A German company has admitted that its video showing Michael Jackson alive was a hoax created only to experiment on online conspiracy theories.
A German company has admitted that its video showing Michael Jackson alive was a hoax created only to experiment on online conspiracy theories.
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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.
"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.
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"Had we used Britney Spears, then the fans of Britney would have complained."u00a0
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