A post claiming to be a rare video of Swami Vivekananda is being shared on social media. Let’s fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Rare video of Swami Vivekananda when he was alive.
Fact: The person seen walking in traditional dress in this video is Swami Yogananda. This was a video shot when he visited New York City, USA. Hence the claim made in the post is False.
We noticed that the viral video had a watermark that read MIRC@SCEDU and searched about it on the internet using appropriate keywords.
That led to the University of South Carolina’s Moving Image Research Collections website. This website contains a collection of archival footage. We observed that the logo similar to the watermark is in a thumbnail on this website. You can see it in the picture below.
We then searched for footage of Swami Vivekananda on it using relevant keywords and found a video containing the footage in the viral video.
The footage in this 48-second video matches the viral video from around 34 seconds. According to the video description, the man seen wearing a traditional dress in this video is Swami Yogananda not Swami Vivekananda. The video description also states that this video was filmed when he visited the New York City, USA, possibly in 1923.
To sum up, archival footage of Swami Yogananda and his team walking in New York City is falsely attributed to Swami Vivekananda.
