A video circulating on social media claims to capture real instances of people vanishing into thin air on 19 October 2023. This video contains four clips of people in different locations vanishing suddenly. Lets fact check this claim through this article.
Claim: These video clips, captured on 19 October 2023, depict people vanishing into thin air.
Fact: The videos are scripted and part of a campaign by Perhaps Today, confirmed by a spokesperson from Turning Point, who made this campaign. These are CGI dramatisations, not real events. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To verify the claim, we conducted a keyword search and traced the videos back to a YouTube upload by David Jeremiah of Turning Point ministries titled “The Great Disappearance – Coming this Fall.”
According to the video’s description, these videos are pre-enactment videos of rapture- an event believed by Christians during which believers ascend to heaven to meet Jesus Christ. This video features a website called PerhapsToday.org, where the full versions of the viral clips (here, here, and here) were found.
However, we could not find the source for the video where a man walking on a road disappears, but there are no credible news reports to prove that such vanishing of people occurred on 19 October 2023, and hence, it is safe to assume that the video was also a staged one.
Upon further investigation, it became evident that these pre-enactments of the Rapture were created as part of a campaign by Perhaps Today made by Turning Point Productions. Speaking to AP fact check in this regard, Turning Point spokesperson Shannon Mann explicitly referred to the videos as “a CGI dramatisation of the anticipated prophetic event called the Rapture.”
To sum up, the viral videos claiming to capture real instances of people disappearing are scripted CGI dramatisations created as part of a campaign by Perhaps Today.
