HitchBOT, a hitchhiking robot that successfully crossed Canada before meeting a foul end in Philadelphia last weekend, may have been demolished at the hands (and feet?) of a goon in a Randall Cunningham jersey.
Video shared by vlogger Jesse Wellens on Snapchat shows a man in a No. 12 jersey lay into something -- presumably HitchBOT -- obscured by a mailbox. The timestamp on the purported surveillance video indicates that it happened around 5:46 a.m. on Saturday.
Multiple outlets have shared a 10-second clip of the man dismantling what's thought to be HitchBOT, but Canada's CBC News obtained the full clip from Wellens. Around 2:45 in the video, the assumed robot killer gives the robot a kick and pulls off its arms.
A couple of factors indicate that the video is part of a hoax. For starters, the video is much more high quality than average security camera footage, and the interlaced effect appears to be inauthentic.
Wellens and his sidekick, Ed Bassmaster, appear to have been the last people to give HitchBOT a ride before it was found in pieces with its electronics missing. Bassmaster often sports a Philadelphia Eagles No. 12 Randall Cunningham jersey when he's in character as his alter ego, "Always Teste."
Wellens and Bassmaster were interviewed by ABC Philadelphia after news broke of HitchBOT's demise.
"Bunch of crumbs," Bassmaster-as-Teste told reporters. "Why you gonna do that? I mean, what did the robot do to anybody, know what I’m saying?"
The men are fond of pranks. Citing the apparent lack of a surveillance camera in the vicinity of HitchBOT's brutal undoing (as of last year), Paleofuture suggested that the robot's violent fate could also be part of a prank, albeit a kind of crappy one.
HitchBOT met its violent end in the so-called City of Brotherly Love just two weeks into its U.S. tour, which began in Massachusetts. The robot had successfully toured across Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
The robot was meant to test human kindness by relying on the goodwill of others to get from place to place.
The Canadian researchers who made HitchBOT as a social experiment said the robot was damaged beyond repair.
“Sadly, sadly it's come to an end,” Frauke Zeller, one of the robot’s co-creators, told The Associated Press.
The creators told ABC they had no interest in filing charges against the vandals.