A viral ‘Iraq war’ picture of US soldiers firing on reptilian humanoids is an AI image. It first appeared on 4 October 2026, days after David Grusch’s Joe Rogan interview, and three detectors and a SynthID watermark flag it.
A viral September claim said Beijing had warned its 1.4 billion citizens not to talk to aliens and to call a UN hotline instead. The real source was a scientists’ protocol for SETI researchers, garbled through a Chinese news graphic.
Viral posts blamed an Alaska radio research station for Europe’s July 2026 heat. Its own operators, three fact-checkers and basic atmospheric physics say otherwise.
A night-time montage of pink beams over a city went viral on X as ‘the instant before’ Venezuela’s 24 June 2026 earthquakes. Its opening clip was posted on TikTok on 18 March, flipped, by an account that has posted 130 near-identical videos. The quakes also struck in daylight.
On the day the Pentagon put its third batch of UFO files online, an image of President Trump beside two tall, white-haired ‘Nordic aliens’ started racking up millions of views. It was AI-made. Here’s the trail.
Five days after the Pentagon’s first batch of UFO files went online on 8 May 2026, an X account posted a ‘Department of War’ memo dated 14 January 1994 about an ‘unidentified humanoid’. It isn’t in the release, and in 1994 there was no Department of War.
