The Mysterious Pygmy Man of Northern Sumatra and Digital Fakery

Cryptozoology is a waste of time. >99% of the time when a mysterious creature is spotted or caught on camera, it is determined to be an existing species or a fake. Bigfoot is a man in an ape suit. The television show, The Unexplained, lately airing on The Travel Channel, included a segment with a video showing a mysterious pygmy-like humanoid running away from motorcycle riders on a dirt road in the jungles of Sumatra. The video was released on social media during March of 2017 by Fred Pastrana who puts videos of his off road motor cycle riding club on Twitter. Allegedly, his club was riding on a dirt road in Sumatra when they encountered a strange pygmy-like man who ran away and disappeared in the tall grass. The lead motorcycle rider tipped over when the pygmy first appeared.

Analysts on the television show speculated the pygmy belonged to a surviving band of the Mante tribe that was thought to have gone extinct through interbreeding with the general population. However, analysts noticed the figure was too small even for a pygmy but could not be a child because it was built like an adult. Instead, they speculated the figure could be an individual related to the extinct species of human known as Homo floriensis. This species is believed to have been a dwarf offshoot of Homo erectus that lived on the Indonesian island of Flores between 190,000 years BP-50,000 years BP when they were probably wiped out by newly arriving Homo sapiens. H. floriensis grew to 3 feet 7 inches tall, and they used stone tools similar to those used by Australopithicus. Some anthropologists speculate H. floriensis might still exist and recent survivors are the source for a local legend, the ebu gogo–the cannibalistic grandmother. According to the legend, the ebu gogo are a tribe of small people who ate everything including farmer’s crops and the farmers themselves. They had a mumbling language, and the women had long breasts that they draped over their shoulders when they ran.

I carefully analyzed the video (watch it here https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2017/04/02/aceh-sighting-ape-or-pygmy-could-have-been-small-person-says-expert.html ), and I suggest it is some form of digital fakery. The video is shot by a man in a trailing motorcycle. He is filming straight ahead and comes upon the lead motorcycle which allegedly crashed when first encountering the pygmy. There is something suspicious about this scene–the pygmy is nowhere to be seen in the frame.

Supposedly the cyclist crashed when he saw the pygmy man come out of the forest, but there is no pygmy man in this frame.

Next, the trailing motorcyclist briefly points the camera at the ground and when he points it straight again, the creature is suddenly in the frame. This is a clever trick because it disguises the insertion of a phony 3-D animated figure into the frame. The figure runs faster than an Olympic sprinter while the motorcyclist follows. The figure is wearing some kind of weird hat reminiscent of a video game character based on the Greek God Mercury. The hat doesn’t fall off, despite his amazingly fast sprint down the road. Finally, the figure disappears into the grass. The Indonesian government actually wasted money looking for this tribe in order to determine how to protect a people who don’t really exist. Maybe someone who plays video games will recognize what game this figure is from.

This is the first shot of the pygmy man. Just before this frame, the camera man cleverly points the camera to the ground before pointing it straight again. This is so the video doesn’t obviously look fake when they insert this image into the video.

Note the size comparison. The figure is too small to be a modern day pygmy, leading some to speculate that it is a surviving individual of an extinct species of dwarf man known as Homo floriensis. Instead, I suggest it is totally fake.

He’s clearly wearing some kind of weird hat. Why doesn’t the hat fall off when he is running this fast?

The figure slips into the tall grass never to be seen again. I suggest the figure is an image from a video game inserted into this video.

Tags: cryptozoology is a waste of time, ebu gogo, Homo floriensis, pygmy man of Sumatra is fake