We came across the posts on the following topic on the social media platform X (1, 2, 3):

The posts include two different videos, shot in different wavelengths, capturing what appears to be a plane flying in the sky.

The plane then appears to be surrounded, one by one, by three unidentified objects that then steadily revolve around it in a triangular formation even as the plane moves.

At the end of each video, there is a bright flash and the plane disappears together with the unidentified objects.

In most versions of the videos we found, the accompanying audio was silent. However, in some, there was a voiceover suggesting that the unidentified objects were UFOs (unidentified flying objects often attributed to alien origin), but also that they belonged to the US government, which was responsible for making flight MH370 disappear.

Similar narratives could also be observed in the text accompanying the posts. In one of the narratives, the footage was suggested to be proof of involvement of UFOs in the disappearance of MH370.

Another narrative suggested that the ‘UFOs’ were in fact a smokescreen, planted by the US government to hide the fact that they had a new ‘hyper advanced technology’ that ‘obsoletes all current forms of energy generation’ and that defies our current understanding of physics.

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 disappeared almost 11 years ago, on 8 March 2014, while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The plane has never been found since, though satellite data suggests that it crash in the southern Indian Ocean.

In December 2024, Malaysia agreed to resume the search for the plane, accepting an offer for a search from sea exploration firm Ocean Infinity, whereby the firm would only be rewarded should they find the plane. Ocean Infinity was involved in previous attempts to locate MH370.

Old Videos Reappearing

When we conducted a search across the web and social media, we found that this video had appeared on multiple other platforms in the years prior, as well as soon after the disappearance of the plane.

We found archived versions of the video on YouTube, as well as the video-sharing platform Vimeo, The videos appear to have then reemerged some time in 2023, showing up on the platforms TikTok and Reddit, where the video was explained as aliens abducting the plane and its passengers.

A number of factchecks addressing the videos were then published from 2023 onwards, though the allegations were also reported without being debunked in the UK tabloid the Mirror. Factchecks were published in France24’s Observers factchecking service, along with Lead Stories and Newsweek.

Observers investigated the origins of the video and found that some of the earliest posts—the archived YouTube videos, had no mention of MH370 in their description. It also indicates that the video on Vimeo, which was captioned in Spanish, described the video as showing ‘what the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 may have looked like’, and it was listed as ‘made by a video editing enthusiast’.

Observers also interviewed an expert who pointed out that in the original video shared in 2014, a sequence of numbers and letters overlaid at the bottom of the video suggested that the video was taken by the NROL-33 military satellite, just as several claims suggested.

However, the satellite was only launched into space on 22 May 2014, long after the plane had disappeared. This added to other inconsistencies with the narrative around the video: once the satellite story was challenged, claims shifted to suggest that the video had been taken by a military drone, before then switching to suggest it had been taken from the ground when it is revealed that the drone flight altitude is much lower than that of MH370.

Later versions of the video have also been edited to remove information such as the overlaid text. The various changes and shifting narratives point to the video’s origin being falsified, either edited or computer generated.

Separately, Lead Stories conducted a factcheck after the story reemerged in 2024, and found that the video had been debunked by a group of VFX artists who were able to trace the edited source materials used for the hoax back to the website textures.com.  The hoax video had been further edited when it appeared in 2024.

Reappearing When Relevant

Previous factchecks have debunked the origin of the video to be artificial and there is no evidence to support the claims that the video shows either UFOs of alien or origin or those owned by a malicious government abducting the flight MH370.

In addition to the shifting and inconsistent narratives explaining the video, another sign of its inauthenticity is the manner it repeatedly reappears, sometimes with further edits, whenever relevant topics emerge in the news cycle.

In 2023, a number of these videos emerged after a former US intelligence official testified under oath that he was absolutely certain that the government was in possession of UAPs (unexplained aerial phenomena, the updated governmental term for UFOs), as well as non-human bodies of pilots of the UFOs that had crashed.

Similarly, we assess it to be likely that the current reemergence of the videos is linked to the announcement of the resumption of the search for the plane.

As such, we find the claim that the videos show MH370 being teleported away by UFOs, either alien or government in origin, to be false.