Image shows 2015 truck spill, not 'rain of fish' in Iranian city | Fact check

Isabel C. Morales, USA TODAY
·3 min read

The claim: Image shows 'rain of fish' in Iran in May 2024

[En Español: Imagen muestra derrame en 2015, no "lluvia de peces" en ciudad iraní]

A May 6 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) includes an image of a street filled with fish and people loading them into buckets.

“Incredible rain of fish in the Iranian city of Yasuj,” the post reads in Spanish.

The post was liked more than 4,000 times in two weeks.

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Our rating: False

The photo in the post is from 2015, when catfish spilled out of a delivery truck in China.

The photo of the fish on the street is from 2015 in China, not from 2024 in Iran

The fish photo in question is from a truck mishap in Kailin, China, in March 2015, according to Time Magazine. The truck's door unexpectedly swung open, dumping nearly 15,000 pounds of catfish into the street. Getty Images also has photos of the incident.

The photo in the post, which Firstpost.com published March 20, 2015, has been used online for years. In June 2020, it was posted on a Nicaraguan television channel's website that falsely claimed it showed fish that had fallen from the sky in Honduras.

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The post also includes a video of fish appearing to drop out of the sky, but there have been no credible news reports of such an incident, and USA TODAY wasn't able to verify the legitimacy of the footage. Sections of fish in the footage disappear briefly at some points, which could indicate it was created by combining footage of the street with unrelated footage of fish at the surface of a body of water.

Hafiz Malik, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan, told USA TODAY that the video appears to be edited.

Fish falling from the height of a cloud would be falling faster than the video shows, he said. They also would hit the ground so hard that the movement shown in the video is unlikely.

“In terms of physics, if you consider the speed, they should be coming genuinely super-fast,” Malik told USA TODAY, “flipping and all those kinds of things there are not going to be basically happening based on physics.”

Malik also noted as evidence of editing that in some places the video shows the reflections or shadows from cars but not the falling fish.

USA TODAY reached out to the user who shared the post for comment but did not immediately receive a response.

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-Reporter Chris Mueller contributed to this story.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fish didn't fall from sky in Iran; image is from 2015 | Fact check