A woman who claims she was chased by a bear while back-country snowboarding in Japan shared a video showing the dramatic moment on 11 April, which quickly started to trend.
Snowboarder Kelly Murphy has shared three videos from her trip on YouTube. The first two were posted on 5 April and do not picture a bear. It was only six days later that Murphy shared a new video, titled Snowboarder Girl Chased By Bear – I Was Singing Rihanna Work And Didnt Know It Was Behind Me!
Murphy said that she was singing and had no idea she was being chased by a bear until later, when she watched the clip. OMG! I was going through my snowboarding videos and I found a bear chasing me!!! I nearly got eaten!!! This was at Hakuba 47 in Japan, filmed yesterday! Be careful people!!! Murphy writes in the videos caption.
Some on Twitter were quick to speculate about the authenticity of the video, which had just over 4,400 views at the time of this writing. Almost every comment on YouTube cast doubt on the videos authenticity. Frame-by-frame analysis of the video did not immediately show that the footage of the bear and the snowboarder were from different sources.
Adam Sich, who describes himself as a video and YouTube person at the Guardian, shared a screengrab of the video, which appears to show a frame in which the bear splits in half. The glitch is caused by a frame-rate mismatch, in other words, the source footage of the bear is not at the same frames per second as the GoPro footage.
Murphy, a 19-year-old student from Sydney, has stuck to her story in interviews with news outlets like News 9 in Australia.
