In 2025, a video was widely circulated on the RuNet about how an astronaut named Anderson made a desperate attempt to escape by parachuting from a faulty spacecraft. Shortly before this, the man allegedly recorded a video for his family. We have verified the accuracy of such messages.
On social networks, the minute-long video, which received millions of views, was usually captioned as follows: “An astronaut jumped from space to Earth to survive.” In the public "Cinema world“On VKontakte, a similar post received almost 330,000 views at the time of writing this analysis. WITH taking into account others communities, who posted the same entry, in totality video on this social network looked about 3 million times. In addition, similar viral posts were published by users Instagram* (16.7 million views), Facebook* (560,000) and Threads* (3200 likes).
The video consists of several scenes. It opens with a man in tears blowing a kiss to the camera. It then shows supposed footage of an astronaut working on the space station, as well as footage of a skydiver jumping from great heights and then landing. The video is accompanied by Russian-language voiceover and subtitles:
“This astronaut records the last moments of his life, where he says goodbye to his wife and daughter. The whole point is that Anderson is working on a space orbital vehicle, which has depressurized and gone into an emergency state. Anderson has very little time left before he begins to freeze and runs out of oxygen. Help from Earth will not be able to arrive in time, and the success of landing on the emergency shuttle is zero. However, he decides to do the craziest thing: the astronaut got as close as possible to the Earth’s stratosphere and decided to parachute from a height of 40 km. During free fall, he reaches an incredible speed of 1300 km/h and breaks the sound barrier. But suddenly the astronaut began to spin violently, and he panicked. But those same shots... At some point, he found his balance and stopped spinning, and, despite everything, Anderson’s landing was successful. And it’s unlikely that he will return to space again.”
There are several versions of this viral video, but the differences between them are minimal: a slightly different voiceover, a slightly longer or slightly shorter duration. Sometimes there are minor text changes. For example, somewhere it is said that the astronaut wrote down an appeal to his family, and somewhere it is said that he wrote it to his wife and daughter. Additionally, at the end of one version, viewers are invited to join an unnamed Telegram channel where they can see more of the “incredible.”
Using a reverse search of screenshots, “Verified” found out that the distributed recording was assembled from several unrelated videos, and its plot was mostly compiled from two stories: fictional and real.
The man identified in the video as Astronaut Anderson is actually named Lewis Saunderson. He actor and popular video blogger: in Instagram over 318,000 people have subscribed to it, YouTube - 338,000, and in TikTok - 2.2 million. In his videos, Saunderson almost always cries - he depicts heroes who sacrifice themselves for others, are about to die, confess to terrible acts, lose their relatives and find themselves in other heartbreaking situations. Apparently, sometimes the actor plays very convincingly - some of his sketches are mistaken for true stories. For example, in 2024, the “Rhymes and Punch” community in its public page “VKontakte"(450,000 views) and in Telegram channel (198,000) published an excerpt from a blogger’s video, where he played a father who donated his heart to his son and recorded a dying message to the child. Original video on Saunderson's YouTube channel was posted back in 2016, it received 13 million views.
The viral video about an astronaut mainly uses recording, which Saunderson posted on his social media on March 25, 2024. It became most popular in TikTok, where it received more than 28 million views. In the story, the astronaut, while in the spacecraft, recorded a farewell message to his wife and daughter. However, it did not specify how the hero ended up in such a critical situation. On June 17, the blogger published a peculiar continuation sketch typed in TikTok almost 18 million views. There, the actor appeared in the same costume and played an astronaut who failed his mission and, due to a ship breakdown, will soon freeze to death in space. He also recorded an appeal to his wife, from whom he asked forgiveness for the fact that he could not return to her and their daughter. Several seconds from this video were also used in a viral recording of an astronaut jumping from space.
However, the creators of the video being tested did not only use staged videos performed by Saunderson. Thus, several episodes show the Austrian parachutist Felix Baumgartner, who on October 14, 2012 jumped from above near 39 km, having installed thus several world records. For example, he achieved the highest free fall speed, which exceeded the speed of sound and amounted to 1357.6 km/h. The parachutist was delivered to the stratosphere in a sealed capsule in a balloon, and not using a spacecraft. There was indeed an uncontrolled spin at the start of the jump, but Baumgartner was soon able to regain control.
That jump took place as part of the project Red Bull Stratos, and the energy drink maker has widely publicized its collaboration with Baumgartner. YouTube live streaming at its peak watched more than 8 million users (which also became a record), and subsequently the Red Bull channel had published many videos about the jump and preparation for it. The most popular (almost 49 million views) minute and a half video appeared on the platform on October 15, 2012. A year later they placed there recording from Baumgartner's body cameras, lasting nearly 9.5 minutes. — spectators could follow the parachutist from the beginning of the jump until the landing. Published in 2022 video clip with comments from an Austrian, which received more than 45 million views. Some footage from there coincides with a video of an astronaut jumping from a faulty spacecraft. In addition, the authors of the viral recording changed original audio track that was played during the demonstration of the parachutist's rotation.
At the end of the video being analyzed, footage of a parachutist was shown for a few seconds, but his equipment did not match that of Baumgartner. The color of the parachute is more reminiscent of the one used by Alan Eustace, who on October 24, 2014 beat a record for an Austrian extreme sportsman, jumping from a height of more than 41 km. But it’s definitely not him captured in the video—most likely, this scene was created using a neural network.
There are other AI-generated clips in the viral video. His work can be determined by characteristic features, including unreadable inscriptions on the spacesuit and missing or deformed limbs of the astronaut. At least three similar scenes are taken from a post published on YouTube in January 2025 roller, which supposedly shows an astronaut making repairs to the International Space Station.
The likely source of the video with the fabricated story is a TikTok account. @mysterious_events_7 with 103,000 subscribers, whose profile description reads: “We will reveal to you all the secrets and mysteries of our planet.” At least “Verified” did not find any earlier publications. Moreover, @mysterious_events_7 talked about astronaut Anderson twice, both videos were released on February 14, 2025. One received more than 11 million views, and second - almost 3 million. The set of differences is minimal: the inscription at the top has changed (“Rescuing an astronaut. Miraculously made it to Earth”), and one of the scenes with Saunders was replaced with other frames from the neural network. @mysterious_events_7 publishes many videos with similar designs on the topic of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. For example, there is a video about a kilometer UFO in the sky above Moscow, about underwater objects unknown to science creatures and about ahead of time technologies ancient civilizations.
On February 15, a video about astronaut Anderson was shared by the Alternative World project: on its YouTube channel the video received 754,000 views, and Instagram — 10.6 million. It was in this version that at the end there was a request to go to Telegram channel, which already has more than 173,000 subscribers. According to the description, the editors' interests are space, UFOs, history, the ancient world, disasters, anomalies, Antarctica and phenomena. At the same time, “Alternative World” publishes almost the same content as @mysterious_events_7.
Note that on VKontakte some records with a fabricated video after complaints from users received special markthat the information in the posts may be inaccurate. However, the label did not prevent them from gaining additional hundreds of thousands of views, not to mention the fact that such a label was placed not for everything similar publications.
Thus, the video about an astronaut who, in order to survive, was forced to parachute from a faulty ship, tells a fictitious story. The video is based on sketches by a popular blogger, fragments of a video about a real parachutist jump from the stratosphere, as well as footage generated by a neural network.
*Russian authorities think Meta Platforms Inc., which owns the social networks Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is an extremist organization; its activities and symbols are prohibited in Russia.
Cover photo: @lewissaunderson38 (YouTube) / social networks / @redbull (YouTube) / collage “Verified”
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