Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
A video has gone viral with the claim that it is of “mermaid sightings”. In the video, you can see three instances of a “mystery creature caught on camera”. You can see the post here.
Fact check
Newschecker noticed the difference in the image quality of the “mermaid” in all the three supposed sightings, as against the surroundings, raising our doubts. On closely analysing the video, we saw a watermark reading “JJPD Producciones”.
Taking a cue from this, we ran a relevant keyword search, which brought us to this Youtube video, dated September 30, 2019, titled “3 impressive mermaids caught on video 2019 – Real or Myth?”. According to the description, the paranormal videos were created for entertainment purposes and all images shown are fictional. The description proceeds to credit the CGI and video editing work to two people.
We then looked up the description of the channel, which when translated from Spanish, read, “We are two Nicaraguan YouTuber brothers, creators of videos with special effects, videos of paranormal encounters, fiction short films, horror stories and more.”
While going through their videography, we saw they have created multiple videos of sightings of mythical creatures in a bid to showcase their work with CGI and video editing, thus confirming that the viral video was just another animation clip.
Conclusion
Viral video of mermaid sighting is actually a CGI one created by a Youtuber film-making duo from Nicaragua.
Result: False
Sources
Video analysis
Youtube video, September 30, 2019
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Authors
Kushel HM is a mechanical engineer-turned-journalist, who loves all things football, tennis and films. He was with the news desk at the Hindustan Times, Mumbai, before joining Newschecker.
