Snowboarder Nearly Eaten by (Probably Fake) Bear!

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  • Source: www.youtube.com / Via: www.youtube.com

  • This viral video of an oblivious snowboarder filming herself with a selfie stick while being chased by a snarling bear is terrifying — or it would be, if we could believe this actually happened.

    “OMG! I was going through my snowboarding videos and I found a bear chasing me!!!” YouTube user Kelly Murphy said in the description. “I nearly got eaten!!! This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!!”

    While it is quite possible that wild bears could become enraged by selfie sticks and bad attempts at singing Rihanna’s “Work,” a lot of people are declaring this video to be fake. Snopes provided this useful rundown of all the suspicious details:

    For one thing, the audio is unrealistic. The bear’s intermittent (and ominous) growl appears to be at the same volume regardless of its distance from the snowboarder. It’s also unlikely that the camera could capture such clear audio of the bear galloping while Murphy made her way down the hill. […] When the video is slowed down, viewers can get a better look at what appears to be a computer-generated animal. At around the 50 second mark of the video, the bear briefly disappears from the scene before exiting the frame.

    There’s also the fact that bears common to that region of Japan are Asiatic black bears, while this one looks like a brown bear which is much more likely to be found in a region 500 miles northeast.

    Still, as a digital editing / Photoshop project this video is pretty cool, so we’ll give Kelly Murphy this one.

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