On Oct. 28, 2025, Hurricane Melissa struck the island of Jamaica as a Category 5 hurricane with 185 mph winds, making it the strongest storm to ever directly hit the island and one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes ever at the time of landfall.
Ahead of that landfall, people on social media shared clips demonstrating how well-organized the storm was, a characteristic most pronounced in strong hurricanes. Some of these clips came in the form of a video that appeared to be shot from out the window of a passenger plane above Hurricane Melissa's clouds. The clouds in that video spun in th
The video was widely shared to multiple social media sites, such as X (archived), Instagram (archived), TikTok (archived) and Facebook (archived).
The video was not real footage of Hurricane Melissa. It was generated by artificial intelligence (AI).
On O
Earth impacts' profile bio read "AI disaster curiosity." The account has regularly uploaded AI-generated videos of various disasters, including hurricanes.
The fact that the video was from a passenger plane above the clouds was itself an indication that the video wasn't authentic.
The clouds of a hurricane can be anywhere from about 30,000 feet high to 50,000 feet high, according to the United Kingdom's Meteorological Office and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Hurricane hunters, who fly through the eyes of hurricanes to collect data on them, typically fly into storms at an altitude of about 10,000 feet, the U.S. Air Force wrote in October 2024. The National Hurricane Center (NHC) keeps an archive of hurricane hunter reconnaissance flight logs. While many of these flights remained at around 10,000 feet or lower altitudes, Snopes found one log of a flight into Hurricane Melissa that was between 12,000 feet and 20,000 feet.
A commercial passenger aircraft typically flies at a cruising altitude between 30,000 and 42,000 feet, Leopard Aviation Flight School wrote on its website. Even if such an aircraft was flying at the highest end of that range and the clouds of Hurricane Melissa were at the lowest end of its range, a passenger plane would still avoid the hurricane entirely. Public flight radar data from the 24 hours before Hurricane Melissa's landfall showed commercial airlines clearly avoiding Jamaica and the area around Hurricane Melissa. The few planes that entered the storm's area of the ocean were hurricane hunter planes.
Hurricane hunters with the U.S. Air Force have posted to social media real videos of flights through Hurricane Melissa's eye. Those clips, while still dramatic, showed the hurricane hunters flew through the storm's clouds to reach the eye. Plane parts visible in the videos show propellors consistent with the types of planes used for hurricane hunting, not passenger planes.