Video with hundreds of fish on the road was recorded after a traffic accident, not a flood

What they are sharing: video in which a man claims that a flood scattered hundreds of fish on the road.

Estadão Verifica investigated and concluded that: it’s fake. The fish ended up on the road due to a traffic accident. O Estadão Verifica found other videos from the same moment that show an overturned truck next to the animals. The images were shared on a Chinese social network more than three weeks ago.

Know more: A Facebook user recorded himself commenting on a video showing hundreds of orange fish scattered across a road. “There was a lot of rain in that place. The flood went over the asphalt and left this pile of fish,” he says. In the caption of the publication, he suggests that the animals had fallen from the sky: “It will be a rain of fish,” he wrote.

The video has been viewed 11 million times and has around 1,200 comments. Among them, those who attribute a divine explanation to the event stand out. “This is a tornado that passes through the sea and then the fish fall. Jesus is coming back,” wrote one person. “My God, Jesus is coming back,” said another. “Look, Jesus is coming back. It’s God’s Thing”, said a third.

Traffic accident scattered fish on the road

O Checks took a photo of the video and did a reverse image search (click on the link to learn how to use it) on Google, Yandex and Baidu to discover other publications that showed fish scattered on roads.

On Baidu, a search engine in China, the same video that went viral on Facebook was found. In the image below, it is highlighted in blue.

By clicking on the result highlighted in blue, we are redirected to a Chinese website that published a video where it is possible to see orange fish scattered on the road and a truck overturned next to them. Google’s translation of the page into Portuguese says: “The car carrying the goldfish overturned and an unexpected and magnificent sight occurred.”

The team at Checks copied the same ideograms that were on the Chinese website and used them to search the social network Doyin, the version of Tiktok that works in China, and found another video of the accident filmed from another angle. Below, the video targeted by this check and the one found on Doyin were placed together. Watch:

Why are disaster scenes often related to religion?

Publications on social networks that show strange events or scenes of climate disasters, such as floods and earthquakes, are usually accompanied by comments that seek a religious explanation for what happened. In the opinion of Marcelo da Silva Carneiro, professor of the postgraduate program in Religious Sciences at the Methodist University of São Paulo (Umesp), this comes from a literal interpretation of the Bible.

“Certain biblical literature really has a scope for disaster. This appears mainly in apocalyptic material”, pointed out the professor. “This has to do with the mentality of that time. We are talking about 600 years before Christ to 50 years after Christ. In other words, a period of Antiquity in which the basis of thought was not scientific. All natural phenomena were read and understood from a mythical perspective, from the action of the gods”.

In his opinion, explanations based on facts are discredited because for some people the most important thing is what is in the Bible. “By clinging to mythical thinking, the entire scientific aspect is left behind.”