No traffic jams today - but watch out for the 'Bigfoot family': Traffic department shares picture of sasquatch... but it turns out just to be a row of tree stumps

• Arizona Department of Transportation tweeted photo of six figures
• Joked that it was a family of Bigfoot along SR260 near Heber, Arizona
• Thousands of Twitter users sent into a frenzy, officials said it was a joke

By Mia De Graaf For Dailymail.com

Published: 22:48 EST, 5 January 2015 | Updated: 03:16 EST, 6 January 2015

Thousands of Twitter users were sent into a frenzy on New Year's Day after the Arizona Department of Transportation claimed to have spotted a family of Bigfoot.

More than 3,000 people commented on surveillance footage tweeted by officials on January 1, which was captioned: 'We might have spotted a family of sasquatches on SR 260 near Heber this afternoon. What do you think?'

The image showed six blurry dark figures in a line along the snowy roadside.

However, excited followers investigated and found it to be nothing more than a row of trees.

Spotted? Arizona Department of Transportation jokingly shared an image of trees calling them Bigfoot

One Bigfoot and UFO fanatic even made a YouTube video debunking the claim.

As people raged on Twitter at the officials' idiocy, the department admitted it had been a joke.

'We always try to have a little fun with our Facebook and Twitter feeds,' department spokesman Tim Tait told ABC News.

'That way, we don't just post news about crashes and road conditions, but a little something to engage our audience in different ways.

'This posting was one of those efforts – something that caught our attention, and we thought it might make some people chuckle.'

The alleged sighting in Arizona, which has the highest number of UFO sightings per capita, It would have been the first in living history of the folkloric creatures, which many scientists claim do not exist.

Legendary beast sighting: This is the Facebook post that the Arizona Department of Transportation uploaded on New Years Day

Myth or real? The sighting would have been the first of the folkloric creatures in living history

In 1951 American Eric Shipton the footprint of a beast he called a yeti. Reports of his find prompted a spate of other 'sightings'.

The Sasquatch Genome Project, an organisation in America, has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars investigating and researching potential sightings.

A map produced in 2013 by a PhD research candidate recorded 3,313 sightings between 1921 and 2013, mostly on the western coast of the U.S.

The scientific community is yet to be convinced that they are anything more than hoaxes or mistakes.