A Mermaid Spotted in Kinshasa's Tshangu River? Is It Real?
A video claiming to show a mermaid swimming in the Tshangu river in Kinshasa, DRC, went viral in July 2026. Eleza Fact investigated using local testimony and UncovAI's detection tool, which found it fake with 95% confidence.
UncovAI is an AI content detection platform that checks text, images, video, and audio for signs of AI generation — the tool used to confirm this video was synthetic.
The claim
Starting mid-July 2026, a video showing a humanoid, mermaid-like figure swimming in a river spread widely on social media. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, posts claimed the creature had been spotted in the Tshangu river, in the Masina commune of Kinshasa, around 6 a.m. One Facebook post describing the sighting drew over 500 reactions and 160 comments within days; another version of the video racked up close to 28,000 views. On TikTok, the exact same footage was circulating with a different claim entirely — that it had been filmed in Indonesia.
Is it real?
No. A reverse image search traced the video to a TikTok account with more than 101,500 followers, which had posted the identical clip on July 13, 2026 — a day before the Kinshasa claims began — captioned as a mermaid sighting in Indonesia. The same footage cannot document two unrelated real events in two different countries, which was the first strong signal something was off.
Eleza Fact then gathered local testimony. An urban photographer who documents daily life in Kinshasa flatly denied the claim, and a resident of Masina confirmed the river exists but rejected any supernatural sighting, describing the story as rumor. No provincial authorities or credible media outlets reported the event, despite the video's viral reach — an unlikely silence for something this dramatic in a densely populated area.
UncovAI's neural analysis of the video frames then confirmed the visual evidence, estimating a 95% probability that the footage was AI-generated.
Why this story traveled so far
Stories of water spirits run deep across Central and West Africa, most widely known through the figure of Mami Wata — a water deity blending African, European, and Asian influences that scholars have documented across the DRC, Nigeria, Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, and Angola. That cultural resonance is exactly why a fabricated "mermaid" clip found such fast, receptive an audience: it slotted into an existing, meaningful belief rather than asking people to accept something from nothing. Cultural weight doesn't make a video real, but it does explain why fact-checkers had to work harder to trace it.
The pattern here is a recognizable one: strange or supernatural-looking footage gets attached to a real, specific local landmark to make it feel grounded, then multiplies across platforms with conflicting locations. Anyone encountering a video like this can apply the same steps Eleza Fact did — reverse image search, check for contradictory claims about where it happened, and run it through a detection tool before sharing it further.
Frequently asked questions
Was a mermaid really spotted in Kinshasa's Tshangu river?
No. Local witnesses denied the sighting, and UncovAI's detection tool confirmed the video is AI-generated with 95% confidence.
Why was the same video also claimed to be from Indonesia?
A reverse image search found the identical clip posted on TikTok a day earlier, captioned as a mermaid sighting in Indonesia. The same footage can't be genuine evidence of two separate events in two countries.
Did any local sources confirm the sighting?
No. A local photographer and a Masina resident both denied it, and no authorities or credible media outlets reported the event despite the video going viral.
Source
Eleza Fact, "Attention, cette vidéo montrant une sirène nageant dans la rivière Tshangu à Kinshasa a été générée par intelligence artificielle," July 31, 2026. Analysis included UncovAI.
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