Did a 2011 YouTube video release classified KGB footage of extraterrestrials? No, that's not true: the video combines stock visual effects with footage from another debunked alien video, which was tampered with to feature objects in a cryptic manner.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) where it was published on Tiktok by @goosebumpsent on June 24, 2022. The video opened with a title card showing black and white footage of a military insignia with TV static, and despite later being identified as an emblem of the KGB, the Soviet Union's intelligence agency, a caption over the clip reads:
The shocking creature revealed in a top classified CIA documents
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 28 16:50:51 2023 UTC)
The TikTok video, which splices together various clips, claims that the clips are from a 2011 YouTube video. After showing the military insignia, it cuts to an object flying over a building and what it describes as "the corpse of an extraterrestrial" lying on the ground. Then it juxtaposes the faded military insignia with a color image of the KGB's logo, speculating that the footage was taken from top classified files kept by the Soviet security agency.
The YouTube video in question was posted on April 3, 2011, by @ivan0135, who claimed it was "leaked air force ufo footage" from 1942 to 1969. By the time the Tiktok video was posted, its source material had already been thoroughly debunked by a community of independent investigators that gathered mainly on a still-active subreddit called r/SkinnyBob. Their main findings were summarized on a separate webpage.
It found that the KBG logo was taken from The Secret KGB UFO Files, a 1998 film that purported to be a documentary but was actually a hoax created for entertainment. The YouTube video creator had overlaid visual effects stock footage to make the clips look grainier and more aged. Image stabilization revealed that the flying object in the video, likely presented to be a saucer, is actually static, which means it could be easily embedded into footage that was aimed at recording the house. Similarly, the timecode on the bottom left was found to be digitally embedded using a Microsoft font released in 2005.
