Video shows special effects from TV show, not a real dragon

Published on April 3, 2024 at 17:26
Updated on April 30, 2024 at 17:01
3 min read
By James OKONG'O, AFP Kenya

Special effects are crucial in bringing mythical creatures to life in film and TV series. A video reemerged recently on social media with claims that it showed a dragon spotted on Kwahu mountain in eastern Ghana. But this is false: the footage shows a model dragon featured on a Spanish television show. AFP Fact Check debunked the same claim several years ago when the video was shared in the Philippines.

The video has been shared more than 3,200 times on TikTok since it was posted on April 1, 2024.

Screenshot showing the false post, taken on April 3, 2024

“Real dragon caught on camera”, reads a text overlay on the video.

The clip was also posted on X and Facebook in March with the caption “Huge dragon found in Ghana a place in the Kwahu mountains”.

A man speaking in the Ghanaian Twi language is seen in the clip.

“We were told dragons have not existed for the past 100 years. We only see them in movies. However, here we are seeing a dragon on the mountains of Kwahu ahead of the Easter celebrations,” he says.

“According to eyewitnesses, the dragon is weak and not dead and still lying on the mountain. We don’t know where it originated from... Government officials are contemplating whether to kill it.”

Kwahu is located some 160 kilometres from Ghana's capital, Accra. The region is famous for its Easter celebrations, which attract revellers from around the country and beyond.

A Nigerian Facebook account also claimed that the video showed a “Real Life dragon in Anambra State” in southeast Nigeria, insisting that dragons were not “just fairy tales”.

But the claim that the clip shows an actual dragon is false.

Fake dragon

AFP Fact Check conducted a reverse image search using keyframes extracted by the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify, along with keyword searches.

This led us to the original footage on YouTube. It was uploaded on September 12, 2016 (archived here).

The video features a dragon model created for a Spanish television show and is titled "Juan Villa Herrero: Artist creates fake dragon."

A side-by-side comparison of the clip in the false posts (left) and the original footage on YouTube (right) shows the same creature

In a message to AFP on April 3, 2024, Herrero confirmed that the dragon was just a model.

“The dragon featured in the posts is my creation,” he wrote.

He added that he designed it for a Spanish TV program called “Cuarto Milenio”.

On February 21, 2016, Herrero shared a YouTube video revealing how the model dragon was built (archived here).

The video’s Spanish-language title translates to English as: “Creating a dragon for Cuarto Milenio”.

Its caption reads: “This is how we created a dragon of more than four metres for the Cuarto Milenio television programme step-by-step in our workshop.”

AFP previously debunked the same clip shared in the Philippines in 2019.

April 30, 2024Adds claim shared in Nigeria

April 30, 2024 Adds claim shared in Nigeria

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