"So I woke up Sunday morning and saw this on my camera and am trying to figure out...what the heck??" Gomez wrote. "First I saw the shadow walking from my front door then I saw this thing....has anyone else seen this on their cameras?? The other two cameras didn’t pick it up for some reason."

The video has been shared widely across the internet with over five million views, and speculation regarding its veracity has run rampant.

Just prior to the creature coming into view a second shadow is cast on the fence in the right of the frame, which Gomez stated was her front door opening and closing.

While the creature is clearly physically present in the video, that doesn’t mean it’s anything unusual, and several strange qualities of the footage leave plenty of room for doubt.

At about seven seconds into the video, something like a short, stifled laugh can be heard, and possibly muffled speaking after that.

And then, at the end of the video, the creature suddenly “disappears”—a feat easily accomplished by video editing.

“You can hear the audio cut out when the thing disappears, that indicates the video was edited,” the Singular Fortean Society’s photography and video expert Emily Wayland said. “That audio pop, that says to me that’s where they cut the footage. It doesn’t seamlessly flow at all.”

“It’s actually really easy to do. You can do it with your phone,” she added.

The appearance of the creature itself is suspect, with many wondering if it isn’t just a child wearing a costume—and the fact that at one point it does a brief chicken dance isn’t helping.

“I suspect that the person who posted it dressed their child—or someone with the build of a child—in a costume," the Singular Fortean Society's lead investigator Tobias Wayland said. "Also, it does the chicken dance. Really???"

Others have speculated that the ‘creature’ might be a puppet operated from the home’s roof, although Tobias is quick to point out that “the thing appears to walk several feet past the end of house.”

“I think it’s someone wearing a costume and doing a silly walk, and I think the video was edited to conceal the fact that once they’d walked a certain distance, they had nowhere else to go,” he said. “I assume they just turned around and came back inside.”

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