Fact-Check: This Video Showing 'Strange' Lights in the Sky is Not From Turkey

Fact-Check: The video showing a strange light is from Balkhash, Kazakhstan and not Turkey.

(Photo: The Quint)

A video showing a strange light in the night sky, along with some buildings in the foreground, has gone viral on the internet.

The claim: People sharing it have said that strange lights were seen in the sky before the devastating earthquakes hit Turkey and Syria.

A floating text, "Before Turkey Earthquake," can be seen on the viral video.

An archive of the post can be found here.

(Source: Facebook/Screenshot)

At least 34,000 people have lost their lives following several earthquakes in Turkey and Syria since 6 February.

(Archives of more such posts can be found here and here.)

The truth: The video is from Kazakhstan and has been on the internet since 25 September 2022, which predates the recent earthquakes.

How did we find that out: We used the InVID WeVerify Google Chrome extension to extract keyframes from the viral video and conducted a keyword search on some of them.

• While going through the results, we came across a tweet from 7 October 2022 that carried the same video.

• The caption of the video said that the video was shot on 6 October 2022 in Kazakhstan.

• Upon investigating further, we found the same video published on a Telegram channel on 25 September 2022.

A link to the post can be found here.

(Source: Telegram/Screenshot)

• The caption stated that the video was from Balkhash in Kazakhstan.

Geolocation of the building: We conducted a reverse image search of a cleaner frame from the original video and found a news article talking about the weather in Balkhash.

• The article was published on a Kazakh news website and had a photograph of the same buildings.

A link to the article can be found here.

(Source: Orken Media/Screenshot)

• We looked for street view images from Balkhash on Google maps and found the same building.

• A side-by-side comparison shows that it's the same building from the viral video.

Side-by-side comparison of the viral video with an image from Google Maps. 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

Conclusion: While we don't know the reason behind the light pattern, it's clear that the video is old and from Kazakhstan. It clearly predates the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria.

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