United States.Skinny Bob · videos of a gray being presented as a leak

In April and May 2011, an anonymous YouTube account, "ivan0135," created on April 13, uploaded four black-and-white videos: on April 14 and May 2, 9 and 18. The third has no footage, only text messages. They were presented as leaked film from a series of interviews, held between 1942 and 1969, with a gray being from Zeta Reticuli. They showed an extremely thin being, bald, with an outsized head, a narrow mouth and large blinking eyes, seated at a table, standing full-length and lying in a kind of pool. The often-repeated KGB attribution came from the uploader himself: the first video opens with a still of a "TOP SECRET KGB ARCHIVE" logo taken from the 1998 documentary "Secret KGB UFO Files." The maker never came forward or claimed the work.

For years, enthusiasts analyzed the videos frame by frame on the Metabunk forum and the skinnybob.info site. They identified the scratch-and-grain layer as a film-damage effect sold on commercial stock sites (Pond5) and available online by about 2009. The typeface of the on-screen timecode turned out to be Consolas, released by Microsoft in 2006-2007, and the aging is consistent with Boris FX's Sapphire plug-ins for the editing program After Effects. The aging effects also degrade the timecode, so they were applied last, the opposite of what happens with film shot and then transferred. That does not identify the maker or the base footage, since no one has confessed or shown the set, the puppet or the studio, but it rules out the clips being unaltered archive film.

In July 2025, Edward "Eddie" Abbott, who presents himself as a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst (2007-2009, with a deployment to Iraq) and had been known in UFO circles since a 2021 phone interview with Linda Moulton Howe, said on the UndercoverETuk channel that in 2008 he had seen the complete, unedited video inside a SCIF, a secure room for handling classified information: "in color," with a being ("a pilot") that moved, blinked and turned, "alive," and two craft flying in a staggered formation. He claims parts of that footage no longer circulate. He adds other unverified accounts: photographing a V-shaped craft chased by jets and helicopters, taking part in recovering artifacts in the Middle East, and an alleged hybrid program. Neither his credentials, nor the access he claims, nor the material he describes has independent documentary corroboration.

On May 25, 2026, the YouTube channel "qtecqot," whose namesake X account had been opened in April 2026 and had about 28 followers when the clips began to circulate, posted the first of a series of videos presented as a continuation of the original material: "Confidential leaked ufo-ebe footage continuation of disclosure." It was followed on June 15 by the supposed recovery of the same being ("ET crew recovery site D… skinny Bob"), in the last week of July by a walkthrough of a craft's interior, and around late August by a fourth clip, now in color, titled "Species 4, 13 @qtecqot ≠ @ivan0135." The channel dates the material to 1942 to 1957; the frames carry a burned-in timecode in the lower-left corner, with a black block right over the date digits.

The channel's descriptions present the uploads as numbered installments "of eight," with formulas such as "source anonymity is maintained" and a line saying ivan0135 has been "incapacitated" and his whereabouts unknown since April 2026. This is the structure of an alternate-reality game (ARG, an interactive fiction presented as real), which seals itself off because it explains in advance why the original maker can never confirm anything. By late September 2026 the channel had about 13,700 subscribers. Some media speculated, without evidence, about a link between this revival and the simultaneous wave of orb and sphere videos from Brazil, Miami, Japan, Finland, Indonesia and California.

The most thorough technical analysis of the 2026 clips is a Singhfinity article titled "A verification bench that returns nothing on the new Skinny Bob clips." It downloaded the videos at their native resolution and frame rate (yt-dlp), examined the file metadata (ExifTool), looked for a C2PA provenance manifest and Google's SynthID watermark, ran grain and highlight tests with FFmpeg, and searched commercial stock sites for film-damage overlays. It found nothing conclusive: YouTube strips almost all metadata when it re-encodes, the absence of a C2PA manifest proves nothing, and SynthID only recognizes Google's generators, while Veo, Kling, Runway or a local model leave no signature. Highlights that stay fixed while the geometry moves and inconsistencies in the background (repeated cones, foliage that changes shape, an implausible gait) appear in the article as the most promising tests and as what "people in the replies claim to see," not as measured results.

The conclusion that the 2026 material is synthetic does not come from any measurement. It rests on other signs: a newly created account, the self-sealing ARG packaging, the date blacked out right where it mattered, and the view of the person who cut the most widely shared compilation, who describes it as AI-generated video imitating the 2011 film. For the 2011 material, by contrast, digital manipulation is proven, even though no one knows who did it.

The case shows how an old viral hoax is revived with video-generation tools, in a format, grainy classified 8 mm film, that hides precisely the flaws that would give synthesis away. The credibility built up over fifteen years of unsolved mystery passes to two-month-old clips simply because they appear next to them on the same timeline.

Abbott's testimony raises public interest without providing verifiable evidence. There is no proof that Abbott and qtecqot are coordinated: the channel itself says it is not ivan0135, and its alleged earlier contact with him is uncorroborated. It remains to be seen whether qtecqot will publish the original files with their metadata intact, or whether anyone will document the access Abbott claims to have had.