People think they've spotted a glitch in the matrix as helicopter appears to fly without its blades spinning

A viral video of a helicopter flying has certainly hurt the heads of a lot of people.

I mean, they’re called choppers for a reason right? Because their blades chop through the air?

When movie stars jump into them and cruise through the skies above some mountains on the big screen the blades are spinning.

Or when we see tourists splashing out on a 30 minute tour over a cloudy, grey city, the blades are still spinning.

Except in this clip, they seem to be doing the opposite. The blades literally look completely still as the helicopter comes into land.

And people reckon they’ve spotted a 'failure in the matrix'. Check it out for yourself here:

In the video shared to X (formerly Twitter), the chopper slowly comes into land with its blades barely seeming to move at all.

People joked in the responses: “Conspiracy theorists will say ‘Failure in the Matrix’,” as others shared Gifs suggesting it’s ‘aliens’.

Another wrote: “The helicopter turns into a glider.” Others said they were ‘speechless’ and called it ‘incredible’.

And one put: “The simulation was bugged.”

However, as fun as it would be to think this was a glitch in the matrix, or even a result of alien activity, there is a perfectly normal (if not more boring) explanation for the illusion.

Often, video footage of helicopters will show the blades spinning a little oddly, sometimes they’re super slow or jumpy and like in this case, seemingly not spinning at all.

Twitter/@GeniosFisica

As Popular Mechanics write: “Chopper-blade weirdness is the result of the shutter speed on any given camera.”

Basically, despite how fast a camera can shoot, it can only capture video one image at a time – and helicopter blades are obviously very, very fast.

So when you’re trying to film them, you’re likely to miss ‘a whole lot of the action’.

And in a rare recipe for the perfect illusion, when the speed of the blades spinning and the camera’s shutter speed matches up totally, every frame will catch the blade in the exact same space.

Therefore, it looks as though they’ve not moved at all.

It’s similar to the ‘wagon-wheel effect’, which is an optical illusion making a wheel appear to rotate in a different way.

You’ll sometimes experience this in old Western movies, when the wheels of big wagons or stage coaches are filmed and experience temporal aliasing.

Dependent on the speed of the wheel as it turns and how our brain processes the frame, our mind will perceive that they are actually rotating backwards.

But still, it’s a little more fun to think this no-turning chopper is because of aliens.

Topics: Weird, Viral

Jess Battison

Jess is an Entertainment Journalist with a love of all things pop culture. Her main interests include keeping up with the Twitter girlies, waiting for a new series of The Traitors and losing her voice at a Beyoncé concert. She graduated with a first in Journalism from City, University of London in 2021 and has previously worked at MyLondon.

@jessbattison_