A viral video  which has been viewed more than 8,000 times since it was posted on Facebook on March 19, 2021. It is all over – Facebook, Weibo, Twitter and YouTube.

However, the claim is false as the video was created using digital effects from footage of traffic collisions.

The video clips of cars shows that the cars appear to crash without colliding with other vehicles.

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“In the Gannan area of Gansu province, many armed police and staff members from the Chinese Academy of Sciences were dispatched. Five kilometres around the area were blocked,” the simplified Chinese caption reads.

“Because as the cars came here, they would collide with something unknown, which is quite strange and inexplicable.”

As per the reverse image and keyword searches the video was found to have correspond to a portion of this longer clip which was posted on Vimeo by digital animation artist Donato Sansone on May 29, 2018.

“[The Vimeo video] is the original and it’s mine. It’s a compositing and special effects work done by me 3 years ago,” he told AFP.

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“Many have re-edited it by removing my name to make people believe it was a supernatural event but it isn’t. It’s a special effects work of art,” he added.

Furthermore, the reverse image searches on Yandex found that the unaltered clips which showed the cars crashed with other vehicles on the road.

Also, the misleading claim was debunked by fact-checking organisation Snopes.