‘Surveillance’ video of hitchBOT’s demise was a hoax after all

Purported surveillance footage of a hitchhiking Canadian robot’s demise in Philadelphia was a hoax, according to the YouTube vloggers who last saw the robot – which they insist they didn’t destroy themselves.

Video bloggers Jesse Wellens and Ed Bassmaster picked up the robot – part of a social experiment designed by researchers at Ryerson University and McMaster University – outside Philadelphia’s art museum on Friday night. They left it in Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest residential street in the United States, but the robot was vandalized on Saturday.

On Monday, Mr. Wellens – who runs the YouTube show PrankvsPrank – claimed to have acquired surveillance video of a man kicking and dismembering the robot, which he posted on Snapchat. Late Tuesday, he revealed on YouTube that he and Mr. Bassmaster faked the scene, using foam parts and rubber gloves to create facsimiles of the real hitchBOT’s limbs.

“We don’t know who did it. I couldn’t get the surveillance footage,” Mr. Wellens says in the video. Instead, their faked video casts suspicion on “Always Teste,” a recurring character Mr. Bassmaster plays. (Earlier, Mr. Bassmaster had also trolled an ABC news reporter as the Teste character.)

The “surveillance” video was picked up by news outlets around the world. “I guess this just goes to show that not everything that you hear on the news is real, or for that matter, what you hear from anybody,” Mr. Wellens wrote on YouTube, adding that he wanted to dispel the negative image Philadelphians are getting because of hitchBOT’s destruction.

The robot’s creators say they’re not interested in a criminal prosecution, and without a complaint, Philadelphia police say they won’t investigate.