Last year, a friend of mine got paid some money by a car company to post an ad to his Facebook page as if he shot it, seeding what would eventually become a viral video that was reported on as if it was news. This sort of shit happens constantly on the internet. A lot of the time, if something seems too good to be true, it absolutely is. My gut feeling is that CCTV footage of a very, very strange-looking creature posted four days ago by a woman in La Junta, Colorado is going to turn out to have either a very mundane or a very annoying explanation. But, for now, we have no idea what the fuck it is.
Firstly, let’s start with the video. Watch this:
Look, I know.
A woman named Vivian Gomez posted it to Facebook, and made it public seemingly at the urging of friends. According to Gomez, she woke up on Sunday morning, for whatever reason checked the CCTV footage from the night prior and saw this little fucker waddling out of her front door and out onto her driveway at 9:59 at night. She says that the second shadow that moves just before it enters frame is the door opening and closing. She also says that the thing, whatever it is, was not picked up by her other two CCTV cameras.
Let’s talk more about the thing. As very many people on the internet have pointed out, it very much has the appearance of Dobby the house elf. Fucked up. It also appears to do a brief chicken dance once it passes the car, which is certainly strange but a bit less terrifying. If you zoom in on the video and listen closely to the audio, you also get a very strong impression that the creature is wearing thongs. Odd.
Reading through the comments of her original post, you get the sense that either Gomez is 100% convinced that it’s real or that she is very, very comfortable lying to her friends and family. Her friends and family, however, have other theories. Well, one. That it’s her young son, who — as one friend suggests — has been playing “too much Fortnite“.
Is it an ad? Real life footage of an alien? Or just a young boy being extremely weird for fun?
God, I hope we find out soon.
(Personal note: I stayed in La Junta once because I got rained out of a campground nearby. I had the best tacos of my life at Lucy’s Tacos. This has been an unpaid endorsement for Lucy’s Tacos in La Junta, Colorado.)
