Fact Check: Viral video showing shape-changing creature is from Navajo folklore
A video of an odd-looking and shape-changing creature is going viral on social media platforms indicating that these mysterious creatures exist in the real world
Every now and then, we come across news reports mentioning of the trail cam footage of wild animals’ behaviour during the night. This time a chilling footage of mysterious shape-shifting creatures is going viral on various social media platforms.
In the viral video on Facebook, a mysterious creature is shown which keeps changing its shape every 10 minutes. The video is captioned: “పది నిమిషాలకు ఒకసారి రూపం మార్చుకుంటున్న వింత జీవి” (A strange creature that changes its form every ten minutes).
The Facebook post has amassed 97.7K likes and has been shared over 1.7K times.
During its investigation, Telugu Post fact check team didn’t find any conclusive evidence to either approve or reject the claim made in the viral video.
When we ran a Google Reverse Image search using keyframes of the viral video, we came across several reports stating that the shape-shifting mysterious creature is a native American legend. According to Simple Wikipedia, this concept is unique to Navajo people ( a tribe of Native Americans in the New Mexico state of the US). In popular culture, fictional creatures are known as skin-walkers while they are called ‘yee naaldlooshii’ in the language of Navajo people, which means, "with it [the animal skin], he goes on all fours.".
In this Facebook post dated from February 2014, a woman named Ton Bruce said geologist husband captured “an odd looking human-like creature walking backwards near Lybrook unincorporated community in New Mexico.
This was later debunked by KRQE news channel stating the ‘paranormal activity’ is actually a video clip from sci-fi movie Xtro (1982).
According to some social media reports, skin-walkers were encountered in an area between Uintah and Ouray Indian Reservation in Utah. Due to the frequent occurrence of strange phenomena, this region was later dubbed "Skinwalker Ranch" in reference to Navajo legends of shapeshifting witches.
During our investigation we also found out that such weird-looking creatures were created using Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence programme which creates hyper realistic images of people and their surroundings.
We scanned the web deploying various digital tools but were unable to find the origin of the viral video. We also tried AI tools to check if these were AI generated videos but in vain. During the course of research, we found a video on YouTube which shows similar shape-shifting creatures while claiming the footage (got) leaked from darkweb (and it was ) uploaded on surface web 2 years ago.” The video shows it was captured using a camera at 8.26 pm on February 2, 1987. If the claim is true, we will not be able to find the source of the viral video on the surface web.