Late-night CCTV footage showing a lioness walking on the streets and sniffing a man sleeping on the road before walking away from him has shocked internet users. The video was widely shared on social media, leaving many stunned at the man’s narrow escape. A few news outlets also published reports based on the viral clip, suggesting this happened somewhere in India.
On June 7, 2025, Republic published an article titled ‘Lion Roams On Street, Sniffs Man And…: Terrifying Video Is Not A Movie Scene‘. “A chilling video has surfaced on social media, showing a fully grown wild lion walking on the streets and sniffing a man sleeping on the footpath,” it said. “While the location of the incident remains unclear, the video surely leaves us with goosebumps. The viral video also shows the thin line between survival and danger when faced with nature’s most fearsome predators,” the report added.
On the same day, News18 also published a report titled ‘Lion Spared Sleeping Man’s Life In Bizarre Street Encounter‘.
Local news outlet MaharashtraTV24 also shared the video on its YouTube channel.
X users SilencedSirs (@SilentlySirs) and Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) also shared the purported video, claiming that a man sleeping by the road had a narrow escape. At the time of writing this, @SilentlySirs X post had over 2.5 million views.
X account Update News (@UpdateNews724), which claims in its bio that it serves global news and real-time updates, also shared and amplified the video, claiming an Indian man sleeping on the street survived a lion attack. The post had over 22.5 million views at the time of writing this.
Several other social media users shared the video with similar claims.
Fact Check
To verify the video, we watched it a few times. This revealed several discrepancies that raise doubts about whether the footage is of an actual incident. For instance, we noticed that the words appearing on the banner of the storefront near the sleeping man are gibberish; they look similar to the Devanagari script but do not form a word in Hindi or Gujarati. Also, the posture of the man lying on the ground seems unnatural; the placement of the leg is odd, and it folds near the thigh instead of the knee. We have highlighted these below.
We then did a reverse image search on a few key frames from the video. This led us to a YouTube short, uploaded by a Brazilian channel named ‘The world of beasts’. The video caption roughly translates to, ‘Lion finds a man sleeping on the street in Gujarat’.
The video’s description explicitly says that the content is altered or synthetic. It reads: “Sound or visuals were significantly edited or digitally generated.”
The description of the YouTube channel also says that it shares content and designs that are generated using artificial intelligence.
We then analysed the video using an AI-detection tool, which claimed that it was 90% likely that the footage was generated using AI.
Also, note that both Republic and News18 later updated their articles. Republic updated its report to: ‘Lion Roams On Street, Sniffs Man And…: Chilling Video Surfaced On Social Media Is AI Generated?’ while the revised headline of the News18 report reads: ‘Lion Spared Sleeping Man’s Life In Bizarre Street Encounter? Video Goes Viral.‘ The latter also added that they were unable to verify the authenticity of the video independently.
To sum up, the widely circulated video of a lioness roaming the streets at night and sniffing a man sleeping on the roadside before walking away is AI-generated. It does not depict an actual incident that happened in India.
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