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  • 2016-08-16 (xsd:date)
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  • Was a Human Sacrifice Captured at CERN? (en)
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  • A video concurrently published to YouTube and the Facebook page Stranger Than Fiction News on 11 August 2016 (titled MURDER AT CERN - DISTURBING HUMAN SACRIFICE VIDEO SURFACES) purportedly depicting an human sacrifice carried out by researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The video included commentary from a narrator who stated that the facility was secured and open only to individuals with proper security clearances, that the person filming the video obfuscated his or her involvement with the sacrifice in order to deliberately leak the footage, and that the grainy violence at the end of the clip appeared to be authentic: The rumor predictably and rapidly made its way to conspiracy peddlers and social media groups devoted to promulgating similar rumors, and the evidence presented in the video relating to the CERN facility led some social media users to wonder whether there was any chance the clip was real as described. It didn't help that CERN and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC, the largest and most powerful particle collider in the world) are conspiracy magnets of a sort, having previously prompted falsehoods suggesting scientists working at the facility caused earthquakes or inadvertently opened up UFO portals, Nor did the media's propensity for publishing CERN headlines light on facts but heavy on question marks and doomsday scuttlebutt do much more than amplify perpetually circulating worries about the research facility. Over the years CERN and the LHC have been the subject of claims the accelerator could spawn black holes, trigger a catastrophic chain reaction in the very fabric of space and time itself which would rip apart the entire universe (in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights), just generally kill us all, dangerously unveil the existence of multiverses, summon the anti-Christ, or open a portal to hell. An article about the hell claim delves into why CERN is often the subject of terrifying rumors, despite a notable dearth of black holes or hell portals amidst ongoing research: Nonetheless, rumors about CERN similar to the human sacrifice video likely proliferate in part due to fear and confusion over the purpose of CERN's research and the existence of the LHC. Particle physics isn't a topic that most non-physicists easily grasp, although CERN has attempted to addressed more than a decade of fearmongering about their activities in the Media and Press Relations section of their web site. Some details revealed in the human sacrifice video about the latest rumor also aren't secrets at all, and CERN's social media FAQ page takes a crack at alleviating fears surrounding the facility. In one answer, CERN confirmed the presence of a statue of Shiva honoring a relationship with India that dates back half a century: Another apparent recent addition to the FAQ addresses the video specifically, contradicts claims of absolute facility lockdown, and discourages such pranks: A spokesperson for CERN also told us that the video was a prank that appeared on the internet for the first time in August 2016, and added with respect to rumors and imaginative theories about the facility: CERN's grounds are flooded with international visitors during the summer, many of whom are aware of entrenched conspiracy theories and who opt to make light of the rumors. Of all the circulating CERN or LHC conspiracies, the human sacrifice video rates perhaps the lowest on a scale of plausibility. (en)
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