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Amongst the things that the internet is famous for doing is passing of fake stories as fact and creating hoaxes that are construed as the real thing. Until they are debunked.

The video above claims to depict an usual event outside the offices of CERN – the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. In front of a Shiva statue, which was gifted by the Government of India to the research organisation in 2004, an ominous group of hooded people can be seen carrying out a human sacrifice – in a scene that would not be out of place in a Dan Brown thriller.

It is apparent that the video is a hoax by the very fact that a camera existed to depict the activities of a “secret underground organisation”. But the number of people believing the hoax must have been sizeable, because CERN was forced to deny that a human sacrifice took place on their premises and were forced to launch an investigation into the event.

“These scenes were filmed on our premises but without official permission or knowledge. Cern does not condone this type of spoof, which can give rise to misunderstandings about the scientific nature of our work,” the official spokesperson of the organisation said in a statement while adding that the “investigations underway” were an “internal matter”.

"Spooky footage" purportedly showing a statue of Jesus Christ during a church service in Mexico went viral earlier this month. The footage was actually shot in 2015 and the manager of a paranormal website claimed that the video was not doctored and 30 paranormal investigators and other experts who analysed the footage couldn't find anything wrong with it. That might say more about their skills as experts than the video itself though. This video explains how the visual effect was carried out.

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In June, a news story about a cinema goer in a town in Tamil Nadu who supposedly died while watching The Conjuring 2, and whose body subsequently went missing, was reported in India and across the world. To add to the intrigue surrounding the horror movie, a video ostensibly showing a woman being possessed during a screening also began doing the rounds of social media. Millions saw the video below, which had actually been shot in 2013 and not during a screening of The Conjuring 2.