The infox varies from one video to another, but it is centered around a boat, always the same. On TikTok, Internet users falsely claim that a boat, presented as “mysterious” or as a “floating power plant”, was seen off the coast of the Spanish city of Valencia, just before the dramatic floods which hit the region on October 29 and have caused 219 deaths to date.
In a video viewed more than 420,000 times, a TikTok user even accuses the boat of being part of the Haarp program, a study project at an American university that is the subject of numerous conspiracy theories.
FAKE OFF
Images and videos circulating on TikTok show two boats from the same fleet, the Karadeniz Powership Onur Sultan and the Karadeniz Powership Osman Khan, which belong to a Turkish company. However, the most viral video, on the left below and which allegedly shows one of these two boats off the coast of Valencia, was not filmed in the Spanish port.
As seen in the video’s credits, it was filmed off the coast of Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, Spanish islands that lie south of the Moroccan coast, far from the region that was hit by flooding last week. It shows the Karadeniz Powership Onur Sultan, which sails under the flag of Liberia.
She was originally published on September 25 by the account of a restaurant in Las Palmas, which regularly publishes videos of ships passing offshore.
The local press in the Canary Islands reported this passage of the ship, which had made a technical stopover in the port of San Cristobal. According to the newspaper The Provincethe ship came from Mozambique, information confirmed by navigation data. He was going to Türkiye, where he is still today.
Providing electricity on land
According to the site from Karpowership, the Turkish company* which owns the boat, it has an electrical capacity of up to 470 MW and measures 300 meters long and 50 wide. Its purpose is to supply electricity to onshore installations.
The boat is not related to the Haarp Project, which is a research program led by the University of Alaska “aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere (upper layer of the atmosphere)”, as explains the university on its site. Scientists use “the world’s most efficient high-power, high-frequency transmitter” to do this study work. This transmitter is installed in Alaska, a suitable region for these observations.
Launched in the 1990s, this research was first carried out by the US military before the university took charge in 2015. It is frequently the subject of conspiracy theories, particularly when a natural disaster devastates a territory.
* When contacted, the company did not respond to our requests.
Source: www.20minutes.fr
