What was claimed
A video shows a car-sized drone in Las Vegas.
Our verdict
The video isn’t real. The original poster said it was created digitally.
Video of ‘car-sized drone in Las Vegas’ is digitally created
A video of a “car-sized drone” supposedly spotted in Las Vegas has been digitally created.
It shows a large black flying object and a building with “Wynn” written on the side in the background. A voiceover says the object is “one of those drones that everybody’s talking about” and comments on how loud it is. Traffic noise can be heard in the background. The “drone” then flies off into the distance.
Although the video renders real buildings quite convincingly, such as Wynn Las Vegas, a luxury hotel and casino in the city, and the nearby gold Trump International Hotel, the footage isn’t genuine.
It was originally posted on TikTok and YouTube alongside the caption “this video was created digitally”. In the YouTube video the creator also says “the craft is a D77-TC Pelican”, which comes from the video game Halo.
But the video has been shared on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) as if it were real.
In recent days, there have been reports of drones flying over different areas of the United States, including New Jersey. A joint statement on 17 December from multiple US agencies (the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration) said the FBI had received more than “5,000 reported drone sightings in the last few weeks” and was investigating around 100 leads with support from state and local officials.
The statement said the agencies had not identified “anything anomalous” and that the drone activity to date did not “present a national security or public safety risk over the civilian airspace in New Jersey or other states in the northeast”.
Full Fact has debunked several pieces of digitally created content being shared as if they’re real—we’ve recently written about images appearing to show former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad with Tucker Carlson and a prisoner found ‘deep underground’ in Syria that were both AI-generated.
We’ve written guides on spotting AI-generated images, as well as deepfake video and audio.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the video isn’t real. The original poster confirmed it was created digitally.