A 2016 video showing a swarm of birds descending on a car park of a supermarket in the United States has resurfaced with false claims that it is a recent footage from Saudi Arabia where crows did not allow customers to come out of the market.
The viral clip, which looks like an apocalyptic movie, has also been edited with the sound of people panicking and background music.
The video shows a swarm of black birds flying over a car park of a super market as people avoid moving out of their vehicles. The clip is viral at a time when reports of swarms of desert locusts ravaging crops and farmlands in parts of Western India have emerged. Read more here.
One such video has been captioned as, "Crows not allowing customers to come out of super market in Saudi ..is it the beginning of the end of the world ??" Click here to view an archive of the video.
Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap has also retweeted the video, which is viral on Twitter with the same caption. Click here to view the archive of the video.
Fact Check
BOOM broke the video into its key-frames and ran a reverse image search on one of the frames and found a longer video which was uploaded on UK-based Daily Mail's Facebook page, last month. The person shooting the video films her experience in the clip, as she stays put inside the parked car.
Taking cue from the caption of the video, we were able to find the same video which was uploaded on viral content aggregator, Viral Hog's official YouTube channel in April this year. According to the description, the incident is from December, 2016, Carrollton, Texas. BOOM reached out to Viral Hog, which confirmed that the video is four years old, and was shot on December 6, 2016.
The YouTube footage carries a first person account of the woman who shot the video. "I left H-mart and was returning to my car with groceries. I noticed the birds were very noisy as I was leaving, but the sky wasn't filled with them as bad as shown in the video. I got to my car while some people waiting at the entrance of the building watching. They were smart for waiting because in the next minute, my car got pooped on big time. As you can see, the area filled with birds very quickly. Apparently, these are blackbirds and they gather just as the sun goes down. I don't know the exact scientific reason for it, but there is one and it happens often. I remember seeing groups of birds like this a lot when I was younger, but it was never ever this many!"
Below is a comparison of frames from the viral video and the original clip uploaded on YouTube.
Here is a Google street view of the H Market in Carrollton, Texas, which matches the visuals of the viral video.
The video was earlier viral with claims that crows were coming to Texas after an attack on China's Wuhan. The same was debunked by AFP. Read AFP's fact check here.