A rumor that circulated online in January 2026 claimed (archived) that a pair of wolves had kept a missing man on a camping trip alive for four days in freezing, snowy conditions. According to the story, rescuers unexpectedly found the hiker alive, having been kept warm by the wolves. 

For example, on Jan. 12, the Facebook page Top 10s posted the story. The post displayed a picture of a man huddled on the ground with two wolves resting on his jacketed body. The story began, “Incredible story from the wilderness: a camper who went missing has been found alive after four harrowing days in freezing snow.”

Other social media users also shared the same claim, some using a different image or a video (archived, archived, archived).

At the time of this writing, it was not possible to definitively categorize the story as false. However, searches of Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google and Yahoo found no news media outlets reporting about rescuers finding a hiker kept alive by wolves (archived, archived, archived, archived). Because of the implausibility of the event, such a story would have been widely reported, if true.

Snopes reached out to various pages that posted the story to ask for further sources and await replies. 

Images and text carried traces of AI

Though it was not possible at the time of this writing to definitively class the story as false, elements of the story carried signs of artificial intelligence generation. 

The various images (archived) and videos that circulated alongside the claim showed the rescued hiker wearing a different jacket in each version, suggesting that the implausible event happened multiple times. Online AI detectors Sightengine and Hive Moderation found that two of the images were highly likely to have been generated by AI. Such detectors are not always fully reliable, though one particular image showed the hiker with a poorly rendered face and nose, a telltale sign of AI use.

In the example shared above from Top 10s on Facebook, image text in the upper-left corner read, “Representative image,” suggesting that the photo did not depict the story in question.

ZeroGPT, an online tool that detects text written by AI, found the text from three popular versions of the story highly likely to be in whole or in part generated by AI.

Some versions of the claim also listed alleged sources. Searches on Google for these sources only led back to other social media posts telling the same story rather than plausible reports of the alleged rescue, suggesting the citations were AI hallucinations — a term for the common phenomenon of AI chatbots presenting false information as true or citing nonexistent sources.

Aside from signs of AI, the story very much resembled glurge, which Dictionary.com defines as “stories, often sent by email, that are supposed to be true and uplifting, but which are often fabricated and sentimental.” Such stories seldom include details about locations, dates or names of people involved, which was also the case for the story about the hiker and the wolves.

Wolves are frequent topics of stories with AI-generated visuals, and Snopes has previously reported on multiple similar stories of wolves allegedly protecting people or pets.