Video of ominous cloud formation falsely linked to Hurricane Milton
- Published on October 7, 2024 at 23:05
- 2 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
Copyright © AFP 2017-2025. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
"BREAKING NEWS: Hurricane Milton is now a Category 5 Hurricane and is expected to do severe damage to Florida," says an October 7, 2024 post sharing the video on X.
The post comes from a QAnon-promoting social media user who goes by "Dom Lucre" and was once banned from the platform for posting child exploitation images.
The account has previously spread misinformation, including conspiracy theories about the wildfires that burned through Hawaii in August 2023.
Similar posts shared the clip on Instagram -- and also in Spanish.
Hurricane Milton exploded in strength October 7 to the highest category on a scale of five, triggering evacuation orders in Florida for the second time in as many weeks after Hurricane Helene slammed the state as a Category 4 storm. It is expected to make landfall October 9 near Tampa Bay.
But the footage circulating online is unrelated to the looming storm, which is also expected to graze Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula as it churns eastward.
Reverse image searches surfaced the same video in a June 2021 article about apocalyptic skies in the Florida Panhandle (archived here). The original poster shared his recording to Facebook, saying he captured it in Fort Walton Beach (archived here).
No evacuation order had been issued as of October 7 for Okaloosa County, where Fort Walton Beach is located, according to Florida's Division of Emergency Management (archived here).
Frequently misrepresented footage
AFP previously debunked other posts misrepresenting the video as a shot of Hurricane Ian, which devastated Florida in September 2022.
Tyler Fleming, a senior meteorologist at the US National Weather Service in Tampa Bay, told AFP at the time that the conditions in the video did not resemble hurricane winds (archived here).
"The video appears to show a shelf cloud with undulating asperatus clouds underneath," Fleming said in the September 2022 email. "These could occur with normal thunderstorms coming onshore and would not be associated with an eyewall."
The clip recirculated again the following year alongside false claims that it showed the impact of an earthquake that struck Alaska in July 2023.
AFP has debunked other misinformation about hurricanes here.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
