Hoax Alert: National Geographic Cameraman WAS NOT Eaten Alive During Shooting

Fact Check

  • by: Jeremy Smith

There is a trending HOAX story making the rounds on the internet stating that "National Geographic cameraman eaten alive during shooting." The NOT TRUE story comes from World News Daily Report, a known satire and HOAX site with stories such as "Man catches 320-lb shrimp" and "Doctor performs sex change operation on wrong person."

An excerpt from the NOT TRUE story:

A photographer and cameraman working for the famous scientific magazine National Geographic, is presumed dead after being swallowed by a giant Mola Mola fish while shooting a documentary off the Portuguese coast. 29-year old Joaquín Álvarez Santos, from Chiclayo in Peru, was shooting underwater images on the pygmy sperm whale with four other divers, when the giant predator appeared.

The image used in the HOAX story is NOT of Joaquín Álvarez Santos and crew, it's actually a screen grab from the video below, with the caption "This rare footage of a gigantic sunfish was captured on film by photographer Miguel Pereira off the coast of Portugal. The huge creature dwarfs the divers as it swims past. The slow-moving fish and clear water allow for some spectacular close-ups of this amazing animal." You can see the image used in the video by going to the 8:36 mark.

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Jeremy Smith is from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, and currently resides in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He is an editor at Lead Stories, www.leadstories.com, mainly focusing on debunking hoax stories. 

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