Fact check

Digital artist’s work posted on Instagram viral as close-up of Chinese spy balloon over US – Alt News

By Andrew McCollum

The US Military shot down what they called a Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of South Carolina on February 4, 2023. The US government had been tracking this balloon as it flew over the Aleutian Islands, passed over Western Canada and entered US airspace over Idaho.

In this context, a short video has gone viral on social media that zooms into the spy balloon, giving a closer look at the object.

Twitter users claimed this video to be of the Chinese surveillance balloon that was shot down. A Twitter user named @fkjacksom shared this video. The tweet has gone viral with over 186,000 views.

A user by the name @jineeminee shared this video and the tweet has over 133,000 views at the moment.

Another Twitter handle named @StatAlpha420 also shared this video and has gained over 1700 views.

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By reverse-searching key-frames of the video on Yandex, we came across the Instagram page of Hamid Ebrahimnia, who is a well-known VFX and 3D artist. His LinkedIn profile says he is based in Boston, US. He shared the video on his Instagram page on February 14, 2023. The video has gone viral since.

By looking at the comments on the post, we saw that the creator responded to the conversation on whether the video is real. He wrote, “Yes it is CGI”. CGI stands for computer-generated imagery.




Following this lead, Alt News came across the entire tutorial on how this video was digitally made using special effects software. Readers can find the tutorial here.

Therefore, the video that has been circulating on social media is digitally created using special effects software by an acclaimed VFX artist and not of the actual Chinese spy balloon.

Vansh Shah is an intern with Alt News.

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Andrew McCollum