Videos of giant eels in New Zealand are making waves online, a TV show in the U.S. even wanted to film a segment of them. There’s just one problem: The eels are not real. Visual artist Tim Hamilton has fooled thousands of viewers of his YouTube clips.

On November 7, 20-year-old Hamilton uploaded a barely 20-second YouTube video showing a human-sized eel in the Manawatu River. The clip has since gathered over 100,000 views. He uploaded another video on Friday, featuring his younger brother trying to feed the giant eel pizza bread. The clip has over 40,000 views as of the time of writing.

Many of the people commenting on the video have been curious about the eel, while the others have simply wondered about its authenticity. Some have backed the video with facts, referring to the New Zealand longfin eel that is endemic to the region.

Viewers were not the only ones curious about the unusually large eels. A TV show in the U.S. called “Right This Minute” has also apparently expressed interest in Hamilton’s footage. However, the viral videos are nothing more than just a creative outlet for the self-taught artist.

According to the Hamilton, he filmed the monster eel in his mother’s bath tub using a “red screen,” which is really just a screen lined with red plastic “because you can’t green-screen an eel, because an eel is already green...” He then digitally enlarged the eel to about a metre long.

“They were excited in showing it, but they thought it was totally real. They never bothered asking me if it was fake or not,” Hamilton was quoted by the New Zealand Herald as saying, referring to the U.S. show.

As for the second video, in which his brother Joash is seen feeding the large eel “pizza bread,” Hamilton said it was actually luncheon meat.

“Joash has a kind of farm of eels that he feeds by chucking some meat in the local stream so we thought we could have a pit of play,” he explained. “For the shot where Joash is feeling it pizza bread, we put red plastic under the water in the stream. We needed the current to look like it was swimming.”

He was happy that people thought his creations were real, but he had to admit they were fake when his local council called him about it.

“The Manawatu River is ridiculously polluted – you couldn’t swim in it – and they wanted to know if there were actually eels in there, because it would give them the means to get funding and clean it up. I really didn’t know what to say. It was getting to be too big a lie,” Hamilton confessed.