Unrelated photos showing a bird's eye view of the recently concluded Maha Kumbh mela in Uttar Pradesh are being shared with a false claim that they show the view of the Kumbh as captured by astronaut Sunita Williams from space.
BOOM found that while the photos do show an aerial view of the Maha Kumbh, they do not depict what the event looked like from space. Additionally, we also found that the pictures have been available online on news and government websites and claims that Sunita Williams clicked them are not true.
NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore returned to Earth on March 19, after spending a tense nine months in space. The four- member crew including Williams were stuck on their spaceflight, after a technical problem stretched an eight-day mission which started on June 5, 2024, to over 200 days.
Falguni Pandya, a relative of Williams has in multiple interviews to news websites said that the astronaut shared photos with her family of the Kumbh as it appeared in space. The photos in the viral posts attempt to mislead that they were the pictures of the Kumbh shared by Williams.
The viral claims show three different aerial view photos of the Maha Kumbh with text 'Kumbh From Space'. The posts have a cut out of Sunita Williams and also the text claiming, "Sunita Williams' cousin said Sunita had taken a picture of the Mahakumbh from space".
The first picture shows an aerial view of a massive gathering, the second shows a satellite view of the Maha Kumbh and the third is an aerial view of multiple bridges over a river with massive crowds gathered around it.
Click here, here and here to view those posts.
Fact Check
BOOM was able to confirm that the pictures show scenes from the Maha Kumbh Mela but are not pictures of the event as captured by astronaut Sunita Williams. We cropped out Sunita Williams' out of the collage and ran reverse image searches for the images and found that they had been posted by several news organisations when reporting about the Kumbh Mela, before Willaims returned to Earth.
We first reviewed multiple interviews with Williams' sister-in-law, Falguni Pandya, named as the source for the photos in the claim. While Pandya has said that Williams' did share a photo of the Kumbh as seen from space, none of the media reports carried any picture from the claim.
Photo 1 - Photo Showing A Massive Crowd On A River Bank
A reverse image search showed the full original picture in an article about the Maha Kumbh, published by The New York Times on January 14, 2025 crediting it to photo wire agency Agence France-Presse (AFP).
A check for the original on AFP's site showed the same uploaded on January 13, 2025 crediting the picture as a handout by the Uttar Pradesh State Information Department.
We further found the same picture shared by the official handle of the Ravindra Mandar, the District Magistrate of Prayagraj on January 13, 2025.
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
Photo 2 - Satellite Photo Of The Prayagraj Sangam
A specific keyword search showed that the photo was released by the National Remote Sensing Centres, a department within the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The NSRC posted the satellite images on their website, dated December 22, 2024 showing visuals of Prayagraj before the start of the Maha Kumbh Mela.
The photos are part of a document detailing the preparations for the event and show temporary floating (Pontoon) bridges built for the Maha Kumbh.
Photo 3
A reverse image search on just the photo of the bridges, showed multiple results including on the stock photo site iStock operated by Getty Images.
The photo was uploaded to iStock on May 29, 2021 with the caption identifying the location as Kumbh Nagri in Haridwar, Uttarakhand. The Maha Kumbh was held in the state of Uttar Pradesh not in Uttarakhand.
