Fact-Check: This Video Showing 'Strange' Lights in the Sky is Not From Turkey
The video is from Kazakhstan and has been on the internet since 25 September 2022.
Fact-Check: The video showing a strange light is from Balkhash, Kazakhstan and not Turkey.
(Photo: The Quint)
A video showing a strange light in the night sky, along with some buildings in the foreground, has gone viral on the internet.
The claim: People sharing it have said that strange lights were seen in the sky before the devastating earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria.
A floating text, "Before Turkey Earthquake," can be seen on the viral video.
An archive of the post can be found here.
At least 34,000 people have lost their lives following several earthquakes in Turkey and Syria since 6 February.
(Archives of more such posts can be found here and here.)
The truth: The video is from Kazakhstan and has been on the internet since 25 September 2022, which predates the recent earthquakes.
How did we find that out: We used the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension to extract keyframes from the viral video and conducted a keyword search on some of them.
While going through the results, we came across a tweet from 7 October 2022 that carried the same video.
The caption of the video said that the video was shot on 6 October 2022 in Kazakhstan.
Upon investigating further, we found the same video published on a Telegram channel on 25 September 2022.
A link to the post can be found here.
The caption stated that the video was from Balkhash in Kazakhstan.
Geolocation of the building: We conducted a reverse image search of a cleaner frame from the original video and found a news article talking about the weather in Balkhash.
The article was published on a Kazakh news website and had a photograph of the same buildings.
A link to the article can be found here.
We looked for street view images from Balkhash on Google maps and found the same building.
A side-by-side comparison shows that it's the same building from the viral video.
Side-by-side comparison of the viral video with an image from Google Maps.
Conclusion: While we don't know the reason behind the light pattern, it's clear that the video is old and from Kazakhstan. It clearly predates the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.
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