File AN-R23 · Anomalies · Fact recordFiled 2026-10-15

Are the Fresno Nightcrawlers real? The 2007 video, explained

There is no good evidence that they are. The Fresno Nightcrawlers come from a short home security clip recorded in Fresno, California, in 2007 that survives only as a camera recording of a monitor; the original is lost and the man who recorded it has died. Later clips are anonymous, and skeptics read the figures as puppets or a prank, though nobody has shown how the first one was made.

What the Fresno Nightcrawler is

A Fresno Nightcrawler looks like a pair of long white trousers walking by themselves, sometimes with a small rounded shape on top. In the videos they appear in pairs, one taller than the other, and move with a stiff, jerky gait that the skeptic writer Brian Dunning compares to a marionette. They are known from a few night-vision security clips and a handful of anonymous reports, nothing more.

Where the Fresno Nightcrawler video came from

The first Fresno Nightcrawler video was recorded in November 2007. A man who gave his name only as Jose had set up a camera because his dogs kept barking at night, and the footage from his front lawn in south Fresno showed two small white figures crossing the yard. He took it to the Fresno office of the Spanish-language network Univision.

Univision called Victor Camacho, host of the paranormal radio show Los Desvelados. By Camacho's own account, given at the 2008 MUFON UFO Symposium in San Jose, the station wanted him to say on air that the figures were aliens, and he refused because he did not know what they were. When he visited the property in February 2008, he concluded the figures had been small, no more than about half a meter high.

The clip people watch today is not the original recording. PBS's Monstrum series notes that it is a video of a video, filmed off the security monitor with a video camera, and that the original footage has been lost. The copy a Fresno paranormal blogger found on YouTube in September 2008 was itself, he wrote, a recording someone had made at a conference. Jose has since died, Camacho told the Fresno Bee.

The popular claim: TV, Yosemite and more sightings

The clip remained a YouTube curiosity until 2010, when the TV series Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files tried to recreate it with puppets and a child in a white sheet and called the footage unexplainable. The show's hosts also gave the figures their name, which never quite fit: as a Fresno blogger later pointed out, they walk rather than crawl.

More Fresno Nightcrawler sightings followed the broadcast. In April 2011 a YouTuber who posted about UFOs and video games uploaded security footage he said retired friends living inside Yosemite National Park had recorded the month before. It shows a taller and a shorter figure walking down a paved path, and he later photographed the path in daylight with a baby stroller for scale. The friends were never named. The other cases usually cited are thinner still: an anonymous paragraph about a seven-foot creature in Carmel, Ohio, in December 2014 that matches neither the size nor the shape, and a 35-second clip posted anonymously to YouTube in August 2017 under a title claiming the creatures had turned up in Poland.

Fresno Nightcrawler explained: puppets, pants and lost footage

No one has demonstrated how the 2007 clip was made, and no one has confessed to making it. The simplest reading is a puppet or costume. The figures are small by Camacho's own estimate, they move in the deliberate, segmented way a puppet does, and they always come in pairs. A Fresno resident quoted by the Fresno Bee in 2018 called the creature a cloth puppet on a wire, or perhaps a pair of pajama pants. In a later TV segment, experts working for the History Channel concluded that a 2020 clip of a similar figure was a puppet.

The harder problem is the record itself. The original tape is gone, the only person who saw the first recording at first hand has died, and the version in circulation is a copy of a copy. That leaves no Fresno Nightcrawler evidence that could be tested either way. A television crew failing to reproduce a blurry clip says little about whether it could be faked; it mostly shows how little detail the clip contains.

What is still debated

Camacho still believes the first video is real. He told the Fresno Bee that Jose was too frightened to leave the house for weeks and could not have staged it, and he has speculated about an extraterrestrial insectoid around three feet tall. Michael Banti, founder of the Weird Fresno blog, told the paper he was undecided about the original but that a couple of popular later videos appeared to be fake. The two men also rejected a claim that the figures match beings from local Native American legend, which they traced to photos of similar-looking wooden statues from an unknown location.

Few people argue that the Fresno Nightcrawlers are an undiscovered species. Dunning, writing for Skeptoid in 2022, called the creature one "supported by little or no actual belief by anyone", yet it has a large following, with pins, plush toys and fan art. He traces part of that appeal to its cute, merchandise-friendly look and to its adoption as a mascot in LGBTQ online communities. One video on YouTube had passed 1.4 million views by 2018.

Verdict

Real or Legend stamps the Fresno Nightcrawlers disputed. The evidence is one lost home video known only through a re-recording, one clip attributed to anonymous friends near Yosemite, and a few unverifiable uploads. Nobody has shown the 2007 video to be a hoax, so we do not stamp it debunked, but nothing in the record supports an unknown creature, and a small puppet or prank remains the most economical explanation. Is the Fresno Nightcrawler real? Not on any evidence that exists.