contrast — one video an intentional, technically constructed hoax; the other a genuine but misidentified piece of footage — illustrates how the same “monster video” pipeline can produce very different underlying stories depending on who’s labeling what, and when.
🏷️ How Monsters Get Their Names
Ben draws a longer thread through both cases, noting that the person who captures an anomalous image is often not the person who declares it a monster. He cites the famous 1977 Lake Champlain photograph taken by Sandra Mansi: when he interviewed her, she had not initially claimed to have photographed “Champ” — cryptozoologists arrived later and, in effect, told her what she had seen. The Patterson-Gimlin film sits at the opposite end of this spectrum: the filmmakers went into the field actively looking for Bigfoot, and found exactly what they expected to find.
🎬 Captain Disillusion on the Craft of the Hoax
Alan Melikdjanian — whose Captain Disillusion YouTube channel specializes in entertaining, technically rigorous debunks of viral video hoaxes — walks through exactly what a competent compositor would do to produce the mammoth clip. The key insight: the source footage by Petho is a perfectly stable, wide, multi-minute shot of a river. That stability is a compositor’s gift — no motion tracking required. Alan suggests the likely workflow involved taking a pre-rotoscoped stock elephant clip (he points listeners to a specific green-screen elephant clip on iStockPhoto), looping a few steps of sideways walking, warping the rear of the animal to approximate a mammoth’s profile, reducing the composite’s resolution to obscure detail, and adding synthetic camera shake — pan-and-tilt only, with no Z-axis rotation, a subtle but detectable artifact of faked handheld motion. The deliberate degradation of image quality, Alan notes, is a lazy compositor’s best friend: everything suspicious stays just below the threshold of certainty.
Blake’s own frame-by-frame stabilization attempt is linked in the original show notes — the technique involves locking onto fixed reference points (rocks in the foreground) and scrubbing to find the moment where the water features in both the source video and the hoax video align, definitively placing them at the same location and time.
🎥 Lou Petho and the Story Behind the River
The footage that was stolen belongs to Australian independent documentary filmmaker Ludovic Petho, who was on a research trip to Irkutsk, Siberia, retracing the escape route of his grandfather — a POW who escaped a Siberian camp in 1915 and spent three years walking home. The five-minute river shot was captured mid-way through a ten-day hike, purely for its aesthetic value. A YouTube commenter who recognized Cohen’s pattern of behavior searched for Siberian river footage and matched it to Petho’s upload.
Petho reached out to Ben, who initially did some quiet due diligence to rule out a reverse hoax before confirming the story. The production company that purchased the clip from Cohen acknowledged Petho’s ownership and negotiated compensation; Cohen, characteristically, suggested Petho should be grateful for the publicity. Petho had attempted a wry counter-move: emailing Cohen to commiserate about the terrible person who had tricked them both — the anonymous fraudster who surely wasn’t Cohen himself.
At the time of recording, Petho was planning a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds for the documentary, to be linked from his website Russian Promenade.
🔍 Skeptics vs. Cryptozoologists: Who Solves the Mysteries?
Sharon Hill‘s Doubtful News observed at the time that both hoaxes were ultimately resolved by skeptical investigators, not by professional cryptozoologists. Ben frames this as a recurring pattern: if cryptozoology aspires to be a genuine field of inquiry, its practitioners should have at least as much incentive to expose frauds as to document sightings. The hosts note that truth-seeking and traffic-generation are not always the same goal. They also cite Brian Regal‘s observation (discussed in his book on the history of Bigfoot) that information-hoarding is common in cryptozoological circles — a contrast to the openly collaborative analysis modeled by MonsterTalk’s own listeners, including Misa’s worm-tracking work.
The episode closes with a broader methodological point borrowed from James Randi and, before him, Houdini: demonstrating a mundane mechanism that produces the same effect as a claimed phenomenon is sufficient to warrant skepticism — you don’t need to identify the specific costume, the specific software, or the specific bank transfer. The burden-of-proof escalation that demands perfect replication before accepting a hoax explanation is, as Blake puts it, a kind of Zeno’s paradox of skepticism.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Pseudoscience and the Paranormal 💵 by Terence Hines
– 📚 Lake Monster Mysteries 💵 by Benjamin Radford and Joe Nickell
– 📚 Tracking the Chupacabra 💵 by Benjamin Radford
🔗 Related Links
– Captain Disillusion on YouTube
– Doubtful News (Sharon Hill)
– Lagarfljótsormurinn — the Icelandic “worm” legend
– Woolly Mammoth (Wikipedia)
– Pareidolia — the perceptual mechanism Alan flags as partly responsible for the “bear with fish” reading
– Video Compositing
– Skeptical Inquirer — Ben Radford’s home publication
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
Did you see that popular Internet video that allegedly showed a mammoth crossing a river in Siberia? You probably figured it was a hoax—and we did too—but we decided to get to the bottom of the matter. Join us as we discuss the methods and motives for Internet hoax videos. This episode also includes interviews with documentary film maker Ludovic Petho and Alan Melikdjanian (aka Captain Disillusion). Was there really something fishy about that video? Listen to see if you can bear the truth!
Related Material
- Ben Radford’s deconstruction
- The Huffington Post’s deconstruction
- Blake Smith’s video analysis
- The green screen stock elephant video that Alan describes in his interview.
Music
- Intro Music: sample from Wooly Bully by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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