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| - Fact Check: Gigantic creature spotted in Florida amid Tropical Storm Ian? 2020 video goes viral
As visuals of Tropical Storm Ian took over social media, one video that showed a gigantic creature flopping through the streets at night was widely shared.
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India Today Fact Check
This is a 2020 video that shows an elephant seal wandering the streets of Puerto Cisnes, a town in Chile.
Tropical Storm Ian, the National Hurricane Center said on September 29, is “producing catastrophic flooding” over east and central parts of the state of Florida. Per news reports, the storm is also projected to bring potentially “life-threatening” floods to parts of Georgia and North and South Carolina.
As visuals of the storm took over social media, one video that showed a gigantic creature flopping through the streets at night was widely shared. People claimed this was from Florida and the creature was supposedly a manatee.
Archives of such posts can be found here, here and here.
AFWA has found that this video is neither recent nor from Florida.
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Reverse searching the frames of this video led us to an NDTV report, from October 9, 2020, that said the video showed a massive elephant seal, wandering around a coastal town in Chile on the night of October 5, 2020. The town was under a midnight curfew due to Covid-19 when the incident took place.
The report included a tweet that said in Spanish that the name of the town was Puerto Cisnes. Subsequent searches led us to another video shared by the Guardian that was shot from a different angle. It showed the same creature wandering the streets of the Chilean town. People could be seen guiding the creature back to the ocean using black tarps.
Global News also shared a video of the operation carried out by a group of residents, who were ultimately successful in helping the creature return to the ocean with the help of Carabineros and Navy personnel. The Carabineros are the Chilean national law enforcement police.
(Written by Sanjana Saxena)
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