German company RTL purposely created a video hoax of Michael Jackson jumping out of a coroner van to show how fast misinformation and conspiracy theories can spread on the Internet. The video may have had some people believing that Michael Jackson is still alive despite his passing in late June.

The video received well over 1.75 million views since it was uploaded in the last week. RTL removed it from YouTube, but several other people added the video back. Heike Schultz, a spokesman for RTL said that the video was a hoax to show how easily people can be manipulated and that the response was “breathtaking.”

RTL admitted the hoax in a report on August 26 in their daily news show Explosiv. “We didn’t want to dishonor Michael Jackson, but we needed a strong name to get this experiment going,” stated Schultz in the AP interview.

On December 2, 1983 Michael Jackson released a 14 minute long music video for the song “Thriller.” The Thriller music video was directed by John Landis (Blues Brothers 2000, Beverly Hills Cop III, Coming to America, ¡Three Amigos!, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and An American Werewolf in London).

On June 25th Michael Jackson passed away and the world was shocked. In order to recapture their memories of the King of Pop, they watched the Thriller video on the Internet. The Thriller music video was watched over 8.5 million times since June 25th. Old Michael Jackson songs are almost among the most downloaded songs on iTunes as of right now.

On June 27th, about 1,500 inmates at CPDRC performed a tribute. The tribute was completed in 10 hours and features the songs “Ben,” “I’ll Be There,” and “We Are The World.” This video was watched almost 3 million times since being created 3 days ago.