| 1 | Record breaking grizzly shot dead |
Most internet hoaxes last only a day or two, but some achieve the glorious status of zombie hoax, where no amount of facts can stop them from reviving every 2 years and shuffling around the internet looking for new victims to fool. The contender in the bear universe comes from 2001, when according to a legend, forest worker Ted Winnen was hunting in the remote Alaskan wilderness, when a massive grizzly bear suddenly charged from nowhere. With a feather light touch, Winner unloaded his 7mm Magnum semi automatic rifle into the bear’s skull, which came to a stop only inches away.
Winnen quickly realised that this bear was a record breaker. It weighed 1600 pounds, stood 14 feet from the head, and was tall enough to see inside a first floor gutter. Inside the bear’s den, Winnen discovered the half-eaten remains of a hiker, and its stomach contents proved that the bloodthirsty monster had eaten 2 innocent hikers over the last 72 hours and was doubtlessly planning more soon. A smiling picture of Winnen with his blood-stained kill proved that it was all true.
The Fish and Game Department was bombarded with inquisitive phones calls, but Winnen was actually a US airman, not a forest worker. The gun was a .338 Winchester Magnum, and the bear weighed only 1100 pounds, which was massive, but far from a record. Its height was 10 feet 6 inches.
Let’s face it – if bears are able to see into first floor gutters now, then humanity might as well give up.
| 2 | Bear pursues man on bike |
A man is standing with his bicycle in a forest, adjusting the go-pro strapped to his helmet. He slams his pedal to the floor and is now cycling at top speed, but seconds later, a gigantic brown bear is on his trail, galloping out of the forest. The man accelerates, and hangs on for dear life. He risks a look around, only to see the bear directly behind him. The bear is keeping pace with ease, and is undoubtedly hunting him. The path transitions into thicker undergrowth, and the man pedals with all his might, but there’s just no quit in this bear.
Suddenly, at high speeds, the man sees a tree branch blocking his path. Disaster! He hops off his bike and dashes behind a fir tree. Breathing heavily, he risks a quick peek out, and sees the bear standing in the clearing. It looks around determinedly, before making a decision and galloping off into the thick undergrowth. The man survives.
If real, this would be one of the vividest pieces of bear footage ever shot, rivalling the £10 million productions of David Attenborough with ease. But is it real? The universal consensus is no. The bear is far too shiny and seems to float around the forest setting like a ghost. Its movements are too smooth. The forest background is blurred, yet the bear looks crystal clear.
All signs suggest that this youtube video with 38 million views (as of June 2022) actually contains a CGI bear copy and pasted from Skyrim.
| 3 | Snowboarder girl fights for her life |
When it comes to bears, Japan is a country of two halves. The northern island of Hokkaido is packed with brown bears of the Ussuri brown bear subspecies, but the main island of Honshu doesn’t have a single one. Or does it? In 2016, an 18 year old snowboarder almost broke the internet after 20 successful years of operation when she posted footage from her go-pro helmet.
She had just returned from the Honshu-based ski resort of Hakuba47, and was so cheerful that she started singing Work by Rihanna as she skied down the snowy mountainside. What she didn’t notice was the bulky shadow of a brown bear. 10 seconds in, a brief glimpse of a watchful bear appears, and 30 seconds in, the bear is chasing her at high speeds down the snowy slope, while the girl sings happily, totally oblivious. She claimed to have only noticed the bear when she viewed the footage the next day.
“This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!” she posted. But instantly, some were sceptical of the fact that the video had a producer and director in the credits. This would have been the first brown bear sighting in Honshu for millennia, yet conservationists didn’t bat an eyelid. The acting performances were stuck in a 1950s b-movie, as the bear growls nonstop throughout the video, in a sound effect surprisingly similar to, you guessed it, Skyrim. Some speculated that this was the same bear from the bike chasing video.
| 4 | Bear sightings in southern England |
Rendlesham Forest in Sussex was already a place of heavy superstition, after UFO sightings in December 1980 gave it the moniker of “Britain’s Roswell”. In March 2009, things took another twist when 3 separate brown bear sightings were recorded.
This was strange considering that brown bears had been extinct on British soil since 1000AD. One woman called Jenny Pearce had been exploring the woods with her 3 year old son, when she “saw it moving through the trees ahead. It was much bigger than a dog”. She scooped up her young son and fled. Meanwhile, youtube user nickdeptford uploaded a video with two blurry photos, taken in 2008 and 2009, of a hairy brown mass eating vegetation.
Conservationists rejoiced, but the authorities panicked and urged dog walkers to take care. Some speculated that a bear family had escaped from a local zoo, and a local policeman mused that “I think a bear could survive in Rendlesham Forest“.
The truth? It was all a promotional stunt for a performance of “A Winter’s Tale” by William Shakespeare, which contains the classic stage direction of “exit stage left, pursued by bear”. The crew admitted to inventing the bear story from start to finish. The youtube video was deliberately blurred, and nickdeptford was secretly an actor called Jimmy Grimes who was a dab hand with photoshop. Jenny Pearce was a figment of Jimmy’s imagination, and her fake email account was his handiwork.
The Rendlesham bears vanished in a puff of smoke, but it didn’t stop some from believing.
| 5 | The speaking mummy of Siberia |
2019 saw a news headline ripped straight from the pages of Hollywood: a “living mummy” rescued from a Siberian cave after a brown bear had stored him as a future meal for 30 days. His skin was covered with rotting sores, and his body was severely emaciated. He could remember his first name, Alexander, but not his surname or age.
The story was first posted on the Russian tabloid website EADaily, and soon went viral, accumulating hundreds of thousands of views. Alexander had survived the cave of nightmares by drinking his own urine, and was only saved when the dogs of passing hunters started barking and refused to go on. “The bear preserved me as food for later”, he explained. Alexander was now being treated in hospital, and could only open his bright blue eyes and wave his arms. But he was alive, and it was a true miracle.
Or was it? It turned out that the “living mummy” was actually a severe psoriasis patient. He hadn’t been close to a bear in months, let alone a cave. The crusty, emaciated pictures were all too real, but Alexander had actually fallen into a depression and let the festering sores get out of control. Every element of the story was made up. It was about as accurate as that 2017 story of a bear roaming Siberia with an IZH shotgun. Eventually, Alexander’s mother turned up to whisk her poor boy away from hospital, and probably buy him some moisturiser.
| 6 | The last photo of Michio Hoshino |
In 1996, a new record for brown bears was set – the first bear to break the laws of physics. This superbear managed to place its right forepaw inside a tent’s door, yet still have its right forelimb fully outside the door.
Or at least that’s what a photograph from 1996 shows. Like the old rumours of snakes in KFC ball pits, this was a viral email hoax that purported to show the last picture ever taken by respected bear photographer Michio Hoshino, before he was mauled to death 5 seconds later.
The photograph consists entirely of a blue-coloured tent and a gigantic bear head with its fangs bared, already stepping into the tent. The bear has very sad eyes, as though he’s already apologising. Elements of the story are true, as the real life Michio Hoshino was a professional photographer who died on August 6th 1996 in the Kamchatka peninsula of Russia after being dragged out of his tent.
So where did the picture come from? A photoshop competition of course! It’s an excellent job on the surface, but there’s a few telling flaws, such as the amount of light on the bear’s head. It’s clearly daytime outside, but Hochino met his end at 4am, not 12pm noon. The shadows of the plants indicate that the sun lies to the right, while the light on the bear is clearly coming from the left. The strange blending of the leg puts the cherry on top.
| 7 | Game2: winter |
It sounded like the natural progression of reality TV. 30 contestants, including 15 men and 15 women, would be dropped on a remote Siberian island in Tomsk and left to survive for 9 long months, in a real life imitation of the Hunger Games. 200 fixed webcams would be placed around the 9km island, which was said to be infested with brown bears due to migrants fleeing northern wildfires. The competitors would have to fish, hunt, and build primitive shelters. Most controversially, game2: winter had a “death clause” where competitors agreed that if they were murdered over resources, it was their own fault.
Game2: winter was the brainchild of Yevgeny Pyatkovsky, who had become a multi-millionaire with an app that blocked annoying debt collector calls. He said: “This is the raw Siberian taiga: anything can happen, and we might not be on time to solve an emergency.“. An initial promo poster featured a roaring brown bear head superimposed onto a background of cold, white snow. When asked for his motivations, Pyatkovsky replied “To earn money, this is my main task“. The plan was for 100 criminals to break free from a nearby jail, whom the survivalists would have to capture for a bonus from the sponsors. People were disgusted with the show’s brutal concept, but couldn’t tear their eyes away.
The truth, of course, was that Game2: winter was never happening. It was a social experiment, as announced on June 1st 2017. A few people were suspicious from day one.
| 8 | Timothy Treadwell’s death audio |
This is the only fake video with a slight question mark hovering over it. You’re probably familiar with Timothy Treadwell, the world famous grizzly man of Alaska whose last moments were accidentally captured in a 6 minute audio recording. Werner Herzog, director of Grizzly Man, is the only person to have listened to the full tape, which he immediately handed to Treadwell’s close confidant Jewel Pavolak, telling her to destroy it. She locked the tape in a vault, but that hasn’t stopped a fake video from appearing on youtube, with over 3 million views.
The audio is professionally performed and extremely shocking. The youtube page is full of sober comments that humans are low down on the food chain, but the consensus among Treadwell experts is unanimous: close but no cigar. Many of Treadwell’s lines like “get out here, I’m getting killed out here”, and Annie’s “Play dead!” are repeated precisely.
However, one dodgy-sounding effect is said to be the sound of heavy rain hammering against the tent. Plus, the tricksters couldn’t resist the usual Hollywood bear growls. On reddit, one audio engineer chimed in and said that they were clearly taken from a public domain animal sounds FX kit! In the real tape, the bear is said to be silent. It’s even rumoured that Herzog himself has declared the tape to be fake.
That said, there’s still a slight element of mystery. Several people on the internet have sworn to have heard the real tape on the local news the day after Treadwell’s death, one of whom was drinking in a local bar. It’s said that the police and coroner were also given a copy, and if so, it’s conceivable that a junior employee could have leaked them. If you love unsolved mysteries, then the Treadwell tape is one that lives on.
| 9 | The BBC’s production trickery |
The BBC is famed for its wildlife documentaries, and perhaps the most popular in 2013 was the Great Bear Stakeout. Chris Martin spent several weeks in Katmai National Park in Alaska, the former territory of Timothy Treadwell. In the first episode, a tragic scene was shown where a mother bear lost her cub in the water, who was later washed away, presumably drowned. The footage repeatedly cut between the distressed bears and Martin standing on a beach, with his haunted expression saying it all about the harsh brutality of nature.
But there was one problem – Martin wasn’t even there! 9 months later, it emerged that the footage of Martin and the bear cubs had been spliced together from separate sources. Martin was doing a radio interview where the harrowing cub scene was scheduled for discussion, and naturally, he mentioned that he wasn’t actually present and couldn’t tell them much.
Apparently, the producers had staged Martin’s reaction in order “to tell a narrative and to enhance the viewing experience“. The rest of the program had been through “the guide’s eyes”, and therefore, it was important to pretend that Martin was meters away. The BBC Trust admitted that it had weakened viewers’ trust, and edited the scene for iPlayer, the BBC’s digital service.
Something similar happened in 2011 with David Attenborough’s Frozen Planet documentary series, where shots of breathtaking arctic wilderness were immediately followed by a polar bear mother nursing her cubs, who later turned out to be in a zoo.
| 10 | Grizzly sightings in Aspen |
In 2007, rumours spread from mouth to mouth, from street to street in rural Colorado that a family of grizzly bears had been sighted in Aspen. Better yet, a clear photograph had been taken, which was far superior to the blurry photographs of Bigfoot.
Grizzly bears were widely believed to be extinct in the Colorado Rockies, with the last officially confirmed sighting being in 1979 when Ed Wiseman stabbed one with a fallen arrow shaft. Occasional rumours had appeared, but now, the gossip on local Colorado websites had reached fever pitch. The supposed photo showed a happy family of grizzlies eating, and it was rumoured to have started when a family’s nanny took the bus to Maroon Bells to go hiking. After getting lost, she stumbled across the grizzly family, and flashed the photo with a small digital camera. Suddenly, a spike of fear came over her, and the nanny fled back to the safety of the bus.
It was a magical story, but the truth? The photo was taken from a poster from 1987, emblazed with the words “The Last Great Symbol of the Wilderness”. It was taken by photographer Chuck Bartlebaugh, who instantly recognised it and professed his annoyance that his work was circulating the internet without royalty. In all honesty, the photo was far too professional – blurriness would have made it more convincing. Since then, there have been no confirmed sightings of grizzly bears in Colorado.
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