Mystery Monster Finds With Perfectly Rational Explanations... The Huairou Gollum youtube/watch?v=ZndpRlCwUig The “Gollum” of the Huairou hills is one of the most recent examples of mistaken monster identity to incur worldwide coverage and brief speculation—a Google search of “Huairou Gollum” returns pages upon pages of results in several languages. Posted in June 2014 to the popular Chinese social media network Sina Weibo, photos of what appears to be a strange beast with more than a passing resemblance to the famed character from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy quickly snowballed into a worldwide news item. The photos, which show a fleshy, hairless creature with large, floppy ears, were reposted more than 30,000 times, drawing tens of thousands of comments and well over a million views on YouTube. In the most circulated shot, the gremlin is staring directly into the camera at relatively close range, affording a clear view of its unusual features. Naturally, a popular assumption was that the photos were a hoax, but this turned out not to be the case.Huairou, a picturesque district dominated by mountains in the north of Beijing, is a popular traveling destination which includes a portion of the Great Wall. The pictures were taken by a vacationing camper who had wandered off from his group to “have a pee.” Within a day of the initial posting, the story had gone massively viral in China, with one unverifiable commenter claiming to be the very key to the mystery, writing, “Over the weekend I and my friends went to the mountains to take a mini sci-fi film, and when I was having a pee a person popped up and took pictures of me and shot away.” Within another day, Beijing police had taken notice, stating, “This was an actor wearing a costume. He was filming an advertisement.” The Hauirou County government confirmed the commenter’s story, adding, “The actor was taking a loo break and was still wearing his costume.” This would certainly explain the shot of him stooping in the bushes. Meanwhile, the makers of Guild Wars 2, a popular online role-playing game, offered some slightly different clarification by explaining that the actor had been shooting a Chinese photo ad for the game. He was portraying an Asura, they said, one of the game’s original character races and had been caught taking a drink from a stream. Whether he was relieving himself or refreshing himself remains unclear, but the fact that Guild Wars 2’s Sina Weibo account uploaded pictures of the very same “monster” photographed by the tourist put the issue to rest. While not technically a hoax, the explanation remains perfectly rational after all.David Underhill is a burgeoning freelance writer and stay-at-home father to a small toddler. He one day aspires to leave his house. In his spare time he enjoys sleeping.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 06:30:01 +0000
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