A video circulating the Internet appears to show a naked man climbing down from a top floor window at Buckingham palace using tied blankets, before falling out of view.
In the foreground, soldiers and tourists appear oblivious, with only two Swedish tourists noticing the events unfolding, with one saying [in Swedish] “This must be for a scene in a movie”.
However the video is clearly fake, as we explain below.
The side of the building that features the windows where the man exits the palace isn’t actually the side of Buckingham Palace.
The video is taken alongside the side of the palace next to Constitution Hill, and any photo of the palace from that angle, like the one below, shows that the building design on the palace itself is different to the one in the viral video.
You can see that the photo from the video of the naked man (the top half of the image above) features Corinthian like designs between the windows of the building. However any photo of the actual palace (like the one in the bottom half of the above image) reveals that these designs don’t actually exist in that location.
If the windows don’t belong to Buckingham Palace, where do they belong? The answer is Moor Park House, in Hertfordshire. You can see from the image below that the windows and Corinthian designs on Moor Park House are an exact match to the ones featured in the video.
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The hoaxer has taken a video from Moor Park House, stiched it onto a video of Buckingham Palace, and simply cloned the windows to make the rows of windows appear longer than they are. You can see from the below image that the windows have been cloned as even subtle imperfections on the walls and ledges appear to have been duplicated.
Finally, if there was any lingering doubt left, we found out exactly where the footage came from and for what purpose. The footage was released in 2015 to promote an upcoming series of The Royals, which is an American soap opera drama about a fictional UK Royal Family. A promotional video (below) from a fictional gossip-rag in the show, D-Throned, shows the video along with footage not seen in the original viral video. That footage features Princess Eleanor (played by Alexandra Park) throwing the naked man’s clothing out of the window as he makes his way down.
Tom Malmros – The Royals – 'D-Throned' from Fox Devil Films GmbH on Vimeo.
As such, the video isn’t real.