A video is being widely shared on social media in which the moon can be seen very close to the Earth and also eclipsing the Sun. The video is shared with a claim that it is of the Arctic region where the moon covers the Sun for 30 seconds and immediately passes through it and disappears in 5 seconds.
The video is being shared with a caption, “Between Russia and Canada where the Arctic Ocean is located, when the moon rises during the day and passes in front of the sun, it covers the sun for 30 seconds and then immediately passes through it and disappears in 5 seconds …. This video is special Taken from a type of micro telescope … what the original moon is like can be seen in this video … wonderful views ….”
The link to the post can be seen here.
Similar posts can be seen here, here, and here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile did a fact-check and found the video to be computer-generated.
On observing the video closely, we found that while the moon was crossing over a river, it did not cast its shadow in the river. Also, the Arctic region is ice-capped and in the video no trace of ice can be seen.
We further broke the video into many keyframes using InVid tools and did a Reverse Image Search with one of the keyframes. This led us to a Twitter handle @Hoaxeye which had a quote tweeted in the viral video claiming that the viral video was a CG/VFX animation. The Tweet said, “Many questions about this obvious CG/VFX animation. My only problem is that I haven’t found the artist yet. Does anyone know the source? This clip reminds of this animation from 2013: https://youtube.com/watch?v=oBDZtt0vWD8.”
A further Twitter thread identified that the video was the VFX work of artist, Aleksey___nx on TikTok. The Twitter thread reads as “Artist found. Aleksey___nx on TikTok. They made one viral UFO animation recently so I decided to check their other videos.”
Artist found. Aleksey___nx on TikTok. They made one viral UFO animation recently so I decided to check their other videos. https://t.co/P5sYUMOkv2
— HoaxEye (@hoaxeye) May 26, 2021
We further changed the proxy settings and checked for the Tik Tok artist Aleksey_nx and found that the same video was uploaded by him on Tik Tok also.
We also found out that his Tik Tok profile had many animated videos and graphics uploaded on it. A similar video uploaded by him showed visuals of Saturn from the Earth.
Hence, we can conclude that the viral video is not a natural phenomenon but an animated video.
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