A video claiming to prove the existence of a bigfoot has been posted online, after a group of Yeti spotters supposedly stumbled upon one while they were out walking in southwestern Russia.
The video clip, which was recorded by the owners of a local tourist center, shows a tall, hairy creature romping through a forest near Adygeysk, a city in Russia's southwestern Adygeya republic. An image of the Yeti's supposed footprint is also shown in the video.
NTV state television channel reported earlier this week that local emergency rescue services had received several calls from eyewitnesses that appeared to confirm the Yeti's presence.
"The creature was quite large, similar to a bear, but it wasn't a bear. We didn't get too close to it, but from our doorstep we caught sight of something really big and hairy," eyewitness Lyudmila Khristoforova was cited as saying:
A search and rescue group was subsequently dispatched to the area, where team members found heavy footprints in the snow — 47 centimeters in length and 27 centimeters wide — and took plaster casts to record the evidence.
Their findings have since been sent to scientists for analysis, NTV reported.
"We estimate that it probably would have taken about 200 kilos to press the snow down that much … it couldn't have come from a human foot," Andrei Kazeryan, a member of the search and rescue team, was cited as saying by Britain's The Daily Mail.
But despite what the Adygeysk townspeople might think — a local museum is currently running an exhibition on the Yeti — many social media users were skeptic, saying it was probably a PR stunt set up to attract tourists to the area.
"Really not hard to tell that is a man," wrote one user beneath a video of the Yeti sighting uploaded Wednesday to YouTube.
Yeti sightings in Russia are not uncommon, with some scientists claiming only several months ago they had found proof of a Yeti just outside Moscow.
The last reported sighting of a Yeti in Adygeysk came 18 years ago, when a foreign scientist claimed to have seen the mythical creature while on an expedition.