No, this video does not show a ‘waterfall’ pouring down from the sky

This article is more than one year old.
Published on April 24, 2019 at 11:30
2 min read
By AFP Indonesia

A video of a huge column of water has been viewed millions of times in online posts that claim it shows a waterfall pouring down from the sky. The claim is false; the video actually shows water going up, not down, in a high-pressure jet that burst from the ground during an operation to drill a new well in Vietnam in 2015.

This Facebook post, which has been shared more than 431,000 times since it was published November 15, 2017, contains a video that has been viewed more than 11 million times and purports to show the miraculous "waterfall".

In the video, which is 2 minutes 3 seconds long, people can be seen standing around watching the white column of water in a rural setting.

Translated to English, the post’s Indonesian-language caption says: “God’s power, strange but real. Waterfall from the sky… May those who share this find their sustenance flowing like water. Amen…”

Below is a screenshot of the false Facebook post:

Screenshot of false Facebook post

The post does not specify where the purported waterfall is located, but the people in the video can be heard speaking in Vietnamese, not Indonesian.

“Look, it’s so amazing!” a man can be heard saying.

“The ground around the water column is nearly breaking,” a woman says. “It’s so high!”

The same video and claim was shared elsewhere on Facebook for example here and on Youtube, where it has been viewed thousands of times, for example here, here and here.

The same video has also circulated on social media in Togo with the claim that it shows a waterfall shooting down from the sky in the African country. Here is AFP’s fact-check report about those posts.

Taking a closer look at the clip, it is possible to see that the water is not coming from the sky but bursting from the ground.

Below is a screenshot of a still from the video that clearly shows the peak of the water jet despite the cloudy white sky that makes it difficult to spot. AFP has circled the tip of the jet in red:

A reverse image search using the online tool Yandex led to numerous Vietnamese-language videos showing the same event. Notably, there was this TV report from June 2, 2015, uploaded to YouTube by the Vietnamese channel VTC 14.

The Vietnamese report says it shows a jet of foul-smelling water that burst up to 20 metres (66 feet) into the sky during an operation to drill a new well in the southern province of Ba Ria-Vung Tau.

The Vietnamese video is embedded below:

Vietnam’s water authority wrote on its website that the owner of the well had breached regulations by drilling too deep.

A closer view of the incident can be seen in another video that was posted on YouTube, on June 1, 2015. From this angle, ten seconds in you can see that the water is bursting from the ground, not the sky.

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