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A video purportedly showing a GoPro-captured encounter of a bear chasing a cyclist through some woods was uploaded to YouTube on 1 November 2014 with the following description: The video was watched millions of times in the first month after it was published, but many viewers were skeptical of its authenticity. While its poster, YouTube user Mr. Gregor, did not admit to faking the video, many aspects of the footage rang false. Let's start with the bear. The video gives only a few brief glimpses of the animal, which makes it difficult to determine if the ursine is real. But when the video is slowed down to afford a much better look at the creature, what the viewer sees is a sharp, clear image of the animal even though the background is blurred from the motion of the camera (which shouldn't be the case unless the cyclist were traveling over a relatively smooth surface at almost exactly the same speed as the bear was running): The event depicted in the video also seems dubious. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, grizzly bears have a top speed of nearly 40 MPH, and rangers at Yellowstone National Park have clocked grizzlies traveling at speeds in excess of 25 MPH for more than two miles. This makes it extremely unlikely a cyclist on a bumpy surface, without the aid of a declining slope, would be able to outrace a determined bear. The end of the video also doesn't add up with what we know about bears. In the video, the cyclist gets off his bike and runs into the woods to hide behind a tree: This tactic might work if the biker were hiding from a human being, but bears hunt by smell and can detect scents from several miles away: Although this particular video of a bear chasing a cyclist may be fabricated, encounters such as the one depicted do occur. In August 2013, two cyclists were biking in Jasper National Park in the Canadian Rockies when they had a close encounter with a grizzly bear:
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