Unrelated Clips Used To Claim That a VFX Bird Causes American Forest Fires

The video shows a Syrian scholar and an unrelated video of a bird that was created using visual effects.

A video of a man speaking in Arabic, accompanied by visuals of a bird that appears to shoot lasers and set a small area of its surroundings on fire, is being widely shared across social media.

The text accompanying the video claims that the bird in the video is the cause of forest fires across the United States (US) every year and that Islam had spoken about the bird 1,400 years ago.

However, we found that the two clips are unrelated. The man in the video is a Syrian national Abdul-daem Al-Kaheel, who conducts research on miracles in the Quran, while the video of the bird is a visual effect created by Brazilian VFX artist Fabrício Rabachim, who had created the video in 2020.

CLAIM

The video is being shared with a claim in Hindi, which reads –

"अमरीका में आप हमेशा जंगलो में आग लगने की खबर सुनते थे ? अब जाकर उन्हें पता चला है कि यह विडियो में देखा गया पक्षी आग लगा रहा है,अल्लाह के नबी सल्ललाहु अलयही वस्सलम ने 1400 साल पहले इस पक्षी का जिक्र कीया था,तब सहाबा ए इक्राम भी ताज्जुब करते थे , दुनिया में अब जाकर पृष्ठी हुई!"

[Translation: We always heard news of forest fires in America? They have now found that the bird seen in this video is setting those fires. Allah's prophet had mentioned this bird 1,400 years ago and Sahaba-e-Ikram also wondered, now the world has seen this!]

More claims made across social media can be seen here, here and here.

The Quint received queries for the video's verification on its WhatsApp tipline as well.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We saw that the viral video uses two different videos, the first being the man speaking in Arabic and the second being the video of the bird that apparently shoots fire.

Using InVID, a video verification tool, we fragmented the video into multiple frames. We cropped these frames to isolate the man and the bird separately, and then ran a reverse image searches on the frames.

VIDEO 1

First, we decided to look into the video of the gentleman speaking in the claim.

The results of the reverse image search led us to a YouTube video uploaded in November 2019, whose description (in Arabic) identified the speaker as one Abdul-Daem Al-Kaheel (عبد الدائم الكحيل).

On looking his name up, we came across a verified YouTube channel under Al-Kaheel's name. While we were unable to find the exact clip used in the claim, we saw that his latest video uploaded on 17 November 2021 carried the same visuals.

According to his website, Al-Kaheel is a Syrian national with an education in fluid mechanics, and works as a researcher focusing on the 'Scientific Miracles of the Quran and Sunnah'.

VIDEO 2

We ran multiple reverse image searches on Yandex to find information on the video of the bird. The results led us to a 2020 video titled 'Quero-Quero Power' uploaded by one Fabrício Rabachim.

As per the channel's 'About' section, Fabrício Rabachim is a self-taught Visual Effects (VFX) artist from Brazil who has been working in the field for 15 years.

In the comments under the video, Rabachim interacted with a viewer and noted that this particular video was made on a program called Autodesk 3ds Max, using Phoenix software.

We looked up Rabachim's name and found a page on Internet Movie Database's (IMBd) website, which showed that they credited Rabachim for multiple projects as a VFX artist.

The Quint reached out to Rabachim who told us more about the video and the bird, which is called the "Quero-Quero" in some regions of Brazil, where it is famous for "making a lot of noise and flying close to people to protect its nest," he said.

"I filmed this video in a park here in the city and the bird made a very interesting move for me to apply an effect, as the bird is already known to be intimidating, I decided to add laser rays in its eyes as a joke and study visual effects at the same time. (sic)"

Fabrício Rabachim, VFX artist

Clearly, two separate, unrelated videos where merged and shared to claim that a bird that "shoots fire" is the cause of forest fires in the US.

(This story has been updated to include VFX artist Fabrício Rabachim's inputs on his video of the bird.)

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