We came across the following posts on the social media site X:
The video clip, which is set to dramatic music, depicts a human figure wearing white robes floating in the sky above the clouds, with light reflecting off or emanating from the figure. The images evoke the commonly portrayed appearance of Jesus Christ. The text accompanying the video suggests that it is a ‘fake god hologram’, mentioning that it is the result of ‘Project Blue Beam’.
A CGI Video Created by a Digital Artist
X users responded to the video with a community note that indicated the clip was a ‘CGI video (that is) regularly posted to engagement farming accounts’. The note adds that the clip was created by the digital artist Jessen Carlos, who had posted the video on his TikTok account in 2020.
Community notes are a function on X by which contributors can leave notes on posts and ‘if enough contributors from different points of view rate that note as helpful’, the note will be displayed below the post. This makes it an efficient, if not entirely reliable form of factchecking dubious content.
We looked up Jessen Carlos’ TikTok profile and were able to corroborate the community note, locating what appears to be the original post with identical footage to that in the X post. A quick look at Carlos’ profile revealed that he has created several CGI videos of figures in the sky evoking religious mythology with the effects made to appear as though the figures were filmed with a camera on the ground.
Carlos also shared another post after the original went viral where he featured clips from an Indonesian factcheck of misinformation relating to the original post that had gone viral on social media in Saudi Arabia. In this video, he included clips of his design and production process.
The Project Blue Beam Conspiracy Theory
When we first looked up ‘project blue beam’ in web searches, we could find little of relevance in terms of news reports from credible sources. However, we found a detailed description of Project Blue Beam—a conspiracy theory—on All That’s Interesting (ATI), a website that focuses on history, historical curiosities and archaeology.
ATI described Project Blue Beam as a ‘New World Order’ conspiracy theory, a segment of conspiracy theories that suggest powerful international organisations such as the United Nations, the World Bank or the Illuminati, are ‘working to create a single-world government and to indoctrinate people’ so that they would accept totalitarian leadership and control.
Project Blue Beam in particular suggests that NASA and the UN are using technology to trick people into believing a false religion headed by the Antichrist, which would lead to a one-world religion and government, creating the New World Order. The ideas were first presented in the 1970s and 1980s by Serge Monast, a Canadian writer and journalist.
According to ATI, Monast believed that part of Project Blue Beam involved ‘three-dimensional holographic laser projections that would be beamed across the planet to create a massive “space show,” depicting a variety of religious figures in the sky, including Jesus, Muhammad, and Buddha. The finale of the show would then involve all of these various holograms merging into a singular entity: the Antichrist’.
These details were corroborated by the Georgia-based factchecking outlet Myth Detector, which noted that the Project Blue Beam theory increased in popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic, as large-scale epidemics are used in the theory as a means of control over humans.
Myth Detector points out that the Blue Beam theory is identical to a concept screenplay by Gene Roddenberry, a screenwriter of an American franchise Star Trek, in which aliens try to invade the Earth ‘send religious leaders, created via technological simulation, with the aim of shattering the faith among people and then spread their own religion’. These ideas would later be revised to become the Star Trek: The Motion Picture movie and novel.
We found claims relating to Project Blue Beam unrelated to Jessen Carlos’ work that had been debunked separately by Reuters Fact Check and Politifact. In addition, we found that the Arabic factchecking service Misbar had previously debunked claims surrounding Carlos’ work in 2022.
As such, it is false that the video shows a hologram of a false god, or a technological simulation meant to fool people. It is instead a CGI video created by a digital artist.
