A massive earthquake with multiple aftershocks shook Turkey, and neighbouring Syria, on February 6, 2023. The death toll of the calamity has already crossed 21,000 people and many are still being rescued from the rubble.
Against this backdrop, a viral video showing jellyfish-like patterned lights scattering in the night sky is doing the rounds on social media. People are claiming the phenomenon to have occurred just before the earthquake in Turkey.
A Facebook user posted the viral post with a caption: People in Turkey saw this strange light in the sky right before the earthquake.
You can check the post here.
FACT CHECK
NewsMobile fact-checked the viral video, and found it to be false.
Running a Google Keyword Search for the appearance of the lights in the sky, we identified a tweet by an unverified account on October 7, 2022. The caption of the video states: ‘Baikonur Cosmodrome – Southern Kazakhstan 06/10/2022’.
This proves that the video has existed online since October 2022, and, therefore, cannot be related to the 2023 Turkey earthquake.
Conducting a Google Keyword Search based on the tweet, we found a news article titled: Жители Казахстана делятся красивыми фото запуска с Байконура (English: Residents of Kazakhstan share beautiful photos of the launch from Baikonur), published by Kazinform — a news agency based in Kazakhstanon, on September 21, 2022.
The article informs that NASA launched the Soyuz-2.1a carrier rocket with the Soyuz MS-22 manned spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on September 21, 2022.
The jellyfish effect that appeared in the evening sky is a light and optical effect during the separation of the stages of the Soyuz launch vehicle.
We found many other images and videos of the same effect posted in the article.
Another news article, published in The Astana Times — a media and news company from Kazakhstan, corroborates the claims made above and shows a few more glimpses of the phenomenon.
Therefore, we can conclusively say that the viral video claiming that people saw a strange light in the sky just before the Turkey earthquake is false.
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