Two employees from the Alaska Bureau of Land Management filmed this strange “thing” swimming in the Chena River, Fairbanks, Alaska.
What do you think it is?
YouTube notes:
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Klaus Wuttig believed it’s an object floating in the water, likely snagged on something under the water keeping it in one position, with the motion of the flowing water providing an optical illusion. “It looks like it’s swimming but it’s actually stationary and just wading in the current” says Wuttig.
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Note: NPR has a lengthy list of people’s guesses as to what this is. And Alaska Dispatch News reports:
For all those speculating over what the object might be, Alaska Department of Fish and Game Tanana River Management Biologist Klaus Wuttig has an answer.
He thinks it’s probably just rope stuck to a bridge pier. He said cold temperatures at night allowed frazil ice — a kind of loose, slushy ice that forms on water — to stick to the rope, which caused it to float to the surface.
Looks like a big ol’ hunk of ice, snow and other muck that is snagged on something – just like Wuttig stated. Other than the illusion of swimming, it doesn’t look anything like a live animal of some type.
Interesting optical illusion … and just debris of some sort, just as I believe Nessie was.
Won’t matter what I think it is. Since it is now possible to make VERY believable fake photographs with Photoshop. What pictures show us will never again be a reliable indicator of history. Think about what that will mean for someone born, perhaps today. Who in 30 years time may be looking at my very avatar, the one you can see right now. On what basis should he lend any credence to what is in fact an authentic unretouched photograph of myself?
Photographs have always been our “proof positive” that something happened in a certain way at precisely that moment in time. And yet photos have been altered since photography began. It’s just that methods today are more sophisticated, more high tech, and more widely available.
I once saw something ‘swimming’ in a man made lake, and was convinced I was seeing the head of an otter or a beaver. I had my camera, so took a few photos. When I enlarged the photo on my computer, the animal’s head was just a fuzzy growth of something on a buoy, and the movement was because the buoy was anchored near the water intake…
We have rich imaginations that go to great lengths to make sense of something unfamiliar. It’s troubling and curiosity-provoking to not be able to identify something. Or depending on the situation, just plain scary.