A picture purported to be of a 21 billion-year-old drone recently excavated in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, is making rounds on social media platforms. Let’s verify this claim through this fact-check article.
Claim: The photo depicts a 21 billion-year-old drone that was unearthed in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh.
Fact: The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has released no official statement about the excavation of an ancient drone in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. The image is a creation of artificial intelligence. Hence, the claim made in the social media post is False.
To check the credibility of the claim, we did a keyword search on the internet to find any official statements from the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) regarding the excavation of the ancient drone in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. No such discovery was mentioned either on the ASI’s official website or on their social media profiles.
Further, we performed a reverse image search to find out more about the viral photo. This search directed us to an ‘X’ account named ‘Convomf’, which posted the same picture on 7 March 2024.
According to the caption, the image was generated using artificial intelligence. The same image was also found in a video on the Chinese video-sharing platform, Xigua, where the caption identifies the photo as an AI creation and labels it as ‘completely fictitious’.
Though we could not independently verify the source of the image, it’s clear that the drone seen in the viral image has not been excavated in Prayagraj. Thus, it’s safe to conclude that the viral claim is a fabrication.
Also, according to estimates by scientists and astronomers, the Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the Big Bang likely occurred 10 to 20 billion years ago, so the figure of 21 billion years old for the drone is a wild exaggeration by all estimates.
To sum up, the viral image claiming to be of a 21 billion-year-old drone excavated in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, is false. The picture is an AI-generated image and has no connection to any archaeological discovery.
