If you’ve visited a news site over the last couple of days, you’ve
probably read this incredible story of a Russian “mummified” man who was
found more dead than alive after being attacked by a brown bear and
somehow survived for a month. Well, it case you haven’t already guessed,
it’s fake.
The story of Alexander, a Russian man who had allegedly spent a month
in a bear cave somewhere in Russia’s emote Republic of Tuva before
being discovered by hunters, went viral yesterday, after major UK
publications like Mail Online, Metro and The Sun picked it up and pretty
much reported it as fact. In their defense, the news did originally
appear on Siberian Times,
a Russian news website that covers national events in English. They all
claimed that the emaciated man who appeared in a very short clip was
the unlikely survivor of a gruesome bear attack that had left him
paralyzed. He allegedly told reporters that the beast had then dragged
him to its den and kept him around as “tin-can” food to be eaten later.
Luckily, he was found by hunters who ventured into the bear’s cave after
being alerted by their dogs’ barking. The story ends with Alexander
recovering on a hospital bed. Now let’s talk about how the story began.
Alexander first made headlines in Russia after that very same video
went viral for a completely different reason. Originally, whoever
created or shared the video on social media used a completely different
backstory for it. SochiStream
discovered that Alexander started off as a “zombie”, or, more
specifically a man who was allegedly found alive in a casket, in a Sochi
cemetery. That original video got about 1,000 upvotes on Pikabu, Russia’s version of Reddit.
Here’s where things get interesting. After the administration of the
Baranovsky rural district of Sochi denied reports of a “man who rose
from the grave”, the video of the same Alexander was reposted, this time
portraying him as the survivor of a bear attack. And that was the
version that wound up going viral in Western media, after being picked
up by gullible journalists.
IT specialist Mikhail Golubev told SochiStream that the video and
most likely both its backstories are fake. He admits it’s a well-made
video, but claims that the audio portion in which the emaciated man
states his name for the camera was undoubtedly added over the video
footage.
“Whoever did this, shot an eerie video, added a separate audio file
to it, and published it on social media”, Golubev said, adding that
there are usually three reasons why trolls create such elaborate fakes.
“Why is this being done? There are three likely reasons. First,
someone needs to distract people from another more important topic being
discussed online. Secondly, some publications may have had a hard time
finding interesting stories and decided to make one up, which happens
quite a lot. And finally, it could be that someone was testing the
channels of viral information dissemination. Understanding how quickly a
certain type of news can reach a significant number of people is
important for manipulating the masses,” Golubev said.
Well, whatever the reasons for making Alexander an internet star
were, there’s no denying that whoever was behind this fake news reached
their goal. Some major news outlets still have this story up as legit.
