Brian Jones had just poured his morning coffee and was getting ready for his day when his wife told him to take a look out the window. When he did he was greeted with an unusual start. There was a bear snacking on their bird feeder…standing on his hind legs and looking like a human standing up.
“It’s pretty common in our area to have bear sightings,” Jones, a resident of South Carolina, told the Dodo afterwards. “I thought this one was unique in that he was standing like a person.”
Jones said that once the bear had carefully snacked from the bird feeder he went back into the forest. Since then, Jones has brought the bird feeder inside when bears are the most active to discourage the bear from getting too close to their home.
Oddly, Jones’ sighting of the black bear came in the same week a sun bear halfway across the globe was garnering a lot of attention for a similar behavior.
The Malaysian sun bear at a zoo in China stood on his hind legs and was filmed by a bystander prompting a crazy rumor that the bear was actually a human in a bear costume. The wild allegations got so widespread that officials were forced to deny that Angela the bear was a human.
In a statement, Hangzhou Zoo pretending to speak as Angela wrote, “Some people think I stand like a person. It seems you don’t understand me very well.” They added that a person inside a bear costume would never survive the the summer heat, where temperatures are more than 100 degrees (38 degrees).
We have to admit that it is pretty far-fetched that people believed the bear was a person. But then, there was the time when a photo of Steven Spielberg with a dinosaur prop went viral.
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