A viral video claims to show appearance of a giant moon blocking the sun for a few seconds and then disappearing, all of this purportedly taking place in the Arctic, between Russia and Canada.
The claim is being shared in the backdrop of ‘Supermoon 2021’ on Wednesday, 26 May, when the moon came close to the earth and appeared as the largest full moon or ‘Supermoon’.
However, The Quint’s WebQoof team found that the viral video is an animated one.
CLAIM
The claim, along with the video, reads: “This is at Artic...Between Russia n Canada..Moon appears this big and disappears in about 30 seconds..What a sight.. [sic]”
The video shared by Twitter user ‘Jagat Darak’ had garnered over 47,000 views at the time of writing this article.
Several social media users, including Kenyan politician Mike Sonko, shared the visuals with a similar claim on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and the archived links can be found here, here, here, and here.
The Quint received multiple queries about the video on its WhatsApp tipline as well.
WHAT WE FOUND
We ran a search on Facebook with relevant keywords and came across a post shared by an account called ‘Ufologia Óvnis Ciência Astronomia’. A portion of the video shared by the Facebook account on 16 May carried similar visuals as in the viral one.
The caption of the post credited the visuals to a Tik Tok user ‘Aleksey Nz'.
We then looked up the video on TikTok using Express VPN, an exception we made to our policy to debunk the claim. We found that the user had published the now viral video on 17 May 2021, and it had garnered over 2.2 million views.
We also searched for the user on Instagram, and the bio mentioned that the user is a CGI animation artist.
Speaking to The Quint’s WebQoof team, Suhas Urkude, an animation professional, said that the viral video is a combination of live-action and 3D graphics.
“The moon and probably the sun are 3D elements, where the sun is also the light source. The second half of the video (after the blackout) also looks like a 3D environment as the foliage looks greener as compared to the first half.”Suhas Urkude, Animation Professional
Evidently, an animated video was used to falsely show the position of the moon between Russia and Canada.
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