Does satellite imagery show the moments when Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was surrounded by three circling UFOs before suddenly vanishing in a bright flash of light? No, that's not true: This video does not show satellite imagery or the actual disappearance of Flight 370. The images of the clouds came from a website that supplies background images for 3D artists. The animation of the plane and the UFOs were added to create this hoax.
The claim resurfaced in a reel (archived here) on Facebook on July 13, 2024. The post was captioned:
49_Unexplained things caught in camera What really happened to flight MH370
#unexplained #weird #strange #fbreels #trending #reels #viralreels #challenge
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Wed Jul 17 17:53:25 2024 UTC)
The narrator of the video says:
Something weird has just been discovered about the missing flight MH 370. It happened a while ago, many of you know it here. But this has just been found. Now I'm no expert but this is supposed to be some sort of satellite imagery of the plane. You can see it flying right here, this is the flight MH 370. Now you are going to see some crazy stuff start to happen, there is this object No.1 that starts circling the plane. All of a sudden there is a second object and then a third object. You see them swirling in this like organized fashion around the plane. You can see the satellite image changing positions. And I really, I am literally at a loss for words. Like what the heck? These things are circling the plane like they're trying to do something. And then all of a sudden the plane is going to go poof and disappear. Look at it's just gone. What the heck is happening? Is this legit? Like what the freak is happening?
At the time the plane disappeared in early March 2014 there were reports of three objects that were picked up by satellites. ABC News published an article on March 12, 2014, titled, "Satellites Spot 3 Large Objects Near Malaysia Airliner Flight Path" but this did not result in the discovery of the plane -- which has still not been recovered.
Lead Stories did a reverse image search with Google Lens using a screenshot from this video. The first result that came back has a link to a Reddit post on r/Corridor. This Reddit forum is associated with the Corridor Crew, a group of VFX artists with a YouTube channel who had published their own video debunk of this video hoax on November 28, 2023 (discussion of the Flight 370 hoax video begins at 3:14 minutes in). The post shared on Reddit was a December 7, 2023, post by u/DI370DPX3709DDYB2I6L on r/AirlinerAbduction2014 (archived here) titled "First satellite video fully debunked." Currently the post is pinned to the top of the r/AirlinerAbduction2014 board and has the heading tag, "New Evidence" but in 2023 the tag at the top of the post read, "Definitely CGI" (in blue).
The poster u/DI370DPX3709DDYB2I6L explained how they were able to find the source material used to create this hoax. They also included three comparison images and a video to show what they found. They included a link to the page on textures.com where the source AERIALS0028 files (pictured below) are:
So, as an vfx artist I was interested in how someone had made those videos. I was 100% sure the clouds in the first video was a 2d still image so I began to search the internet for cloud footage, first I looked at NASA:s sites, then some stock footage site but then, as a vfx artist myself I often used textures.com in work, a good source for highdef images. So I began looking at the cloud image available on that site, only took me maybe 20 minutes before I found a perfect match of one of the cloud formation. So I looked at other ones from the same collection and found other matches as well
(Source: textures.com screenshot taken on Wed Jul 17 20:00:13 2024 UTC)
User DI370DPX3709DDYB2I6L mentioned the original cloud images from textures.com had been flipped on a horizontal axis compared to how they appear in the video -- an evasive action that might defeat a reverse image search. It seems they found a needle in a haystack by checking textures.com backgrounds and thinking to check the reversed versions as well. Another unusual finding at textures.com was an animated UFO with three lights rotating around it (pictured above) that made repeated passes across the screen like a screensaver. This has an uncanny resemblance to the three things that appeared to circle the plane in the hoax video. We could not determine if this was added before or after the cloud background became associated with the hoax animation.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image made with screenshots from Facebook and textures.com on Wed Jul 17 20:16:02 2024 UTC)
The video on Facebook is not the original CGI hoax video; it is presented in a vertical format. Using the tips from u/DI370DPX3709DDYB2I6L in the debunking post, and transparent layers in Adobe Photoshop, Lead Stories was able to match the clouds from two screenshots of the video on Facebook with the AERIALS0028_2 and AERIALS0028_3 files. These composite images (pictured above and below) verify the findings in the post on Reddit. After reversing the AERIALS0028 images, we found that the video on Facebook was tremendously elongated, so the screenshot had to be squished (using Photoshop's distort tool) in order to align it with the source image. The composite images show the screenshot on Facebook before and after being sized and squished, as well as the area of the source image that appears in the screenshot outlined in color.
(Source: Lead Stories composite image made with screenshots from Facebook and textures.com on Wed Jul 17 20:16:02 2024 UTC)
This video hoax has been around since shortly after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 went missing on March 8, 2014. An archived copy of a now deleted YouTube channel shows RegicideAnon published this video on May 19, 2014 -- so contrary to what P. Graf says, this has not "just been found."
The hoax video has been circulating in certain UFO, conspiracy and skeptic channels. It was the subject of an article in the March/April 2024 edition of the Skeptical Inquirer that includes lots of details about internet drama behind the hoax and debunkings -- including November 2023's bounty of $100,000 for anyone who could provide the original footage.
This video has appeared in other fact checks such as a March 23, 2023, article by the FRANCE 24 Observers team, and this December 12, 2023, video by Factly.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks on claims about flight MH370 can be found here.
