02 September,2009 12:37 PM IST | | ANI
A German company has admitted that its video showing Michael Jackson alive was a hoax created only to experiment on online conspiracy theories.
German TV company RTL had uploaded the video on YouTube for a day.
The video that has been since removed had received 880,000 hits.u00a0
Sky News quoted RTL spokeswoman Heike Schultz as saying: "We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos.
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"Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead - and the response was breathtaking."
The video, posted under an "anonymous source", showed a coroner''s van entering what appeared to be an underground car park.
A man, who had the same build and hair as Jackson, was escorted from the vehicle and through a doorway.
Schultz said: "Unfortunately, many people believed it was true.
"Even though we tried to create the video in a way that every normal user can see right away that it is a fake."
Heike revealed the video was filmed near Cologne in Germany and "definitely not in the US".
Speaking on the angry reaction of some Jackson fans, Schultz said: "We didn''t want to dishonour Michael Jackson, but we needed a strong name to get this experiment going.
u00a0
"Had we used Britney Spears, then the fans of Britney would have complained."u00a0
