Fact Check: Viral video of a bright light in the sky makes a false claim that it occurred before earthquake in Turkey
A video showing bright light in the sky is in circulation on social media, especially on Twitter, with the claim that this strange light was seen in the skies of Turkey, right before the earthquake. An earthquake of magnitude 7.8 occurred in Turkey and Syria, killing more than 30,000 people.
A video showing bright light in the sky is in circulation on social media, especially on Twitter, with the claim that this strange light was seen in the skies of Turkey, right before the earthquake. An earthquake of magnitude 7.8 occurred in Turkey and Syria, killing more than 30,000 people.
Fact check:
The claim is false. The video was from Kazakhstan and not Turkey.
When the key frames extracted from the video were searched using Google reverse image search, we found a YouTube video showing the same video with the title in Ukranian language: ‘Супутник над м.Балхаш, Казахстан’ meaning ‘Satellite over the city of Balkhash, Kazakhstan’ in English.
When searching for more videos, we found another YouTube channel named WarriorxSGR showing light in the sky expanding just like in the viral video. The title of the video is ‘Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft lift off’.
Further search showed us a few articles and various images of the strange light in the sky. An article published on a website named rtbf.be, shares the same images as in the viral video. The report states that the glowing light is twilight phenomenon of a rocket launch. Balkhash is located 500 km east of Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, from where the Soyuz spacecraft took off to the International Space station, with an American and two Russians on board.
Images and videos from various angles of the same event were published in Tengri news KZ on September 21, 2022.
Hence, the strange light in the viral video is the twilight phenomenon after the rocket launch and is from Kazakhstan but not from Turkey, before the earthquake. The claim is false.