'Dead Alien' Video on YouTube Goes Viral
Video of alleged "dead alien" found in Russia attracts nearly 1.5 million views.
April 19, 2011 — -- A YouTube video of a so-called "dead alien" found in Russia is quickly becoming an Internet sensation.
The video, posted to YouTube on Sunday, has attracted nearly 1.5 million views and is now making the rounds on Twitter and Facebook.
Uploaded by All News Web, which calls itself "The World's Only Inter-Galactic News Service," the video's description says it shows a "dead alien" found in Russia's Republic Buryatia, at a site not far from an alleged UFO event one month ago in Siberia.
The fuzzy film, apparently shot as two Russian-speaking men walk across a snowy countryside, features a close-up of what is appears to be the shriveled up body of a tiny extra-terrestrial being. Like the aliens of pop culture, the dead creature in the YouTube video has an enlarged gray head and huge, dark eyes.
"We found him over there. ... We found him around two hours ago. ... It must have been lying here for days", the translation beneath the video says.
But UFO believers shouldn't get their hopes up too high.
Video Is 'Clearly a Hoax," Investigator Says
Benjamin Radford, a paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said the video is most certainly the work of pranksters.
"It's clearly a hoax," he said.
The first "big red flag" is the way the video was shot, he said. Instead of just stumbling upon the alien, the camera man gives the viewer a wide-angle so-called "establishing shot" of the landscape before zooming right onto the alien as he and his friend find it.
"This is film-making 101. We see this in sitcoms, we see this in virtually every film in order to establish a place and scene for the viewer," he said. "It makes sense in the context of a fake film but it does not make sense in the context of someone suddenly finding this alien creature."
Russians Laug on 'Alien' Video
The video's credibility is also not helped by the fact that the men in the video are audibly laughing, Radford said.
"I don't speak Russian, but I can tell you when someone's laughing," Radford said.
Radford also said that the so-called "alien" looks too much like the "little green man" of our favorite sci-fi films.
The video is fuzzy enough to be compelling, Radford said, but that still doesn't mask the reality that the video's alien was likely handmade with some clear Jello and animal or chicken skin.
"You look at it and it's not badly done -- it took somebody probably a couple of hours to make," he said. "There's probably a butcher shop somewhere missing some pieces. ...It's no alien."