Faking An Earthquake

My brother and I made a fake earthquake video and convinced several tv stations of its authenticity.

I had just gotten home from work and was wasting time on the computer. I felt a rumble like a dump truck driving nearby, but it continued for a while and became even more intense. Nothing crazy, I don’t live in an area of the world with a lot of seismic activity, but it was strong for the area. Maybe a 6.2. Of course my brother runs out of his room to ask me if I had felt it, and in passing said it was too bad he didn’t catch it on video.

My brother at this point was obsessed with YouTube videos. He had his own channel with his small amount of followers, and was always recording himself or anything else. Then I came up with the brilliant idea of faking it. We started recording one of his typical videos, I shook the camera slightly (nothing crazy, just enough to be convincing). He then said something like “what’s that?!”, runs to grab the camera, and runs outside. All while the camera shake of simply walking was more than enough. We added some earthquake sound-effects we found online, posted it on YouTube, and then it exploded.

We would refresh the page, and almost instantly it maxed out at about 330 views. Then the phone started ringing. It was the weather network. It was CTV. It was tv stations in the city and out. It was the CBC! They were all asking for permission to use the video, to which we very enthusiastically agreed.

Then the interviews started.

My brother chickened out doing an over-the-phone interview with the weather network, so I impersonated him over the phone. They actually made a comment about re-calculating the length of the earthquake based on our video, as what we had seemed to be a few seconds longer than what they had thought had actually happened.

CTV simply ran the video without an interview.

CBC requested an in-person interview that night, so with convincing (and lots of it) my brother and I bussed it down to the CBC building downtown, and my brother did an interview with “Connect with Mark Kelly”. It was a quick (and awkward) interview, but was worth it. We had officially trolled one of the biggest news broadcasters in the country.

Oh, and the video got about a third of a million views, and very briefly appeared first on the “Most Viewed” page. This was a few years back though, so I don’t know if that many views would get to #1 any more.