Fact Check: Is the video showing a US aircraft carrier under attack by bees real?
WASHINGTON, DC: A video appearing to show panic on the ship's upper deck during a bee attack is going viral on social media platforms. It surfaced at a time when the United States-Israel conflict with Iran continues to escalate tensions in the Middle East, sparking speculations about its authenticity. Let us analyse the video and fact-check the claim behind it.
Claim: Video shows an aircraft carrier being attacked by bees
The 12-second video surfaced on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube on March 9, 2026, garnering hundreds of thousands of views.
The video shows fighter jet pilots on the ship’s deck panicking during an insect attack, running and falling as they scramble to evade the swarm of bees.
The video is shared with the claim that it is from the ongoing tensions in the Middle East between the US, Israel, and Iran.
Fact Check: The video is AI-generated
However, an analysis by AI detection tools found that the viral video was generated using artificial intelligence.
An analysis by the Hive Moderation tool showed a 96.5% probability that the content was AI-generated, while an analysis by the Zhuque AI Detector Assistant indicated a 76.27% likelihood that the content was AI-generated.
A search for relevant keywords on Google turned up an identical video uploaded to Facebook on March 5, 2026, which features a “Gem” watermark floating at the top, indicating that the content was generated with Google's Gemini AI model.
There are also no official or credible media reports of a bee attack on an aircraft carrier.
American leaders claim extensive destruction of Iran's military
As the conflict continues, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claimed that “Iran has no air defense. Iran has no air force. Iran has no Navy. Their missiles, their missile launchers, and drones being destroyed or shot out of the sky.”
Also, President Donald Trump had proudly announced that the US is “doing very well in Iran, you see the result. It's been amazing, we’ve knocked out 42 navy ships, some of them very large, in three days. That was the end of the navy.”
“We knocked out their air force, we knocked out their communications,” he claimed, before calling Iranian leaders "bad people."
The POTUS added, “When you look at October 7 and beyond October 7, when you look at all the killing they’ve done for 47 years, this had to be done. They were very close to a nuclear weapon. They are crazy, and they would have used it, as he declared, “So we did the world a favor.”
