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| - Fact Check: Neither a Harry Potter spell, nor a 'ball of lightning'! Just people falling for CGI as usual
The maker of the video said that the clip of the railway tracks seen in the video was shot near the Belarusian capital of Minsk.
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India Today Fact Check
This video was created by Andrei Trukhonovets, a CGI artist based in Belarus, using Adobe After Effects.
A video, supposedly showing the rare phenomenon of “ball lightning”, has been seen rolling all over social media for a few years now. Shot near railway tracks, a levitating blue ball of pulsating light emerges from a wooded area, and as it advances, it shoots lightning tendrils — one of which strikes a nearby lamp post, resulting in a big spark.
A Twitter user shared the video, writing, “I remember studying this in HS. This is called ball lightning and it’s real.”
Another person commented, “So this is actually a rare occurrence, no one knows why this happens and what causes it but has been happening for years, I feel like I remember a video of someone explaining it but its just called ‘Ball Lightning’ or ‘Luminescent’.” Archives of such posts can be found here and here.
Sadly, AFWA’s investigation found that this supposedly rare phenomenon in action was nothing more than CGI.
AFWA PROBE
A reverse search of the keyframes from the viral video led us to the same video tweeted back in 2020. In the comments of this tweet, a person wrote, “Since it's getting some attention, I feel an obligation to inform that this is a CGI (the ball lightning part). Created by Andrei Trukhonovets.”
Using this clue, we found the YouTube channel of Andrei Trukhonovets. The viral video was shared on this channel on May 27, 2019. The title of the video mentioned that it was computer-generated imagery or CGI. Trukhonovets is a CGI artist based in the Eastern European country of Belarus.
In the comments of this video, Trukhonovets wrote, “This video was created when I just started to learn computer graphics thus it has a lot of mistakes here and there and I think if someone can look attentively that mistakes are clearly visible.”
Further, we found an interview with Trukhonovets about this video on the History Channel’s YouTube. In the video, Trukhonovets revealed that the ball lightning was not real and that he processed this video using “specialised software”.
Earlier, the same video was debunked by Agence France-Presse in December 2021. At that time, Trukhonovets told AFP that he created the video using Adobe After Effects. He further added that the clip of the railway tracks seen in the video was shot near the Belarusian capital of Minsk.
"I tried to create a short story with a ball of lightning, imagined how it would have moved and behaved, then I recorded a video with railways, imagining there's a moving ball of lightning on it," said Trukhonovets in a conversation with AFP.
BALL LIGHTNING
Ball lightning or Globe lightning is a bizarre phenomenon that reportedly appears during thunderstorms as a floating sphere that can range in colour from blue to orange to yellow, disappearing within a few seconds. It is sometimes accompanied by a hissing sound and an acrid odour.
One popular theory suggests that ball lightning is caused when lightning strikes the ground and vaporises some of the silicate minerals in the soil. Carbon in the soil strips the silicates of oxygen through chemical reactions, creating a gas of energetic silicon atoms. These then recombine to form nanoparticles or filaments which, while still floating in the air, react with oxygen, releasing heat and emitting a glow.
One of the first sightings of ball lightning reportedly occurred in 1638 when a "great ball of fire" came through the window of an English church.
(Written by Sanjana Saxena)
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