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| - Fact Check: Creepy video of a sea of black birds is neither from Delhi nor from Ukraine
A six-year-old video from Texas in the United States is being shared with claims that it shows a murder of crows thronging a highway in the national capital after earthquake tremors were felt across Delhi-NCR on January 24.
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India Today Fact Check
This is a six-year-old video from Houston, Texas, in the United States and therefore, unrelated to the recent earthquake.
Imagine a mass of black, winged creatures coming at you while you are driving home from work. Straight out of a horror movie, right? This is exactly what the scene looked like in a now-viral video. The video, likely shot from inside a car, showed a flock of winged creatures descending upon people on a busy road.
Some claimed that the clip shows a murder of crows thronging a highway in the national capital after earthquake tremors were felt across Delhi-NCR on January 24, 2023. Others, however, claimed that the footage was from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital that has been ravaged by Russia’s invasion. The archived versions of similar posts can be seen here and here.
AFWA in its investigation found that the video is at least six years old, and therefore unrelated to the recent earthquake or the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
AFWA probe
A reverse search of the viral video’s keyframes led us to a report by the Daily Mail published on January 25, 2017. The report carried the video and multiple screenshots from it. As per this article, the video was from a highway in Houston, Texas, in the United States. The Scottish Sun also carried the same video and reported similar details. The reports in fact compared the incident to a scene from Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 horror film, “The Birds”, where thousands of birds terrorised the small town of Bodega Bay.
Around the same time, the video was also uploaded to multiple YouTube channels. The description given by these channels also claimed it was from Houston.
A similar incident was also reported in 2016 from the Greater Houston area. A sea of black birds was spotted in the parking lot of a Walmart store. As per reports, large numbers of birds appearing in one spot is a common phenomenon in Texas during the month of January. They come in search of food, warmth, and safety as the seasons change.
It is hence clear that the viral video is old and not related to the earthquake in Delhi-NCR or the war in Ukraine.
(With inputs from Sanjana Saxena)
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