Fake crash picture shared with false claims it shows satellite brought down by Iranian missile

A fake image which is falsely claimed to show an Israeli-US satellite downed by Iranian missiles has been circulating on social media.

The picture is being shared on Facebook with the caption: “Iranian hypersonic missiles brought down a US-Israeli linked Spy satellite and radar monitoring systems.”

It appears to show part of what looks like a large satellite crashed into a highway. But this image is an AI fake, and does not depict real events.

The picture being shared is a still from a video which was posted in December by an account which regularly shares AI-imagined disasters involving objects crashing from the air, such as planes, helicopters and space shuttles.

This video was captioned: “POV from the scene a massive space station just landed near a busy area. Emergency teams are everywhere, people are gathering around, capturing the chaos… looks unreal, but don’t worry, it’s all AI-generated.”

Satellites have been destroyed by missiles before, such as in 2007 when China destroyed one of its non-operational weather satellites with a ballistic missile, and in 2021 when Russia used an anti-satellite missile in a test on one of its own satellites.

It was reported on 16 March that the Israel Defense Forces said it had destroyed an Iranian base which it said was being used to develop “satellite attack capabilities in space”.

But there have been no reports of any satellite being targeted by Iran in the way the posts claim. Any such attack on another country’s satellite is likely to have created significant space debris that is detectable by private companies and governments, which so would have received widespread global media coverage.

Hezbollah—which is backed by Iran—did claim an attack on 9 March on a ground-level antenna field in Israel, which is part of a network for broadband and TV broadcast satellites in orbit.

We have debunked many examples of AI fakes and miscaptioned videos circulating with misleading claims during the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. Before sharing content that you see on social media, it’s important to first consider whether it comes from a trusted and verifiable source, and our Full Fact toolkit contains guides on how to do this.