Was the devastating 6.8 Magnitude earthquake that hit Marrakech on Friday artificially induced? No, that's not true: the earthquake that impacted Morocco was not man-made; it was a natural event caused by the sudden movement of the Earth's crust due to the pressure exerted by the constant motion of tectonic plates beneath its surface.
The claim appeared in several posts, like this video (archived here), published on Tiktok on September 10, 2023, under the title "Before the earthquake in Morocco from a surveillance camera, #BlueBeam, #causion;# conspiracy# UFO." The video looks like it was captured by a surveillance camera, showing the skyline of a city at nighttime, with a date and timestamp that reads September 8, 2023, at 23:09:01, and a banner written in Arabic, translated by Lead Stories staff that says:
"This video is for those skeptics about the sighting of the Blue Beam just before the quake"
"this video is captured by a surveillance camera, documents what happens right before the earthquake and right after it"
The video alleges evidence of the Blue Beam hitting Marrakech just moments before the earthquake took place.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon September 14 14:50:58 2023 UTC)
The post is spreading a known conspiracy theory about earthquakes, claiming that they are man-made, and was done using an unknown advanced technology called the Blue Beam project. Similar claims were made after other earthquakes, like the Syria -Turkey earthquake.
Another post like this video (archived here) shows another video taken from a survivance camera. It shows lighting-like illumination in the middle of the sky at nighttime, with a banner written in Arabic, translated by Lead Stories staff, that says:
"the appearance of big lightining just before the earthquake in Morocco, this is the weapon that caused the earthquake in Morocco, HAARP project"
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Mon September 14, 15:30:58 2023 UTC)
The post claims to show proof that the earthquake that hit Marrakesh was triggered by the HAARP project, The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, a project to study Earth's Ionosphere, which was started by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Lead Stories has debunked similar claims about the HAARP project, including a claim that HAARP triggered the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria in February this year.
