Speaker 1: You're listening to an air wave media podcast.
Speaker 2: Right of allheaded.
Speaker 3: A right A, thank you, off.
Speaker 4: I do being off.
Speaker 5: I wanned all level.
Speaker 3: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4: A giant hairy creature in Part eight party mat in Luckness,
Speaker 4: a twenty four mile long bottomless lake in the Highlands
Speaker 4: of Scotland. It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 3: Mornstert All, Welcome to Monster Talk, the science show about monsters.
Speaker 3: I'm Blake Smith, and today with doctor Karen Stolesno and
Speaker 3: Ben Radford, we'll be tackling the issue with video hoaxing. First,
Speaker 3: we'll be discussing the context of Internet video hoaxes, and
Speaker 3: then we'll be talking to Lou Petho, the man whose
Speaker 3: video was ripped off to build.
Speaker 5: The famous Mammoth hoax.
Speaker 3: And after that we have a bonus interview with Alan
Speaker 3: Melick Janion, better known by millions as Captain Disillusion. He'll
Speaker 3: be walking us through how such hoaxes are made. This
Speaker 3: episode will also have some interesting links in the show notes,
Speaker 3: including my own frame by frame matchup which proves that
Speaker 3: the Mammoth video did indeed derive directly from Beetho's source material,
Speaker 3: and we'll also be talking about the Iceland worm and
Speaker 3: how it differs from the mammoth hoax. We've got a
Speaker 3: lot to cover, so let's get going with some morbster.
Speaker 3: We've had a lot of really interesting video monster news
Speaker 3: in the past couple of weeks. So one story that
Speaker 3: we're going to be doing I guess the majority of
Speaker 3: this episode on is this mammoth in Siberia. But there's
Speaker 3: also another story about a mysterious ice serpent that Both
Speaker 3: these stories are Internet videos that have gone viral, and
Speaker 3: both of them, Ben, you've written articles on and found
Speaker 3: solutions for really quickly.
Speaker 5: So I think we have a lot of interesting things
Speaker 5: to chat about.
Speaker 6: Yeah, definitely.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Why has it been such a spite of these of
Speaker 1: light I don't know.
Speaker 5: And why are they all ice related.
Speaker 2: Time of year?
Speaker 6: I guess that must be I mean, actually it's interesting because,
Speaker 6: as you pointed out, I mean there's a lot of similarities.
Speaker 6: Both of them were you know, in icy conditions in water.
Speaker 6: One was in Iceland, in eastern Iceland. I'm not even
Speaker 6: going to try and pronounce the name of the lake,
Speaker 6: and the other one, of course, was in Siberia. One
Speaker 6: of them was much fuzzier than the other one because
Speaker 6: as we as we now know, it was digitally dizzily
Speaker 6: digitally fuzzified. But the other one, I don't think was
Speaker 6: yes exactly, I mean, let's.
Speaker 5: Not fill the whole thing up with the right exactly.
Speaker 6: Yeah, exactly the insider tech jargon fuzzified. But no, it was.
Speaker 6: It was interesting, I mean, just from my perspective, how
Speaker 6: both of these turned out, because you know, initially I
Speaker 6: had written pieces on both of them, sort of independently,
Speaker 6: and to be honest, i'd kind of not ignored, but
Speaker 6: I just hadn't gotten around to the whole ice the
Speaker 6: Iceland lake, Monter or river, whatever the hell it was.
Speaker 6: It had been around for about a week, and I
Speaker 6: was just really pisical other things. I didn't get a
Speaker 6: chance to do it, and then finally I was asked
Speaker 6: to do it by by news organization, so I dropped
Speaker 6: everything I did. But what was interesting was that what
Speaker 6: with both of them. Of course, one of the first
Speaker 6: things was, well, is is it real? Is it a hoax?
Speaker 6: Whatever else? And of course they were. They were hoax
Speaker 6: theories on all sides. But I think you know that
Speaker 6: these two are a very interesting pairing when you look
Speaker 6: more closely at the videos and you you know, what
Speaker 6: happened and how did it happen and how did these
Speaker 6: things come up? And we can talk some about that
Speaker 6: now because I think it's again we've got a lot
Speaker 6: of feedback, as you pointed out, from the monster Talk community, uh,
Speaker 6: on Facebook and elsewhere, so it's a it was kind
Speaker 6: of neat to sort of see how each of them
Speaker 6: played out in their own way.
Speaker 1: I was going to say, as well, as you noted
Speaker 1: on the Facebook page, that it's it's really great that
Speaker 1: these were tackled so quickly and that solutions and explanations
Speaker 1: were found. Otherwise they would really be relegated to FOLCAL
Speaker 1: very quickly and no one would ever uh be able
Speaker 1: to explain them, and they just go on and on
Speaker 1: and on. So it was good to really nail them
Speaker 1: so quickly.
Speaker 6: It's it, you know, it's a double edged sort. I mean,
Speaker 6: you know, in some ways, the uh, the the internet,
Speaker 6: you know, of course, it's we have a proliferation of
Speaker 6: of these these videos and these you know, is it
Speaker 6: a big foot, these blob squatches and here and there.
Speaker 6: So on one hand, of course that the Internet has
Speaker 6: has really promulgated and you know, made it much easier
Speaker 6: to get these things out there and fooling people. On
Speaker 6: the flip side, of course, we also have there's much
Speaker 6: more there's much more capacity for immediately addressing these things
Speaker 6: and bringing analysis and criticism. So which was which was?
Speaker 6: Which is? Which? Is kind of good because again, a
Speaker 6: lot of times, you know, in my experience, these things
Speaker 6: just fade away. I mean, I can you know, I
Speaker 6: can think of dozens and dozens of you know, of
Speaker 6: videos of you know, the Lake Champlain monster or a
Speaker 6: blob squad somewhere or whatever else that you know, makes
Speaker 6: a big hubbub, and then after a week or two
Speaker 6: it fades away and there's really no no final conclusion
Speaker 6: or really solid analysis. And it was nice to sort
Speaker 6: of be able to put a period at the end
Speaker 6: of both of these.
Speaker 1: If any of the Internet was around in nineteen sixty six.
Speaker 6: Hey, right, exactly.
Speaker 3: I think it's interesting to kind of talk about how
Speaker 3: there's there's several big differences between these these two incidents.
Speaker 3: I'm not sure what we should call them. Let's call
Speaker 3: them incidents for now.
Speaker 2: Hoxes.
Speaker 3: Well, Well, that's the point, right, That's exactly the first
Speaker 3: point I wanted to get to the the I really
Speaker 3: wish I could pronounce the name of this thing, but
Speaker 3: I'm just going to call it the ice snake.
Speaker 5: So the video shows.
Speaker 6: Blake, I believe you're referring to the log art flowstorm.
Speaker 7: Bless you, Floats or Mrran.
Speaker 1: You could just fix this in post.
Speaker 6: Call it, call it the ice icelandic worm. How's that?
Speaker 5: I think?
Speaker 8: You know?
Speaker 3: I think I think our friends, uh this was we
Speaker 3: have listeners everywhere, but I think our friends in Iceland
Speaker 3: are probably.
Speaker 5: Laughing at us.
Speaker 6: Really it's okay, Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I think I also tore something in my tongue
Speaker 5: just now.
Speaker 6: So any Yes, you were talking the Iceland worm.
Speaker 3: Right, the Iceland worm. We call the Iceland river worm.
Speaker 5: Anyway.
Speaker 3: The point is that the Iceland river worm video was
Speaker 3: popularized after the person who saw the thing in the
Speaker 3: river videoed it and then turned it over to the
Speaker 3: local news as an interesting video, right, and then it
Speaker 3: became sort of a monster what's the right word here.
Speaker 3: It became another one of those encryptid reports that all
Speaker 3: of our favorite websites picked up and carried, but it
Speaker 3: was never I guess specifically claimed by the guy who
Speaker 3: videoed it that he had seen the monster, he saw
Speaker 3: something unusual in the water. But the mammoth video was
Speaker 3: promoted as being a wooly mammoth crossing a river in Siberia,
Speaker 3: that the person who videoed it actually had seen a
Speaker 3: mammoth crossing the river, which is a fairly big difference.
Speaker 6: Well, I think I was gonna say. One important thing
Speaker 6: to understand is that, for the most part, when when
Speaker 6: the public sees these videos, the immediate assumption is that that,
Speaker 6: however it's being presented to them at the time, is
Speaker 6: how it was presented to the journalist or to the
Speaker 6: blogger or whoever it was. And so if they say,
Speaker 6: you know, you know this is allegedly you know, this
Speaker 6: was shot by someone who says it's bigfoot, and what what,
Speaker 6: there's a lot of times there's nuances in there where
Speaker 6: what you find is that is that that's not quite true,
Speaker 6: and that certainly was the case with the the Iceland worm.
Speaker 6: Was that uh, And as you pointed out, you know
Speaker 6: the guy that that actually shot it, it's important to
Speaker 6: realize that he didn't. His end of the story didn't
Speaker 6: come out for several weeks when when when the first
Speaker 6: when the video first hit the internet, and I think
Speaker 6: it was probably, as I recall it, it probably appeared
Speaker 6: in one of the British tabloids, because they just create
Speaker 6: this stuff out, you know, like like sausage. But but
Speaker 6: when when it first appeared there we there was no backstory.
Speaker 6: It was just basically, hey, here's this, here's this, this
Speaker 6: this river monster in Iceland.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 6: And then after I think a week or two, there
Speaker 6: was some follow up and then someone actually talked to
Speaker 6: the guy and got a quote, and that's when it
Speaker 6: sort of came out that he himself, as you point out,
Speaker 6: and never really claimed that, and other people had sort
Speaker 6: of put the label on that. And I that that
Speaker 6: process by which people labeled monsters has always really interested me.
Speaker 6: And the first time that I really noticed that was
Speaker 6: with the Champ Monster in Lake Champlain because if you
Speaker 6: look at the most famous photo photo of Champ and
Speaker 6: really of any lake monster in the world, the one
Speaker 6: taken by Sandra Manson in nineteen seventy seven. It appears
Speaker 6: in all sorts of cryptosology books and mystery books and
Speaker 6: unexplained books. As you know, a photo of Champ, the
Speaker 6: local lake monster. But when I interviewed missus Mancy and
Speaker 6: when I did more research on it, it turns out that,
Speaker 6: in fact, she never claimed it was well, she eventually
Speaker 6: claimed it was Champ. But at first she just said
Speaker 6: I saw something weird. She never said it must be
Speaker 6: you know, the local lake monster. She never said it
Speaker 6: must be Champ. She just said, hey, here's this weird thing.
Speaker 6: And it wasn't until later on when cryptozoologists came in
Speaker 6: and basically put a label on her experience and on
Speaker 6: her photograph, and in a very real way they told
Speaker 6: her what she saw. In the end, I argue, and
Speaker 6: I've argued in my books that they were wrong in
Speaker 6: our interpretation. But of course she in her mind, these
Speaker 6: were the experts. You know, these are cryptozoologists, They've written
Speaker 6: books on these things, they know these things, and so
Speaker 6: she was happy to accept their explanation because she sort
Speaker 6: of felt like, well, you know, these are scientists, these
Speaker 6: are experts. They know more about this than I do.
Speaker 6: I'm just somebody who happened to be there and see
Speaker 6: it and photograph it. And anyways, it's interesting because this
Speaker 6: actually happens fairly frequently in these in these lake monster sightings,
Speaker 6: where again as with the Iceland worm, the first person
Speaker 6: isn't necessarily the person that's labeling it. It's just sort
Speaker 6: of something weird, and of course something will weird quickly
Speaker 6: translates into monster.
Speaker 1: And then conversely you've got with the person Gimlin footage,
Speaker 1: they were actually in search of Bigfoot at the time,
Speaker 1: and then that's what they find.
Speaker 3: Exactly in this particular case with the with the Siberian
Speaker 3: Mammoth video, it's it's really unclear what the backstory was
Speaker 3: supposed to be. The guy who brought the video to us,
Speaker 3: Michael Cohen has been involved in bringing all sorts of
Speaker 3: videos in other hoaxes and claims to the public. So
Speaker 3: he was involved in I think we you know, as
Speaker 3: we talked about when we talked to low Petho, has
Speaker 3: a series of hoaxes he's been involved with, or at
Speaker 3: least what appears to be hoaxes too.
Speaker 6: Right, we should probably qualify that not all of them
Speaker 6: have been proven hoaxes, but they're certainly highly dubious.
Speaker 3: Well, let's say two of them, in particular, this one
Speaker 3: and then the Chicken alien from I think it was
Speaker 3: April of.
Speaker 5: Last year, and then what I think was pretty clearly.
Speaker 3: Also a hoax is the video he did of a
Speaker 3: supposed alien behind some Brazilian school kids. That looks pretty
Speaker 3: phony to me. But again the question is not well,
Speaker 3: I guess the question is did Cohen do these hoaxes?
Speaker 3: Or is he just a promoter of hoaxes. I don't
Speaker 3: know the answer to that, But what I think should
Speaker 3: be clear is that if any news story comes from
Speaker 3: Michael Cohen, it should be treated as extremely unlikely to
Speaker 3: be true, like very suspect. I mean the whole whole
Speaker 3: idea that you know, he's he's become like a pet
Speaker 3: Barnum or a yeah.
Speaker 2: I was going to say yeah, or.
Speaker 5: Tom Biscardi.
Speaker 2: Them all.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's a person who who's whose content is extremely dubious.
Speaker 3: I would not trust it. I don't think our listeners
Speaker 3: would trust it. And I'm surprised, well, you know, I'm
Speaker 3: not surprised. We'll get to that too. It's like, I
Speaker 3: want to talk about why the Sun would put this
Speaker 3: onto their paper, because that's also kind of an interesting matter.
Speaker 1: They're a tabloid exactly well, American listeners would be familiar
Speaker 1: with the Sun as a British tabloid, but you know,
Speaker 1: page three goals and the lot.
Speaker 3: Well, and then those are respectable I'm talking about.
Speaker 2: Comparatively.
Speaker 5: Yeah, those aren't fake, you see, that's all?
Speaker 2: Well they are?
Speaker 3: Hey now so so right, there's the other thing. It's like,
Speaker 3: what the Sun's responsibility in this manner? I mean, I
Speaker 3: think they ought to, you know, be more reputable, but
Speaker 3: it's not. It's not their job to be reputable, I guess, considering.
Speaker 5: They've given up on that a long time ago.
Speaker 3: I mean, they have a reputation as I mean, are
Speaker 3: they suitable for holding fried fish? Well?
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean, look, I think that there's an element
Speaker 6: to this where, you know, part it's it's a valid
Speaker 6: question asked, did anybody was anybody really fooled by this?
Speaker 6: I mean it's it's easy to sort of say, well, look,
Speaker 6: you know it got it got five million hits on YouTube.
Speaker 6: All these people believe it, not necessarily just because people
Speaker 6: are watching it or forwarding it or commenting on it.
Speaker 6: You know, it doesn't mean people are buying it. A
Speaker 6: lot of them are skeptics and and things like that.
Speaker 6: So I think I think that it's easy to sort
Speaker 6: of unintentionally exaggerate the number of people that were really
Speaker 6: you know, fooled or baffled by it. And and you
Speaker 6: know when you when you look at and again, part
Speaker 6: of that that credibility goes to word first appeared. And
Speaker 6: you know when something first appears in the tabloids, just
Speaker 6: like you know the National Inquirer, which I think is
Speaker 6: now online, only you know ten years ago, if something
Speaker 6: appeared in the Inquirer, every now and then, you know
Speaker 6: something is true. I mean, the Inquiry has actually broken
Speaker 6: important news stories like for example, I think they broke
Speaker 6: Jimmy Swaggert being caught with a hooker and a copy
Speaker 6: of Hustler, which I was I just love. But so
Speaker 6: the point is that you know that even every now
Speaker 6: and then, even they can come up with a real story.
Speaker 6: But for the most part, people know what they're getting.
Speaker 6: And the same thing with the Sun and especially when
Speaker 6: you when you when you look at it from from
Speaker 6: a skeptical point of view and you realize, you know,
Speaker 6: this is all anonymous. This is you know, a government
Speaker 6: employed engineer, really somebody, and this is all shot last summer.
Speaker 6: I don't believe for a second that some Russian government
Speaker 6: engineer saw a wooly mammoth last summer and didn't say
Speaker 6: anything about it for six months, I just just don't
Speaker 6: buy it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the Sun, I think they were going to
Speaker 1: replace News of the World with a Sunday edition.
Speaker 2: If that says anything about.
Speaker 5: Them, it doesn't. What does that mean, Well.
Speaker 2: They we're going to replace another tabloid.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, okay. So you know, my familiar with British tabloids
Speaker 3: is very limited. I do know that the Sun is
Speaker 3: I think the Sun and the Daily Mail. You know,
Speaker 3: they have been responsible for so many wasted hours for.
Speaker 6: Me, especially the Page three girls, right, I can't get to.
Speaker 5: That at work.
Speaker 2: And the Tory politicians in lingerie.
Speaker 5: I guess my point is the Yeah, so that's a
Speaker 5: dubious thing. But here's what I found really interesting.
Speaker 3: A lot of the times when photos and videos appear
Speaker 3: in the Sun, people I mean, I assume other listeners
Speaker 3: have the same thing. They want to figure it out themselves.
Speaker 3: They want to say, well, is that a real thing
Speaker 3: to be curious about or is that just crap? Or
Speaker 3: is that a reflection in a window? Is that digitally enhanced?
Speaker 3: Is it something you know? Is it a real thing?
Speaker 3: And in this particular case, it was fascinating to me,
Speaker 3: I mean absolutely fascinating to me, less the video, but
Speaker 3: more how the skeptic community split up on the whole thing,
Speaker 3: and like the most if there had been an Internet poll,
Speaker 3: by far, the clear winner would have been this was
Speaker 3: actually a bear with a fish, right? And I found
Speaker 3: that really interesting because I saw that there were elements
Speaker 3: that implied digital trickery. And this was before the actual
Speaker 3: source video came out. And so we're gonna have inserted
Speaker 3: into this episode some really good explanations for how this
Speaker 3: stuff was done. But everybody was so sure it was
Speaker 3: a bear with a fish because of this really interesting reason.
Speaker 3: They said to themselves Occam's razor, which makes more sense?
Speaker 3: Is it a bear with a fish? Or is it
Speaker 3: a Willie mammoth?
Speaker 5: But the other option of maybe there's nothing there at all,
Speaker 5: taking which.
Speaker 3: Is really the null hypothesis, I mean literally, then all
Speaker 3: hypothesis didn't come through. It was like, why would somebody
Speaker 3: take the time to digitally insert something when they could
Speaker 3: just take a natural phenomena and put it in there.
Speaker 3: And I think we'll address all those questions in the
Speaker 3: two interviews. But that's that's that's really an interesting thing,
Speaker 3: because maybe they were asking the wrong question or maybe
Speaker 3: they asked the right question to begin with, is it
Speaker 3: a hoax or not? Yes, as a hoax, and then
Speaker 3: they played through I don't know.
Speaker 6: Right well, I was gonna say in the original piece
Speaker 6: that I wrote about that I basically I gave three
Speaker 6: possible possible theories on it. The first one was that
Speaker 6: it was it's an outright pox, that it was you know,
Speaker 6: it's a computer generated elephant or mammoth that was digitally
Speaker 6: inserted into the photo and you know, and just you know,
Speaker 6: end of story. And then the second hypothesis that I
Speaker 6: gave was was the one that you mentioned, which is
Speaker 6: the the bear with a big fish in its mouth.
Speaker 6: And then the third one was sort of a combination
Speaker 6: of the two, that it was it was a bear
Speaker 6: with the with the a fish in his mouth, but
Speaker 6: it was also faked, and that is that is it
Speaker 6: wasn't It wasn't that the photographer uh didn't recognize it
Speaker 6: or you know, was like, oh my god, you know
Speaker 6: I did. I just sort of you see this for example,
Speaker 6: and in a lot of ghost photos where someone they
Speaker 6: take a photo and then days later, weeks later whenever
Speaker 6: they develop it, Oh my god, I didn't see that
Speaker 6: at the time, well you know, got a wooing mammoth there,
Speaker 6: like the theory exactly exactly, and so so that was
Speaker 6: it was interesting to me to sort of parse it
Speaker 6: out and where it was, you know, it could have been.
Speaker 6: It wasn't a mistake, you know, it wasn't you know,
Speaker 6: it wasn't an authentic you know photo of a bear
Speaker 6: and a fish, and yet it was still faked. And
Speaker 6: of course, as it turned out, the first explanation was
Speaker 6: was the right one, but it was. It was really
Speaker 6: fascinating to sort of, as you pointed out, to sort
Speaker 6: of see you know, where people came down on it,
Speaker 6: and people really got pretty passionate about it. If you
Speaker 6: were getting pissed off about no, no, no, if you're you're
Speaker 6: an idiot looking you can see the fish like, well okay.
Speaker 5: But but I was gonna say, go ahead, Kiern.
Speaker 1: I was just gonna say, I think it's a good
Speaker 1: lesson for skeptics to not be too hasty and to
Speaker 1: stay open minded.
Speaker 3: I agree, And I think one of the things that
Speaker 3: I found interesting was how many biologists I saw involved
Speaker 3: in this discussion on various forums and in our Facebook
Speaker 3: group and just all over the place. Talking about whether
Speaker 3: or not there was useful information there. Could you tell
Speaker 3: if it was a bear or if it was an
Speaker 3: elephant or a mammoth and our mammoth model, and there's
Speaker 3: this field of study called elementrics where you compare the
Speaker 3: ratio of body part sizes to each other and you
Speaker 3: get these numbers which helps you identify with the species
Speaker 3: is you know.
Speaker 5: And it's you know because in this case you don't
Speaker 5: have the.
Speaker 3: Ability to look at the skull or the bones or
Speaker 3: the DNA or anything like that, and it's very blurry.
Speaker 3: But there that can take you somewhere that can kind
Speaker 3: of help you figure out to some extent if it's
Speaker 3: really a bear or I mean, even if you can't
Speaker 3: tell for sure if it's a real bear or a
Speaker 3: digital bear, or is it a mammoth? In this case,
Speaker 3: I suspect and again the I think the interviews will
Speaker 3: cover this, but I suspect it's probably an elephant model,
Speaker 3: but it could have been it could have been a
Speaker 3: bear model. It really doesn't matter because it's been digitally
Speaker 3: changed in shape so that it wouldn't fit with anything.
Speaker 5: Really, I mean, it's not it's not it's.
Speaker 3: Somebody moved it around cut off its legs and did
Speaker 3: a few things to it to make it work.
Speaker 5: So whether that be with live video or whether it
Speaker 5: was done with a model.
Speaker 6: It's kind of irrelevant, because I mean, the point is
Speaker 6: it's faked, and it was intentionally faked. This is not
Speaker 6: exactly this is not this is not an accidental hoax.
Speaker 6: And again sort of we can sort of compare back
Speaker 6: to the the the Iceland worm that was, as it
Speaker 6: turns out, I would argue, not a hoax at all.
Speaker 6: It was you know, it was legitimate video. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: all interpretation. So that's that's where you have the contrast there.
Speaker 6: And let me just just for a second, let me
Speaker 6: touch quickly on the on on the the media aspect,
Speaker 6: because I think that's one one part that really interested me.
Speaker 6: Is is again because it did appear in a tabloid,
Speaker 6: The Sun, I had comments, not necessarily directors of me,
Speaker 6: but just I saw comments like, well, this is the Sun,
Speaker 6: what do you expect? This is ridiculous? Why you bother
Speaker 6: and recover it? And there's there's a certain truth to
Speaker 6: that because there's a there's a sort of a laundering
Speaker 6: effect in which, uh, you know, a story we picked
Speaker 6: up by somewhat disreputable or or should we say, less
Speaker 6: than reliable sources. But but then, but then as the
Speaker 6: story gets more esteem, uh, at that point, it then
Speaker 6: becomes the story in itself. And so you so reputable
Speaker 6: sources like myself ended up end up sort of reporting
Speaker 6: not just on the story, not not just on the
Speaker 6: original video, but the story behind the story, that the
Speaker 6: fact that it was becoming a story. And so, you know,
Speaker 6: to to people who would say, well, you know, this
Speaker 6: is also stupid. You know you can't believe anything. Uh,
Speaker 6: you know that, you know, why did you bother investigating this?
Speaker 8: Uh?
Speaker 6: I think that's that's the wrong way to look at it,
Speaker 6: because because even though I and you and probably many
Speaker 6: people were not fooled in the least, I'm sure some
Speaker 6: people were and and and uh and even if they weren't,
Speaker 6: there's value in investigating the things, these things and trying
Speaker 6: to figure out, what you know, getting to the bottom
Speaker 6: of them. And it doesn't do any good to sort
Speaker 6: of take the sort of high handed, dismissive approach like
Speaker 6: well this is this is too stupid or this is
Speaker 6: too silly. It's not necessarily and uh, and there there's
Speaker 6: value in in in doing these things and doing these investigations,
Speaker 6: because again a lot of times if there isn't this
Speaker 6: sort of skeptical investigation, there's no there's no conclusion to it.
Speaker 6: I mean you just you know age for that one,
Speaker 6: you know, Bigfoot video. Yeah, no one ever, you know,
Speaker 6: no one ever really proved or disproved it. It's just
Speaker 6: just sort of out there lingering in the wilderness or
Speaker 6: in the chrystosological wilderness, like like debris. And so that's
Speaker 6: why exactly, So that's why it's good sort of be
Speaker 6: able to to you know, to to you know, to
Speaker 6: get get a bite on it and uh and and
Speaker 6: analyze it.
Speaker 10: These The simple truth is if you don't squash hoaxes
Speaker 10: like a bug, I mean just completely squashed them, then
Speaker 10: they will keep being reborn again and again and again.
Speaker 3: In the in the in the paranormal literature, just like
Speaker 3: the we there's so many of these things that that
Speaker 3: they're not real, or they're misinterpreted, or there's just a
Speaker 3: fake story for a real thing, and that becomes the
Speaker 3: big story. And when you figure out what's really going on,
Speaker 3: you can't get that story out. So I'm excited that
Speaker 3: we're having the opportunity to sort of take this, analyze it,
Speaker 3: and get a sort of more timely episode of Monster
Speaker 3: Talk out to kind of talk about how this went down,
Speaker 3: because well, well that's not an interesting show for TV. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, I guess the question is has this bug been
Speaker 1: squashed then, because if there was, we're arguments amongst the
Speaker 1: skeptical community about this. I wonder if there'll be arguments
Speaker 1: outside of the community. I mean, obviously people are still
Speaker 1: going to be questioning it.
Speaker 3: I think, you know, we may never know what the
Speaker 3: source material was, what is that animated item that's been
Speaker 3: placed onto this real video. But what we do know
Speaker 3: is that the original video just showed water, and that
Speaker 3: whatever was placed on there was deliberately blurred and motion
Speaker 3: was added to the video to make it seem like
Speaker 3: it was a live encounter versus just a static shot.
Speaker 3: So all that can I mean, all that tells us
Speaker 3: that whatever they're showing there wasn't really there. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's that's I think extremely well demonstrated.
Speaker 2: But the affix general probably.
Speaker 3: Hard to say, right. I Mean, there may people like,
Speaker 3: let's take the the thing in the river, the the
Speaker 3: Iceland worm, It's it's not a real animal. It's it's something.
Speaker 3: It's not even moving. I mean, it's not even making
Speaker 3: any forward or reverse motion in the water. It's really
Speaker 3: waving back and forth. But because the way the guys
Speaker 3: shot the video, it appears to be moving. Uh, and
Speaker 3: it appears to be making progress, I should say.
Speaker 5: And so there's people still arguing that that's a.
Speaker 3: Real animal out there, but it's uh, yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 3: That's a good question, Karen, I. I don't know.
Speaker 2: It's a long term thing.
Speaker 3: Mean one thing, you know, our our project to make
Speaker 3: Monster Talk transcripts. At least the hope is out there
Speaker 3: that when we can sort of drive up the ability
Speaker 3: for people to find the answers to questions like this
Speaker 3: when they search, because right now, when you search, most
Speaker 3: of your searches are going to hit on there's this
Speaker 3: mysterious story before exactly the.
Speaker 5: Hoax explanation is just kind of mixed in there.
Speaker 3: This a salt and pepper and what you really want,
Speaker 3: I think is more of a snow with a few
Speaker 3: flecks of dirt, right.
Speaker 6: We want to song the well. Actually, let's talk a
Speaker 6: little bit more about the Iceland word because that was
Speaker 6: an interesting case in that that was partly solved by
Speaker 6: a Monster Talk listener, so, which was kind of kind
Speaker 6: of neat. I mean, the backstory to that. Again, I'd
Speaker 6: written a piece on that and it was bounced around,
Speaker 6: and again I had sort of offered a couple of
Speaker 6: different a couple of different figures, but what it might be,
Speaker 6: and I pointed out a couple of things about the
Speaker 6: poor quality of the video and that was actually shot
Speaker 6: from two different angles and things like that, and I
Speaker 6: pointed out, I said, look, you know, I said further, Amore,
Speaker 6: we don't even know if it's it's making any for progress.
Speaker 6: I'm not, I'm not certainly, I certainly wasn't the first
Speaker 6: person to question that by any means, but I sort
Speaker 6: of put that out there, and and one of our
Speaker 6: Monster Talk listeners UK, her name was Misa. She you know,
Speaker 6: she posted on on the Monster Talk facebook page that
Speaker 6: she had done some screen captures and had basically proven
Speaker 6: that in fact, she used different points of reference and
Speaker 6: had shown that it was not in fact moving forward,
Speaker 6: that the tale was moving with the current. And so
Speaker 6: at that point I'm like, hey, that's pretty good. I
Speaker 6: think you got it. And so I sort of combined
Speaker 6: it with something else and I did a follow up
Speaker 6: story and that was sort of when it when it
Speaker 6: all sort of you know, blew up and then died down.
Speaker 6: But it was it was neat to me to to
Speaker 6: sort of see how amateur you know, investigators, uh, just
Speaker 6: sort of you know, well informed skeptical people with some
Speaker 6: knowledge and some you know, some critical thinking can can
Speaker 6: really contribute to this.
Speaker 3: It was good worm analytics.
Speaker 2: Oh, you've reached your quota of tonight.
Speaker 3: No, I did that.
Speaker 5: That was fantastic. I wanted to do the same thing.
Speaker 3: And as you guys know, my PC rig where I
Speaker 3: do all my analysis died, so I've actually just bought
Speaker 3: a new system board for it today. I'm excited to
Speaker 3: get back in the game. But that was great. I
Speaker 3: love it when our listeners actually participate.
Speaker 5: That's fun.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, it isn't. I love this too. I love
Speaker 3: how collaborative skeptics can be with this sort of research
Speaker 3: versus And this may be a misperception of my part,
Speaker 3: but it seems like the cryptozoology and community in general,
Speaker 3: and I think this is actually born.
Speaker 5: By the the evidence.
Speaker 3: Like in Brian Reegel's book when he talks about how
Speaker 3: everybody wants to hoard their knowledge. Nobody wants to share information,
Speaker 3: and that's that's I think a.
Speaker 5: Pretty big difference between the two communities. So that's kind
Speaker 5: of fun.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of those people are after fame,
Speaker 1: aren't they, well than anything else, and not so much
Speaker 1: within our community.
Speaker 2: We're just wanting to solve mysteries.
Speaker 5: That's right. They do it for the chicks.
Speaker 6: Well, you know, it was interesting on on on Doubtful News.
Speaker 6: On on Sharon Hill's uh blog, she pointed out that
Speaker 6: what's that yes from friend of the show Sharon No. Uh.
Speaker 6: She pointed out that that it was interesting that in
Speaker 6: both these cases, of course, it was the skeptics that
Speaker 6: that solved it. Uh, it wasn't the the professional cryptozoologists.
Speaker 6: And I won't name names, but we all know who
Speaker 6: many of them are. And that's not to discredit them, yes,
Speaker 6: but but I mean, but there's you know, as we
Speaker 6: all know, there's sort of top tier. You know, we
Speaker 6: have the Discardes and and things like that. But by
Speaker 6: the way, people who who were going out there, and
Speaker 6: what what Sharon pointed out was that that as is
Speaker 6: often the case, uh, it's the skeptics who have to
Speaker 6: go in there. And and and solve the mysteries, and
Speaker 6: and you would think that, you know, if this is
Speaker 6: a legitimate science, and if some of the main individuals
Speaker 6: who are in the field are really doing this sort
Speaker 6: of investigation and really on top of things, you would
Speaker 6: think that they would be the ones who are out
Speaker 6: there exposing hoaxes and getting to the bottom of this.
Speaker 6: But oddly enough, it often it often seems to fall
Speaker 6: to the skeptics to do that. And and that's the
Speaker 6: case over and over again. I mean, whether you're looking
Speaker 6: at the Lake Champlain, Mancy photo, or you know, any
Speaker 6: number of other things that Chupicaba for example, there's lots
Speaker 6: and lots of subjects that you would think that that,
Speaker 6: you know, the more believer kind, the more believer breed,
Speaker 6: I guess you would say, if they're really on the ball,
Speaker 6: and if they're as scientific as they claim to be,
Speaker 6: they should be out there doing this instead of us.
Speaker 2: A really good point.
Speaker 3: Although I don't want to pat myself on the back
Speaker 3: too much, I'll go ahead, no, no, I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: we we like solving mysteries, and we have a lot
Speaker 3: of the same interests that they do. But I think
Speaker 3: we have in this case, we had a few advantages
Speaker 3: over them. So when being that it's way more important
Speaker 3: to us that we get to the bottom of the truth,
Speaker 3: then we generate more page views for our site.
Speaker 6: I don't know, good point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds harsh, but I think it is kind
Speaker 3: of true.
Speaker 6: It is true.
Speaker 3: Yea, it is true.
Speaker 6: I mean that that's I mean, that's that's that's what
Speaker 6: the three of us do. I mean, we're we're interested
Speaker 6: in the truth, and we're interested in solving mysteries. And
Speaker 6: you know, if if it gets hits and if it
Speaker 6: gets publicity, then that's all well and good. But at
Speaker 6: the end of the day, Miami interest is solving the
Speaker 6: damn mystery. Fragrant, what the hell is it? Yeah?
Speaker 5: Well, and that's the other thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, you have to learn where you have to
Speaker 3: stop when how far can you take this questioning and
Speaker 3: how far can you go with digging, Like we know
Speaker 3: this thing in the Siberian River was not a real
Speaker 3: live animal that was on site. I mean, do you
Speaker 3: keep going trying to find out if it was really
Speaker 3: an elephant or or a bear or a mammoth or
Speaker 3: you just.
Speaker 5: Step back and say, Okay, I don't know specifically what
Speaker 5: it was, but I know it was a hoax and
Speaker 5: here's how it was done.
Speaker 3: And I think that's where you have to kind of
Speaker 3: cut off, because this kind of research can become a
Speaker 3: rabbit hole that is bottomless, and it can be very frustrating.
Speaker 3: But I do want to say that while we were
Speaker 3: talking about Sharon and her site, that you listeners should
Speaker 3: check out doubtful News doubtfulnews dot com I believe. Let
Speaker 3: me verify that very quick, because it's a website that
Speaker 3: she's put together that aggregates this sort of news, but
Speaker 3: it does so in a very skeptical way.
Speaker 5: So it's a great way to.
Speaker 1: Get that's a great current news.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you can also get it. You can follow
Speaker 3: them on Twitter and just kind of get very current news.
Speaker 5: It's a great way to get news about.
Speaker 3: The paranormal without having to weed through tons of crazy
Speaker 3: ads about how you goin. Go to doubtful news dot com,
Speaker 3: follow them on Twitter. It's a great way to get
Speaker 3: your news of the unusual with a nice skeptical flavoring.
Speaker 6: There you skeptical sprinkles if it were as it were.
Speaker 5: I don't want to be too hard on those other guys.
Speaker 6: Well, let me just pick up quickly on something you
Speaker 6: were talking about, because I think you make a really
Speaker 6: important point about how far do you take this? Because
Speaker 6: you know there will be people who will I mean
Speaker 6: probably not in the mammoth case, because it's so obviously faked,
Speaker 6: but there are people who will say, well, you know, well,
Speaker 6: where exactly you know which model are you talking about?
Speaker 6: You know, can you identify the exact program that created that?
Speaker 6: And and that you also you see this a lot
Speaker 6: of times. For example that the main example that I
Speaker 6: think of is the Patterson Gimlin film, where you know,
Speaker 6: the question is okay, well, okay, where exactly is the costume?
Speaker 6: Do you have the costume? Let me see the exact costume?
Speaker 3: And why can't you make an exact copy of the video?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 3: Why the film?
Speaker 6: Why can't you duplicate every single last right? And if
Speaker 6: you and and to too many people, you know, especially
Speaker 6: on the believer side, if you can't or you don't
Speaker 6: want to put in the time and effort, and something
Speaker 6: could be incredibly time consuming to exactly duplicate and in
Speaker 6: many cases just practically impossible to do.
Speaker 8: Uh.
Speaker 6: But but you often see this in the in the
Speaker 6: video analysis where the believers will say, well, if you well,
Speaker 6: you know, okay, maybe maybe you proved that it was
Speaker 6: probably a hoax. But unless you can identify the exact person,
Speaker 6: the exact time, and you know, you have names and
Speaker 6: dates and and you know and and toilet paper receipts
Speaker 6: and you know exactly what they were doing, then then
Speaker 6: it's not true.
Speaker 3: It isn't that That basically becomes Zeno's skeptical paradox. I mean,
Speaker 3: it's the whole thing about well, you have to get
Speaker 3: there's a more and more burden of proof, right that
Speaker 3: it's not really there, but like you can never reach
Speaker 3: a full conclusion because you can't make it match exactly.
Speaker 5: I think, yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: But even if you're duplicating a video or a walking
Speaker 1: style or something like that, it's not to say that
Speaker 1: you're duplicating before.
Speaker 3: Well, well, and this is actually the same sort of
Speaker 3: thing Randy has gone through with his history, the Amazing Randy.
Speaker 3: He doesn't necessarily show you, well, even going back to
Speaker 3: who did he say? Thing, they don't necessarily show you
Speaker 3: proof that psychics and mediums are tricksters, but they show
Speaker 3: you ways that can be You can mundanely reproduce the
Speaker 3: same effects, which should be enough to make you realize
Speaker 3: that it can be done without supernatural powers. Therefore, if
Speaker 3: they're not demonstrating supernatural powers, there's a really good chance
Speaker 3: that they're faking it.
Speaker 1: And now Brian and Baxter did that with the alien
Speaker 1: in the window footage.
Speaker 6: Oh that's right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, I forgot about that, which.
Speaker 2: They've been doing again and again of late, peaking.
Speaker 5: In people's windows. That doesn't surprise me.
Speaker 3: Just Brian, we're talking now with Alan Melik Janean Is
Speaker 3: that right?
Speaker 9: That's right. Wow, I'm surprised. You know, that's a test
Speaker 9: I have with people. You know, if you can, if
Speaker 9: you can same my name without stumbling, then I know
Speaker 9: you're going to be a good friend.
Speaker 5: Good The two hours before him were well spent.
Speaker 3: Then all right, Oh, so we've talked a little bit
Speaker 3: on Facebook.
Speaker 5: Have you had a chance to look at this so
Speaker 5: called mammoth video?
Speaker 9: Yeah, I'm glad you showed it to me, And I
Speaker 9: mean we kind of spoke in comments on there, but yeah,
Speaker 9: I wasn't one hundred percent sure what was going on,
Speaker 9: but I was kind of suspicious as far as the
Speaker 9: whole bear with fish theory. But it's interesting that it
Speaker 9: got revealed kind of while it's still hot, while it's
Speaker 9: still a topic of discussion, like the truth behind it
Speaker 9: got revealed.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I like that.
Speaker 3: So now most people know you as Captain Disillusion, and
Speaker 3: you have some really great videos and a DVD which
Speaker 3: will be available in the show notes.
Speaker 5: Thanks, no problem.
Speaker 3: I really like the way you do your reveals because
Speaker 3: you make them entertaining at the same time as exposing
Speaker 3: the techniques. So how could somebody be sure that this
Speaker 3: video was actually faked and that the what they're calling
Speaker 3: the original video isn't just a if you'll pardon the pun,
Speaker 3: a truncated version that stops right before an elephant actually
Speaker 3: does walk out, or a bear with a fish.
Speaker 5: How how can we really know it's a fake?
Speaker 9: Well, I was actually thinking about this because if you've
Speaker 9: seen the original, well what there's claimed to be the
Speaker 9: original video by that filmmaker, it's actually a wider shot
Speaker 9: that's completely still, and the mammoth video looks like a
Speaker 9: handheld camera and kind of pushes in further into the shot.
Speaker 9: So what I was actually thinking of doing. I haven't
Speaker 9: tried this yet, but you could basically take the whole
Speaker 9: original shot. You know, it's a long it's it lasts
Speaker 9: like several several minutes, and you can take the mammoth shot,
Speaker 9: yeah if I meanutes. So you could take the mammoth
Speaker 9: shot and kind of reverse engineer the motion out of it,
Speaker 9: you know, track it and stabilize it, kind of like
Speaker 9: they did with the the Bigfoot video, you know, the
Speaker 9: famous one and the that's right that one, and also
Speaker 9: like things like I don't know, the Kennedy assassination, Like
Speaker 9: all those videos that were captured kind of haphazardly and
Speaker 9: have been studied for years. They've stabilized them so that,
Speaker 9: you know, they took out the camera shake and whatever
Speaker 9: zooming might be going on. You could do the same
Speaker 9: thing with this Mammoth one, even though it's kind of
Speaker 9: like really low quality and low resolution, but you can
Speaker 9: still do it to some extent and then take that
Speaker 9: line up the features of the you know, the the
Speaker 9: landscape and everything, lay it on top of the original
Speaker 9: video and just kind of scroll around, scrub around to
Speaker 9: find maybe there's a point where all the water and
Speaker 9: splashes and things kind of line up, like find that
Speaker 9: same synchronization point between them, and then you can.
Speaker 3: See make me feel really good because I've been trying
Speaker 3: to do that. That's exactly what I've been trying to
Speaker 3: do my mac so great, Okay, exactly keep going interrupt.
Speaker 9: Oh no, and so yeah. I mean I literally that.
Speaker 9: That was kind of the first thing that came to
Speaker 9: my mind when I saw the video by the documentary
Speaker 9: guy that's kind of like pissed off right now about
Speaker 9: the fact that his video was used. Well, I guess
Speaker 9: it's in his interest to prove very definitively that the
Speaker 9: video is his, and that would be one way to
Speaker 9: do it, to kind of just you know, do a
Speaker 9: perfect side by side where you can sort of point
Speaker 9: to multiple water splashes and things and show that they're
Speaker 9: going together. I think if you did that, it would
Speaker 9: be pretty apparent, like if you did find that matching point.
Speaker 5: I'm going to I'm gonna keep working on that. That's
Speaker 5: a yeah, I mean I would.
Speaker 9: I would do that as soon as I have some time,
Speaker 9: but probably somebody will beat me to it, you know,
Speaker 9: at the pace that I work. I mean, you suggested
Speaker 9: this video to me, and I thought it would be
Speaker 9: cool to do an episode, but I didn't even have
Speaker 9: time to even like start thinking about it already the
Speaker 9: story progressed.
Speaker 5: It's fun, though, I mean I thought it might be
Speaker 5: also fun. I found a.
Speaker 3: Three D model for an elephant that looks very close
Speaker 3: to what's in the video, and but the truck moves
Speaker 3: a little different. How does that different? Like, if you
Speaker 3: want to composite, M say composite, What can you tell
Speaker 3: us what a composite shot is?
Speaker 8: Yeah?
Speaker 9: I mean, well, in visual effects, I guess you have
Speaker 9: different fields. You have like animators and CG artists that
Speaker 9: just make you know, stuff out of nothing, you know, renderings,
Speaker 9: and you have I guess compositors who are like who
Speaker 9: take different elements and put it all together. Pretty much
Speaker 9: any kind of visual effects or animation work has to
Speaker 9: go through a final stage. It's not really the final stage,
Speaker 9: but one of the final stages is compositing, putting all
Speaker 9: the elements together and making sure that they kind of
Speaker 9: work together. Everything looks seamless if you're trying to make
Speaker 9: something photo realistic. So that's that's actually an actual feel compositing.
Speaker 9: And you use the term correctly, so you're good.
Speaker 3: Super and so you have I have very lazily used
Speaker 3: the term CGI to talk about digital effects and I
Speaker 3: think from what I gather there, there's a difference now
Speaker 3: that CGI is now being used specifically for this sort
Speaker 3: of computer generated modeling and not just for your computer
Speaker 3: created effects.
Speaker 9: Right, yeah, I guess CGI normally you would just refer
Speaker 9: to like, yeah, three D models, the animation of those models,
Speaker 9: and the rendering of the final product. And it doesn't actually,
Speaker 9: it doesn't even have to be three D basically anything
Speaker 9: that was made from scratch in a computer LIGHTSABERGI yeah,
Speaker 9: there you.
Speaker 5: Go, lightsaber effects.
Speaker 3: Right, So in this case, I mean, I don't know
Speaker 3: if you can tell from looking that's that's one of
Speaker 3: the real questions I have. Well, and actually it's probably
Speaker 3: the number one question on the internet is was whatever
Speaker 3: really is there? I mean, assuming I think, I think
Speaker 3: we're gonna be able to demonstrate maybe within the next
Speaker 3: week or so, that whatever took place didn't exist on
Speaker 3: the original video, that the original video was the you know,
Speaker 3: in part of that four or five minute segment of
Speaker 3: water that's just going by. And if that's the case,
Speaker 3: can you tell from looking at the video whether it's
Speaker 3: a real animal video that's been inserted like a like
Speaker 3: an excerpt from another video, or if.
Speaker 5: It's a three D model. It seems like it's so digitally.
Speaker 3: Distorted it's hard to be sure, But I was wondering
Speaker 3: if there were any signs we could look for that
Speaker 3: might be giving us a clue there.
Speaker 9: Yeah, well, first of all, regarding the quality, that's sort
Speaker 9: of like a lazy compositor's best friend is to basically,
Speaker 9: you know, make a composite, put put things together and
Speaker 9: make it look as realistic as you can. But then
Speaker 9: if you can't go any further and it still doesn't
Speaker 9: look right, that's when you kind of take the whole
Speaker 9: thing and you know, reduce its resolution, add some camera movement,
Speaker 9: you know, fake camera movement and shaking or things going
Speaker 9: out of focus to kind of fudge it up and
Speaker 9: and and that's like when you look at this video,
Speaker 9: it has that look of a video that has just
Speaker 9: low enough quality for you to just not be able
Speaker 9: to make out what the thing is. In a way,
Speaker 9: that's kind of a giveaway. Of course, it's not a
Speaker 9: guarantee that you know that it's fake just based on that,
Speaker 9: but it's it's kind of you get that feeling like
Speaker 9: just the thing that I want to see the details,
Speaker 9: that I want to examine are just out of reach,
Speaker 9: you know, in terms of resolution. That's one thing, like
Speaker 9: I said, like the matching up now that the real
Speaker 9: shot is available, matching that up would definitely immediately prove
Speaker 9: the fact that like that, during that moment, that creature
Speaker 9: wasn't there, and you know, when people were talking about
Speaker 9: the you know, whether it's maybe a bear with a fish,
Speaker 9: which kind of I find kind of an interesting example
Speaker 9: of paradolia where it wasn't it was paradolia that's resulted
Speaker 9: from the fact that we were trying to find a
Speaker 9: more like legitimate explanation and more realistic.
Speaker 5: Yeah, no, you're dead on.
Speaker 3: We're going to talk about that in the discussion with
Speaker 3: Ben and Karen, but we can't say it here too.
Speaker 3: Okham's razor rightat people want to use Om's racier. What's
Speaker 3: the what's the most simple explanation that it's a mammoth
Speaker 3: or that it's a bear walking across the river. Well,
Speaker 3: but the the other option that it was a digital
Speaker 3: insert to many people seems like an unlikely explanation, like
Speaker 3: why would you may go to the trouble.
Speaker 9: Especially because yeah, because because it does look kind of
Speaker 9: like a bear with a fish. In its mouth. You know,
Speaker 9: you feel like that's yeah, that's that's so much easier
Speaker 9: explanation than somebody going into the trouble of putting something
Speaker 9: in there that could be mistaken for a bear, you know, exactly,
Speaker 9: Like if you're gonna make a CG elephant you I mean,
Speaker 9: a mammoth, you might as well do it like in
Speaker 9: a way that can't be mistaken for something else.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it would make worse sense, I guess.
Speaker 3: But then again, that eeriness of it, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: or the unusualness of it may have been a factor.
Speaker 5: I don't know. Yeah, I tell you this though.
Speaker 3: Here here's I want to talk about some of the
Speaker 3: things that I saw as a non expert. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is really not my feel, but I do a
Speaker 3: lot of photo analysis and uh and I do a
Speaker 3: lot of video analysis too, But it's not like you.
Speaker 5: I mean, you're you're much better.
Speaker 3: You do a much better job of showing how it's done,
Speaker 3: and I just try to like spot the clues that
Speaker 3: maybe it's fake. So the the first thing that stuck
Speaker 3: out was that the whole video had a uniform blurriness
Speaker 3: to it, and and to me, I found that problematic
Speaker 3: because most modern cameras have some level of auto focus,
Speaker 3: and and it just seemed unusual to me that even
Speaker 3: zooming and zooming out, the blurriness never changed at all.
Speaker 9: Right, Yeah, I mean it was more like a blurriness
Speaker 9: caused by just low resolution. Like if you if you
Speaker 9: took a video of something and kind of formatted it
Speaker 9: to be like an old standard def you know, very
Speaker 9: small even like something like three twenty by two forty
Speaker 9: kind of resolution, you know, a tiny postage stamp sized video,
Speaker 9: and then you blow it back up to like a
Speaker 9: normal resolution of you know, I don't know, h D
Speaker 9: seven to twenty pixels. That's what you get. You basically
Speaker 9: get a blurreness just because pixels are kind of just
Speaker 9: repeated and smooth, doubt to look to not look choppy.
Speaker 9: That's what they did. But I mean by putting the
Speaker 9: whatever the object is whatever, that's whether it's a CG
Speaker 9: elephant or what a CG mammoth or what I think
Speaker 9: is a piece of stock footage of an elephant, which
Speaker 9: I kind of we can we can do that in
Speaker 9: a few seconds. I can we can kind of do
Speaker 9: ann interactive thing where I can show you where you
Speaker 9: could find a piece of footage like that, but you know,
Speaker 9: you put it there in the still shot, and then
Speaker 9: you take that whole rendering, that whole composite, and you
Speaker 9: push into it, and just by virtue of doing that,
Speaker 9: it's already it already has a severely reduced resolution, and
Speaker 9: that's where the blurringness comes from. So it's really just
Speaker 9: it's not the camera. It's not something optical that happened
Speaker 9: when it was filmed. It's something that's that's an artifact
Speaker 9: of the post production, the way that they messed with
Speaker 9: the video gotcha.
Speaker 3: And so the other thing, the second thing I noticed,
Speaker 3: or that I think I noticed, was that the so
Speaker 3: called handheld motion seemed mechanical to me, like it didn't
Speaker 3: seem like a natural random handheld. It seemed like it
Speaker 3: was almost on a track or that it was. It
Speaker 3: was very mechanical. I don't know how it's described it
Speaker 3: and it's very subjective, but is it possible to visually
Speaker 3: tell the difference between computer generated hand motion and and.
Speaker 9: Well, I guess not kind of just by looking at it,
Speaker 9: because you'd have to know, you know, what kind of
Speaker 9: lens it was, how far the stuff was, and to
Speaker 9: what extent it's zoomed in. I wouldn't say that that
Speaker 9: that that fake camera motion, if it is fake, is
Speaker 9: done badly because it has kind of this non uniform
Speaker 9: kind of shaking that you would get from It actually
Speaker 9: has this like it imitates this effect that some consumer
Speaker 9: cameras have where they have like a built in stabilizing
Speaker 9: sort of mechanism to try to keep your shot from
Speaker 9: from wobbling. But sometimes as you move your hand too
Speaker 9: much or you know, your your shot, actually you actually
Speaker 9: try to change your shot, you know, by moving the camera,
Speaker 9: it sort of it latches onto something and then it
Speaker 9: kind of has to let go and latch onto something else.
Speaker 9: So it has this smoothness broken up by sudden little,
Speaker 9: you know, twitches, and that kind of looks real. So,
Speaker 9: if anything, I would say it's a pretty decent job
Speaker 9: on a fake camera motion.
Speaker 5: Yeah. So then maybe in my imagination, I'll have to
Speaker 5: test that at some point.
Speaker 9: Yeah. But what what is kind of vicious is the
Speaker 9: fact if you look at the way the camera moves,
Speaker 9: it has this shaking reminiscent of a handheld camera. But
Speaker 9: in a in a real handheld camera, there would be
Speaker 9: this rotation that's kind of like, you know, turning your
Speaker 9: head to the side, a little bit like a banking rotation,
Speaker 9: you know, in the on the around the z axis,
Speaker 9: you know, if you know what I mean. In other words,
Speaker 9: it would be like a ship, you know, rocking side
Speaker 9: to side. There isn't really that kind of rotation in
Speaker 9: the image. It's as if someone was using like a
Speaker 9: really shaky tripod, you know, like the camera keeps level,
Speaker 9: but it just moves up and down and left and right.
Speaker 9: So that's a little bit of you know, that's a
Speaker 9: potential giveaway that the motion was just added as a
Speaker 9: as just basically like a little panning and tilt, you know,
Speaker 9: just just jogging around inside of a cropped image, kind
Speaker 9: of going up and down, left.
Speaker 3: And right, right, and and that's consistent when I did
Speaker 3: my I did like a little tempted stabilization.
Speaker 5: It's not perfect.
Speaker 3: It would be really cool if the software I have
Speaker 3: I'm just using an iMovie, but it won't let me
Speaker 3: lock you in. There's some rocks on the front right
Speaker 3: hand side. I really like to lock you in and
Speaker 3: make those stable and then and then that would be
Speaker 3: what you.
Speaker 9: Want to do. Is I don't know how the iMovie
Speaker 9: stabilizing interface. Thing works if you are given an option
Speaker 9: of using more than one point you want to try
Speaker 9: to find, like the rocks and then maybe the tree
Speaker 9: tops when it's like really wide the shot the tree tops.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be great, but I don't think it
Speaker 3: does that unless maybe it's an advanced tool.
Speaker 5: You know, do you have what do you use Final
Speaker 5: cut pro or something?
Speaker 9: Well, I mean I use an Avid media composer for editing,
Speaker 9: but for things like this, for compositing stuff, I use
Speaker 9: Adobe After Effects, which is a very very popular program
Speaker 9: with everyone for this exact task. But I was going
Speaker 9: to add because you mentioned the rocks in the foreground,
Speaker 9: and that reminds me of another thing. When I was
Speaker 9: first seeing this video, one of the first things I
Speaker 9: kind of subjectively was perplexed by was the scale of everything,
Speaker 9: because those rocks, they're basically like pebbles on the beach,
Speaker 9: these rocks in the foreground, and kind of extrapolating from
Speaker 9: that looking at the water and then how far the
Speaker 9: other shore is, I think that this is a pretty
Speaker 9: small like it's not a very wide river. And I
Speaker 9: think that if this is an actual if you know,
Speaker 9: this is supposed to be a mammoth. It's kind of
Speaker 9: a baby mammoth because it doesn't look like a full
Speaker 9: grown you know, something that's larger than an elephant to me.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's again.
Speaker 5: But yeah, it.
Speaker 3: Would be really cool to know exactly where that was
Speaker 3: because we could go to Google Earth and then get
Speaker 3: a kind of better idea of how wide the river
Speaker 3: is there. So how did you get involved with the
Speaker 3: video editing in video effects?
Speaker 9: Well, that's just something I mean from childhood, I wanted
Speaker 9: I was always interested in animation in particular, but I
Speaker 9: basically just wanted to a filmmaker and tell stories and
Speaker 9: was always fascinated by the whole you know, film production, technology,
Speaker 9: anything that's involved in making movies. So I kind of
Speaker 9: just aimed for that from a young age, and I
Speaker 9: went to school to study that made little shorts, you know,
Speaker 9: even as a high schooler. And yeah, I'm still like,
Speaker 9: I work in the field, but I'm still kind of
Speaker 9: you know, ended up being so unfocused that I do everything.
Speaker 9: I basically you know, freelance as in production and in
Speaker 9: post production, depending on what's needed. And I'm kind of
Speaker 9: sort of good at all things and maybe not completely
Speaker 9: genius and amazing at anyone thing.
Speaker 3: You're general it's not it's not a bad way to go.
Speaker 3: You can always specialize, right if you.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and it's I guess I have the kind of
Speaker 9: personality where it's hard to just keep doing the same
Speaker 9: thing all the time. And this is such a rich field,
Speaker 9: you know. I mean, cinematography is nothing like sitting, you know,
Speaker 9: doing visual effects or the editing process. So if you
Speaker 9: kind of do a little bit of everything depending on
Speaker 9: what part of a project you're involved in, it's kind
Speaker 9: of fun. It's refreshing because you can always switch gears
Speaker 9: and hone some other skill.
Speaker 5: Well, how long would you have to go to school
Speaker 5: to learn how to make a mammoth video like this?
Speaker 9: Well, these days, I don't think you have to go
Speaker 9: to school. I actually I was going to go to
Speaker 9: school for things like this, for animation and compositing, but
Speaker 9: then I decided this is stuff you can really learn
Speaker 9: from books. There are so many books and nowadays tutorials
Speaker 9: and stuff on YouTube that you could basically get a
Speaker 9: free education and all of this stuff if you were
Speaker 9: really obsessed with it and got your hands on all
Speaker 9: the software and just kind of looked around and studied
Speaker 9: from the many many tutorials and stuff you can find.
Speaker 9: You can learn every skill that's involved in doing a
Speaker 9: video like this, for sure, especially since I mean, I
Speaker 9: really don't think that the mammoth, the actual object that
Speaker 9: they put in was like a siege g rendering.
Speaker 6: At best.
Speaker 9: What they might have done is taken some sort of
Speaker 9: illustration of a mammoth and just kind of made itmatable
Speaker 9: enough to do what it's doing in this video, just
Speaker 9: kind of a sideshot that they you know, kind of
Speaker 9: split up into pieces and made it almost like a
Speaker 9: cutout kind of animation. Because it's so blurry and so
Speaker 9: bland that and half obscured by water that you really
Speaker 9: don't have to do much. But when I was digging around, actually,
Speaker 9: if you want to see, if you want to do
Speaker 9: this little experiment, if you go to iStockphoto dot com
Speaker 9: and viewers can do this too if they're not driving
Speaker 9: or something. Icetock Photo is a place where you can buy,
Speaker 9: you know, pictures and graphics and videos for any kind
Speaker 9: of multimedia stuff you're working on. If you go in
Speaker 9: the menu tou video, just the video section, and once
Speaker 9: you're in video, use the search bar to just type elephant.
Speaker 6: You'll see you'll end up.
Speaker 9: Once you're there, you'll see that you get a bunch
Speaker 9: of results of a bunch of clips of elephants, you know,
Speaker 9: in the wild and everything. But one of the first clips,
Speaker 9: a couple of the first clips, should be this elephant
Speaker 9: in front of a green screen. It looks like a screen,
Speaker 9: but yeah, it's actually somebody took some footage and actually
Speaker 9: rotoscoped the elephant out for your convenience, so you can
Speaker 9: put him wherever you want. And if you hover over
Speaker 9: the very first one of those two green screens, you'll
Speaker 9: see a little preview of the clip playing right, and
Speaker 9: the elephant is looking at the camera, and then he
Speaker 9: kind of starts walking to the side, and he eventually
Speaker 9: takes on a pose that's kind of like what we
Speaker 9: were seeing in the in the video, you know, he
Speaker 9: takes a few steps in the same way. Now, of course,
Speaker 9: I don't know if they used this exact thing, but
Speaker 9: if I had to recreate this video, this is what
Speaker 9: I would do to not waste time. I would take
Speaker 9: this clip. Somebody already mated it. It has a green
Speaker 9: screen and everything. I would just take the elephant, take
Speaker 9: those last few seconds of him walking sideways, make a
Speaker 9: little kind of seamless loop so that I have this
Speaker 9: and just taking these steps stabilize him so that it
Speaker 9: would just you know, he'd be exactly where I want
Speaker 9: him to be the whole time, and maybe like warp
Speaker 9: him a little, like make his career much lower and
Speaker 9: smaller so that he takes on that mammoth type of profile.
Speaker 9: And uh, yeah, once you did that, you just stick
Speaker 9: him into where you want in the in the shot,
Speaker 9: like you knows, as we know, the original shot is stable,
Speaker 9: so you don't even have to do any tracking. It's
Speaker 9: already like actually, if you see the original shot, it's
Speaker 9: basically begging to be messed with because it's this perfect
Speaker 9: sort of almost like a still, except the water as
Speaker 9: it's running.
Speaker 5: It's yeah, that's actually something I was going to say.
Speaker 3: It looked to me like whatever they did, they didn't
Speaker 3: get very much of an animation sequence. The animal appears
Speaker 3: to be making the exact same physical moves over and
Speaker 3: over again, almost like an animated GIF.
Speaker 9: Yeah, that's what made me suspicious about the bear with
Speaker 9: fish thing, because yeah, maybe it's that, and scale wise,
Speaker 9: it looked like that, but it was so yeah, like
Speaker 9: so uniform and kind of very limited in the way
Speaker 9: that it was moving, Like, no, I don't think any
Speaker 9: animal would just basically march in this very timed way,
Speaker 9: you know.
Speaker 3: Well, but again I've been saying it was digital from
Speaker 3: the get go, just because of my suspicions we talked
Speaker 3: about and I don't want to gloat or anything, because
Speaker 3: I really would like to know this specifically if it
Speaker 3: was an elephant or a bear they used, But it
Speaker 3: really doesn't matter in one sense. But let me say this,
Speaker 3: for all those people who thought it was a bear
Speaker 3: with a fish, I would challenge them to go find
Speaker 3: a video of a bear who catches a fish that
Speaker 3: big and then, instead of pulling it back to the
Speaker 3: bank where.
Speaker 5: He's at, calmly and slowly walks across a river. Right,
Speaker 5: it seems that's very unnatural behavior to me.
Speaker 9: Yeah, no, no, you're totally right. And especially yeah, I
Speaker 9: would expect, especially a bear with a fish, with a
Speaker 9: fish that he just caught that's probably still alive to
Speaker 9: some extent in his snout, I don't think he would
Speaker 9: be so docile and the fish wouldn't move in any
Speaker 9: way you know, basically it does very.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's there's a lot wrong with that, but this,
Speaker 3: this makes much more sense to me. And again, you know,
Speaker 3: I had several biologists talking to me about, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it was a bear or an elephant, and most
Speaker 3: of them seem to think and again none of them
Speaker 3: were saying mammoth. But this makes more sense. So it's
Speaker 3: something you could take this video and digitally just sort
Speaker 3: of warp the elephant a little bit to make him
Speaker 3: look more mammoth like.
Speaker 9: Yeah, and I was, I mean, you might not even
Speaker 9: have to warp him because really, in the final video,
Speaker 9: what makes him more mammoth like is the fact that
Speaker 9: like his you know, he's got like supposedly like a
Speaker 9: kind of fur that that extends down to the legs,
Speaker 9: you know, unlike on an elephant, so it's kind of
Speaker 9: you know, you don't really start seeing the legs as high.
Speaker 9: And the fact that the rear side of his body
Speaker 9: is kind of lower or the front of him is larger,
Speaker 9: whichever way you want to call that. But really, because
Speaker 9: half of him is obscured by the water in this way,
Speaker 9: you could basically just rotate that elephant shot a little bit,
Speaker 9: like counterclockwise to kind of end up with that kind
Speaker 9: of profile. You know, he probably wasn't that lazy whoever
Speaker 9: made this, But I mean, that would be like, if
Speaker 9: I had to do it in half an hour, that
Speaker 9: would be the first thing I would do. I would
Speaker 9: see if I can just kind of rotate the elephant
Speaker 9: a little bit to make him resemble that shape more right.
Speaker 3: I'm pretty sure from watching this video they spent at
Speaker 3: least an hour doing it.
Speaker 5: It'll be interesting.
Speaker 3: I'm going to try to find out what the actual
Speaker 3: monetary value was for that cell, because the Sun pays.
Speaker 3: They pay for these things, and not only did they
Speaker 3: rip off somebody who shot a real video, but they also.
Speaker 5: You know, made money doing it.
Speaker 9: So I feel sometimes I feel like I'm in the
Speaker 9: wrong line of work. People are suggesting that I do
Speaker 9: a fake real video all the time.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's tempting.
Speaker 9: No, Yeah, I really have no desire to do that,
Speaker 9: but I could see how it's lucrative. I mean, just
Speaker 9: based on the fact that that that news organizations quote
Speaker 9: unquote news organizations pay for this kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's it's a funny thing
Speaker 3: to have ethics.
Speaker 6: It is.
Speaker 9: It's very limiting, isn't it.
Speaker 5: Yeah, a little bit.
Speaker 3: I would say, a step down morally is always a
Speaker 3: step up financially. Right there, anything else you want to
Speaker 3: tell our listeners about this, But.
Speaker 9: What I find funny is that in this situation, the
Speaker 9: original filmmaker, at least based on the video that he
Speaker 9: made talking about this stuff, he seems pretty pissed off
Speaker 9: and kind of poised to potentially, you know, sue this
Speaker 9: guy or pursue some kind of legal action because he's
Speaker 9: literally saying, you know, he's interest didn't finding out what
Speaker 9: his options are, and as the guy who provided the
Speaker 9: cryptied video, I would be like in the mode of
Speaker 9: total self defense right now, because you know, no one
Speaker 9: likes to get sued, So the best thing for him
Speaker 9: to do would be to come clean, because that, you know,
Speaker 9: the least of his problems should be, you know, whether
Speaker 9: or not people believe it's a real video. I would
Speaker 9: come clean and I would explain, you know, anything could
Speaker 9: have happened, like if you make a hoax like this,
Speaker 9: you don't know if it's going to go viral and
Speaker 9: become huge, but it did, so you know, I would
Speaker 9: come clean with the guy and just say here's what happened,
Speaker 9: and yes, these guys bought it. You know, I had
Speaker 9: to get compensated. But now that we it's sort of
Speaker 9: it's your footage. I did the effect, So maybe we
Speaker 9: can work something out wherever. You know that nobody needs
Speaker 9: to sue anybody. Unfortunately, this guy is not in this
Speaker 9: position at all, because, as I understand, this is someone
Speaker 9: who's provided these kind of paranormal or crypted videos on
Speaker 9: a regular basis. Doesn't doesn't he Yes.
Speaker 5: Yes, I'm aware of two. Right off the top of
Speaker 5: my head.
Speaker 3: He went.
Speaker 5: He did the I think it was last October. He
Speaker 5: did the.
Speaker 3: There was some Brazilian kids and there was a weird
Speaker 3: alien kind of popped up in a light in the background,
Speaker 3: and it all looked very phony, but it became kind
Speaker 3: of a hot video. And then before that he was
Speaker 3: evolved in the I think it was back in April
Speaker 3: or something, he was involved with the chicken alien, where
Speaker 3: the alien appeared to be laying in the snow and
Speaker 3: it was actually somebody had taken like a roasted chicken
Speaker 3: and made it to look like an alien.
Speaker 5: It was brilliant. He's got he's got a long string
Speaker 5: of these sort of things.
Speaker 3: And the question is, you know, I don't know if
Speaker 3: he's the hoaxer, or if he's just extremely gullible person
Speaker 3: who promotes them, but at the point that he's taking cash,
Speaker 3: his curiosity and skepticism is probably.
Speaker 5: Not in his best interest, right.
Speaker 9: Yeah, absolutely, But yeah, it's it's sort of it's funny
Speaker 9: because he's someone like that has painted themselves into a
Speaker 9: corner because they can't even if, yeah, if he knows
Speaker 9: anything about the origins of this video or whether or
Speaker 9: not that other guy's footage was used, he can't come
Speaker 9: clean because that would undermine all his other claims, and
Speaker 9: it's the whole you know, it's the whole chain reaction.
Speaker 9: So it's kind of a lesson. I guess for anyone
Speaker 9: that does this kind of thing and you know, a
Speaker 9: purposeful hoax and tries to make money off of it,
Speaker 9: is that you know, it only takes one video, you know,
Speaker 9: it only takes one problem, and then all of your
Speaker 9: entire reputation with all of this stuff will unravel.
Speaker 5: So yeah, you'll maybe it is right. But then there's
Speaker 5: things like Tom Biscardi, who has been.
Speaker 3: Involved in multiple hoaxes and still sells bigfoot videos and
Speaker 3: has a podcast, has efficiently fans who believe in him.
Speaker 9: I don't know why, Yeah, because I guess it's just
Speaker 9: that's how the mind works. You can you can discount
Speaker 9: the ones that got revealed as hoaxes and still believe that,
Speaker 9: you know, but this other stuff is real. I mean,
Speaker 9: and I know that's fake.
Speaker 3: But that's the same mentality with people who hoax fake
Speaker 3: archaeology from the Middle East, you know, right, that's the
Speaker 3: same you know, well, yeah, he had a few bad items, but.
Speaker 5: Most of them are really good.
Speaker 3: Well wait a minute, they're all suspects right after you've
Speaker 3: the reputation counts for something.
Speaker 5: I guess that's what I'm saying.
Speaker 9: Yeah, And in my in comments on my videos whenever
Speaker 9: you know, sort of defenders of whatever video I'm discussing
Speaker 9: or dissecting when they comment, that's a lot of comments
Speaker 9: that I see is basically, you know, accusing me of
Speaker 9: picking up something that's an obvious hoax and somehow that
Speaker 9: you know, that tarnishes the notion that these similar things
Speaker 9: are real. You know, other UFOs are real. Just because
Speaker 9: this one is fake doesn't mean that you know, all
Speaker 9: of them are fake.
Speaker 3: So I don't know if there's a chance that any
Speaker 3: of our listeners have not been through your YouTube channel,
Speaker 3: but we'll have a link to that in the show notes,
Speaker 3: a link to your DVD which is a really great
Speaker 3: collection of your and some bonus materials on there too.
Speaker 5: They're very nice.
Speaker 9: So yeah, yeah, I worked really hard. It's not one
Speaker 9: of those DVDs where you know, I just threw together
Speaker 9: whatever was on the web to just put it together
Speaker 9: just to sell it. I try to kind of, first
Speaker 9: of all, remaster a bunch of those older videos which
Speaker 9: were posted back when YouTube had like a ridiculous quality,
Speaker 9: you know, right, and I put them all, you know,
Speaker 9: made them as new and good looking as possible. And yeah,
Speaker 9: I have like commentary and stuff on there, and some
Speaker 9: funny kind of behind the scenes stuff, you know, just
Speaker 9: trying to support this habit because I mean, I'm one
Speaker 9: of those people I'm really bad at you know, this
Speaker 9: stuff doesn't get updated. I don't come up with new
Speaker 9: videos as often as I would like. But I'm working on,
Speaker 9: you know, figuring out a system where I can simply
Speaker 9: because this stuff is the same as my day job.
Speaker 9: And sometimes if I'm you know, getting off of a
Speaker 9: big project, it's like, oh, now I can do the
Speaker 9: same thing for fun. So yeah, so yeah, I mean
Speaker 9: it's it's doable, and uh, you know, I'm still working,
Speaker 9: but but basically this, you know, people buying this DVD
Speaker 9: goes a long way to help me kind of carve
Speaker 9: out some time and ability to make new videos. And
Speaker 9: I do have a lot of cool plans for future
Speaker 9: episodes and maybe more characters and stuff like that. So
Speaker 9: it should be fun. And with every video it's just
Speaker 9: going to get better because I just try not to
Speaker 9: go over the same territory all the time. All the time.
Speaker 9: I just want to make something crazier and crazier each
Speaker 9: with each episode.
Speaker 3: That's great. I don't know if you remember meeting me
Speaker 3: at TAM but well we got to go see Bill
Speaker 3: and I the science guy together.
Speaker 9: That's right, that's right. That was awesome and expected. I yeah,
Speaker 9: I found out at the last moment.
Speaker 5: It was well, me too, me too, but I was
Speaker 5: excited to be a part of it.
Speaker 8: All right.
Speaker 3: Well, I don't want to keep you all night, but
Speaker 3: I really appreciate you taking some time to talk to you.
Speaker 9: Thanks, thanks for asking me. It's it's fun more instant.
Speaker 3: Today we're talking with lou Petho, is that right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's right. We'll make sure I got it right because
Speaker 3: I saw your full names. Is it Ludovic, which is
Speaker 3: a very cool name? All right, it's our friends.
Speaker 5: Who is lou pethol?
Speaker 8: Well, I'm one of these independent documentary filmmakers that you know,
Speaker 8: we spend you know, there's a lot of us. We
Speaker 8: spend a lot of time and money just to get projects.
Speaker 8: And I looked at broadcasters and hopefully you get a
Speaker 8: guernsey after many months and sometimes years of you know,
Speaker 8: pushing these projects. That's basically what I do. And the
Speaker 8: footage was from one of these projects that I'm working on.
Speaker 1: So Blue, how did you find out about this mammoth video?
Speaker 1: And how quickly did you recognize your own footage?
Speaker 8: Okay, well look what happened. Was a guy called Moderate Martin,
Speaker 8: I think from YouTube send me an email saying, mate,
Speaker 8: you should have a look at this footage because it
Speaker 8: looks a bit like yours. When I looked at it,
Speaker 8: you know, fair enough, I instinctly thought it was my footage.
Speaker 8: And then I checked, you know, every pebble, every rock,
Speaker 8: every cloud was in the same space. And I asked him,
Speaker 8: you know, how did you work this out? And he
Speaker 8: actually knows of Michael Cohen's work and he thought I looked,
Speaker 8: something's a bit fishy here. So what he did? I
Speaker 8: just did a search through YouTube for Rivers and Siberia
Speaker 8: and came across my footage.
Speaker 6: Either this has been you actually emailed me. It's interesting
Speaker 6: how the whole of this thing came up, as I had,
Speaker 6: of course written on it, and then I guess you
Speaker 6: had seen my piece or how did you end up
Speaker 6: contacting me?
Speaker 11: Yeah?
Speaker 8: Yeah, Look, what I did straight away was to go
Speaker 8: to people like yourselves who were talking about this story
Speaker 8: and just wanted to set it straight. I mean, what
Speaker 8: really upset me was the fact that somebody took my footage,
Speaker 8: slapped their own copyright on it, and proceeded to make
Speaker 8: some money out of it. And as I pointed out
Speaker 8: in my video, if it was you know, if it
Speaker 8: was a couple of kids in the bedroom think a
Speaker 8: bit of fun, I'd laugh along with them. I think
Speaker 8: it'd be great.
Speaker 6: But you know, this is different, right, This is this,
Speaker 6: This is a whole whole different set of things. When
Speaker 6: you're again you're not just talking kids, You're talking a
Speaker 6: production company that should know better, right, Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, correctly, Well, the production company I have got in
Speaker 8: touch with them. They they acknowledge that the footage is
Speaker 8: mine and we're coming to some you know, some agreement there.
Speaker 8: But you know, we we do. People like us put
Speaker 8: a lot of effort to try and get these projects up.
Speaker 8: So it's disheartening when you see somebody taking your footage,
Speaker 8: which you know I put up there, show a bit
Speaker 8: of the scene, read the beauty of the place, and
Speaker 8: also to talk about my project.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we do want to talk about your project.
Speaker 3: But I have a couple more questions about this whole
Speaker 3: hoax matter.
Speaker 5: I've been really curious.
Speaker 3: About this, Like how much do you think was paid
Speaker 3: for this this hoax video?
Speaker 5: Or do you the idea yet?
Speaker 8: I don't have any clear idea yet, but you.
Speaker 3: Are pursuing trying to get some kind of compensation for
Speaker 3: it or misused.
Speaker 8: Yeah, we'll basically yeah, yeah, they're going to compensate me
Speaker 8: where where Cohen would have been compensated, you know, originally
Speaker 8: start something a bit big about it, but but it's
Speaker 8: just something that was still kind of functionalizing.
Speaker 9: And I am looking, I am.
Speaker 8: Persisting with Michael, I am in touch with Michael, and
Speaker 8: I'm kind of I'm seeing where how far I can
Speaker 8: push that, because I think he's done this before a
Speaker 8: lot of other people have got back to me and said, said,
Speaker 8: you know, good on you. This guy is just a
Speaker 8: serial hoax. You know a lot of people are caught
Speaker 8: upset with Michael for doing a lot of these these hoaxes,
Speaker 8: or or the one that's the conduct for these hoaxes.
Speaker 8: I mean, whether he's doing and actually himself, you know,
Speaker 8: I'm not sure, but he certainly is the platform for it.
Speaker 1: And is he claiming to have been the videographer or
Speaker 1: is he just the promoter of the video?
Speaker 8: Oh no, no, no, he's just saying that somebody sent
Speaker 8: it to him, which is a bit unusual when you
Speaker 8: slap your own copywriter and this stuff as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's really odd.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I did.
Speaker 8: And then I think I ce CD you on that.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure if I see you on it, but
Speaker 8: I sent an email to to Michael saying, isn't this
Speaker 8: terrible that this person has has tricked you? And is
Speaker 8: basically let's let's join together, let's band together and get
Speaker 8: this guy. You know, we need to.
Speaker 6: Wow, we all got scammed out.
Speaker 3: Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 6: Michael?
Speaker 9: Wow?
Speaker 6: And and look your name happens to be another very
Speaker 6: dubious videos. Isn't that weird?
Speaker 8: Let's get this is terrible, you know, justice needs to
Speaker 8: be well.
Speaker 3: He's also said that, you know, well, how do we
Speaker 3: know that this wasn't just shot at the same location.
Speaker 3: But I think it's really hard to get your camera
Speaker 3: set up exactly the same and.
Speaker 8: Make sure that the same pebbles if the same. And look,
Speaker 8: the really funny is it. Some of the funny comments
Speaker 8: that I've been getting on the just at that footage
Speaker 8: is that people are angry that it's actually me that
Speaker 8: took Michael's footage and I took out the mammoth and
Speaker 8: I've put it up there as as this is a hoax.
Speaker 8: Other people have said that it's it's me that created
Speaker 8: the hopes, and I've come Michael into believing that it's real,
Speaker 8: just to get the publicity.
Speaker 6: I'm just curious more about your your dealings with mister Cohen.
Speaker 6: I mean, how how what were your initial I don't
Speaker 6: know if you're at liberty to go into details, but
Speaker 6: what was your initial contact with them? And was he
Speaker 6: very defensive or did he just sort of plead listened
Speaker 6: or how did all that come about?
Speaker 8: Oh look, I didn't. I didn't go to end direct.
Speaker 8: I basically look, I just saw it as, Hey, this
Speaker 8: is a YouTube event.
Speaker 6: Let's let's keep it at that.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 8: My my contact with Michael has only been been recent
Speaker 8: when I found out found his email. He's saying that
Speaker 8: he's not He's not the bad guy in all this.
Speaker 8: I'm not a bad guy, and that that he that
Speaker 8: I should appreciate all the publicity that I'm getting and
Speaker 8: that I should be thanking him for it.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, Yeah, what's the There has to be a
Speaker 6: really beautiful, concise Australian term for that. What would that be?
Speaker 3: There are lots of terms, maybe he's taking them, but
Speaker 3: I think he was actually an American.
Speaker 8: It was funny I found out he was an Australian
Speaker 8: and the Sidy Morning Herald and the Age in Australia,
Speaker 8: and I think the headlines was two Australians lockehorns.
Speaker 3: That's coincidence over a moment. Yeah, how has YouTube handled
Speaker 3: all this? Have you been cooperative with your inquiry?
Speaker 8: I did look early on. I did point out that
Speaker 8: the member thing was actually you know, wrong claim of copyright.
Speaker 8: And I haven't heard back from them, but one interesting
Speaker 8: thing is that Ben Ben, yourself and Lee Spiedler from
Speaker 8: Huffington Post were really the only too. They came back
Speaker 8: and wanted to debunk the story. You know, I know
Speaker 8: it's I clarify that I was the ABC Brothers show
Speaker 8: News in America, but the Sun, you know, I put
Speaker 8: in a I put a comment on their blog. I
Speaker 8: haven't seen that a comment appear on the blog on
Speaker 8: that that article, and they haven't responded to me. So
Speaker 8: it's kind of interesting that they just wanted to ignore
Speaker 8: the But I guess that's the Sun, isn't it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, right, I think that's probably a part of the
Speaker 6: course with them. So yeah, it was interesting because you know,
Speaker 6: when I first, you know, you know, saw it, and
Speaker 6: now I you know, well you saw the piece, and
Speaker 6: I was sort of critiquing all the things that I
Speaker 6: thought were really do be some suspicious about it, And
Speaker 6: to be honest, I I sort of assumed that it
Speaker 6: was just going to sort of fade away, as many
Speaker 6: of these sort of hoaxed you know, bigfoot videos, you know,
Speaker 6: mysterious creature videos go, and so I just thought it
Speaker 6: was sort of fade away and nothing. And then and
Speaker 6: then I think a few days later, I woke up
Speaker 6: one morning and there's an email from you, and you're like, hey,
Speaker 6: look at this. I'm like interesting, all right, So I did.
Speaker 6: I did more digging, and I'll be honest with you,
Speaker 6: I actually did a little investigating on you because I
Speaker 6: was a little concerned of a sort of a reverse
Speaker 6: hoax that somebody was gonna, you know, try and pull something.
Speaker 6: So I did a little poking around and I verified
Speaker 6: that you were more or less who you said you were.
Speaker 6: And then I said, all right, I think there's a
Speaker 6: story here. So I'm glad that I could help sort
Speaker 6: of expose this because it was just it's just youah,
Speaker 6: so egregious.
Speaker 8: I mean, I mean it is. It is funny. I
Speaker 8: mean it's it's it is a bit of a joke.
Speaker 8: But where it does get serious is the the idea
Speaker 8: that people can take your footage, plane copyright on it,
Speaker 8: make money out of it. Yeah. I think that's becomes
Speaker 8: a different story.
Speaker 1: And so what is the backstory to the project? Why
Speaker 1: did you shoot four minutes of video of a river?
Speaker 8: Well? The projects I'm following story of my grainfather, who
Speaker 8: staided from a pow camp in Siberia in nineteen fifteen
Speaker 8: and then spent three years walking back home. Now what
Speaker 8: I'm planning to do is to retrace that as a documentary,
Speaker 8: which we're still looking for funding. It is a hard
Speaker 8: slot to get these big projects up. And part of
Speaker 8: it was a research trip to Kutz where.
Speaker 4: I met a lot of.
Speaker 8: Academics and they're showing me through the archival material from
Speaker 8: that period. But I also wanted to go through the
Speaker 8: mountains to see if it was possible that my grandfather
Speaker 8: actually tried to cross these mountains, and so I did
Speaker 8: a ten day hike and at the end that.
Speaker 6: Was the river shot that.
Speaker 8: That's become the month shot was about five days in,
Speaker 8: was at the ten around point, and it was just
Speaker 8: such a beautiful area and I thought it wouldn't be
Speaker 8: nice just to have a static shot of just this beautiful,
Speaker 8: peaceful you know, flowing the river and you know that
Speaker 8: that was the only motivation, you know, behind her. So
Speaker 8: I put it up there and really looked. I had
Speaker 8: lots of a lot of the comments, you know, before
Speaker 8: all this happened, people saying how beautiful piece for it
Speaker 8: was and wonderful, and I know it's kind of happy
Speaker 8: to get, you know, one hundred and fifty hits and
Speaker 8: then you know, once this thing happened, it's like a
Speaker 8: quarter of a million.
Speaker 9: Now, I think.
Speaker 8: It's kind of like we imagine if I panned and
Speaker 8: put some music to it.
Speaker 3: I want to well, I think you can actually add
Speaker 3: some stock music to the YouTube interface, so you get
Speaker 3: that one. I don't know if this will end up
Speaker 3: helping your you know, get funding for your project or not,
Speaker 3: but uh uh, you know, how how can people find
Speaker 3: out more about your project or is there anything we
Speaker 3: can do to you know, help it move along?
Speaker 8: Yeah, well, look what what I look, I am taking,
Speaker 8: you know, why not take the opportunity of this publicity.
Speaker 8: And I've spoken to my producers over in Europe, and
Speaker 8: you know, we're getting interest through German French television. But
Speaker 8: it is a big project and we still need to
Speaker 8: raise quite a bit of money. What what I'm going
Speaker 8: to do in the next week or so is create
Speaker 8: a crowd funding site where we're hoping to raise enough
Speaker 8: money just for the science section. And you know, we'll
Speaker 8: obviously have rewards. We'll we'll try and you know, reward
Speaker 8: people who join in. And I don't know, maybe maybe
Speaker 8: have a closer look this time, and you never know,
Speaker 8: one might see a mammoth along the way.
Speaker 6: Well, I have to ask, just just for the record,
Speaker 6: just to be crystal crystal clear, are you absolutely sure
Speaker 6: that you didn't see William ammoth at the.
Speaker 8: I've looked through the footage, and I looked through all
Speaker 8: my footage and I'm sorry to say, but no, there
Speaker 8: was just no.
Speaker 10: Sorry.
Speaker 8: I mean, after ten days, I'm sure I probably smelled
Speaker 8: like a wooly mammoth.
Speaker 6: Wow, fair enough, then, fair enough?
Speaker 8: But but yeah, look, I'll if you guys in mind,
Speaker 8: I'll set up I'll speak to producers and we'll set
Speaker 8: up a link. Certainly, we'll have it on on my website,
Speaker 8: which is Russian Promenade. I'll put something up there where
Speaker 8: we can link to the crowd something and if that's
Speaker 8: if that's a little possible, that that would be greast.
Speaker 5: We'd be glad to put the link in the show notes.
Speaker 5: That's not a problem.
Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah, thanks.
Speaker 5: We typically, no matter who the guest is, we try
Speaker 5: to ask them what's your favorite monster?
Speaker 6: Monster?
Speaker 8: God, I don't know, probably the yetti because I reckon,
Speaker 8: you know, if anything's going to happen, I reckon, it's
Speaker 8: it's going to be a yet.
Speaker 5: Did you see any of those while you're over there?
Speaker 8: No? No, But I look, I know that in Russia
Speaker 8: there is a university in Siberia that is at tacking
Speaker 8: this a little more seriously and they're actually trying to
Speaker 8: find the truth of what what these these things are.
Speaker 3: And you never know that's true if because if you
Speaker 3: ever did know, then we would never show anymore.
Speaker 1: So unless it has something to do with Michael Collin,
Speaker 1: well that's.
Speaker 3: True, right, yeah, I am. I'm going to doubt his.
Speaker 8: Work after all. This had to thank Michael, I guess
Speaker 8: for for some of this.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it'll probably at least a year now before
Speaker 3: we'll hear his next project.
Speaker 6: So your show is no.
Speaker 3: But he is a staple on the web. I mean
Speaker 3: we haven't talked a lot about him, but he puts
Speaker 3: out a lot of content. He was involved in the
Speaker 3: Chicken Alien from a last April and then.
Speaker 6: He was that's right, also also in Saber Area. I
Speaker 6: wrote about that and none of them.
Speaker 3: He's involved in the the Brazil Alien that pops up
Speaker 3: behind the children. Uh yeah, he's uh yeah, he gets around.
Speaker 8: So I speaking of the producers and we were kind
Speaker 8: of you know, checking maybe maybe there's a good documentary
Speaker 8: in the serials, you know, see what they actually do
Speaker 8: and did they damage people trying to you know, to
Speaker 8: really find out what's going on.
Speaker 3: Oh, for sure, there is absolutely my favorite, I mean
Speaker 3: my favorite irony of all this. You know, we look
Speaker 3: at a lot of cryptos weology cases, and my favorite
Speaker 3: irony is that the Patterson Gimblin film is shot at
Speaker 3: a place called Bluff Creek. I mean, how what a
Speaker 3: great title for a documentary, Bluff Creek.
Speaker 5: All right, Well, thank you so much for talking to us, Lou.
Speaker 3: We really appreciate it.
Speaker 6: Thank you, pleasure, Take care Monster.
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to another episode of Monster Talk. I'm
Speaker 3: Blake Smith, and you've been listening to me. Ben Radford
Speaker 3: and doctor Karen Stoles know as we talked about Internet
Speaker 3: hoax videos and interview documentary filmmaker Lou Petho and video
Speaker 3: analysis expert Allen Captain dissillusion Melick Janion. Links to Petho
Speaker 3: and Captain d sites are in the show notes. Monster
Speaker 3: Talk is an official podcast of Skeptic Magazine. The views
Speaker 3: expressed on Monster Talk, while completely awesome, do not necessarily
Speaker 3: reflect the views or opinions of Skeptic Magazine or the
Speaker 3: Skeptic Society. Thanks again for all who participated in our
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Speaker 5: Thanks again for listening.
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Speaker 6: Oh well, I'm a big burden. Who are you?
Speaker 8: That's easy. Oh yes, yes, I am a snuffle up.
Speaker 3: I guess a snuffle up.
Speaker 8: Aga