“AI video has come pretty far”: the 86-second UFO trailer Reddit can’t stop rewatching

It is 86 seconds long, it has no plot, no dialogue and no credited production tool — and by midday on Saturday it was the most argued-over video on r/singularity. “AI video has come pretty far,” the post is titled, and the 955 upvotes and nearly 290 comments it gathered in under six hours suggest the subreddit agrees with the title, even if it cannot agree on what comes next.

The clip was posted on Saturday morning by u/socoolandawesome, who credits the creator as tupacabra and links to his original post on X. What follows is a rapid montage of AI-generated-looking shots, each lasting one to three seconds, cut together like a movie trailer: a burning cityscape under missile trails, a futuristic Washington, D.C. seen from a domed vehicle, a mustached man in period dress holding a paper, a huge black monolith under searchlights, a candlelit Tudor crowd. A “TUPACABRA” watermark sits in the center of the frame throughout. There is no narration and no on-screen text to explain what any of it means.

What the 86 seconds actually show#

The montage moves too fast to inventory shot by shot, and that is part of the point — the trailer is designed to be rewatched. Commenters who froze individual frames picked out a mustached man they identify as Nikola Tesla, a shot of the Washington Monument from a futuristic vehicle that some nicknamed the “Hitlermobile,” Nazi troops, a scene of Jesus on the cross, a portal that looks borrowed from Stargate, and combat that reads as Star Wars crossed with Halo. One commenter pieced the fragments into a story: Tesla discovers portal technology, the Nazis seize it, and the “thousand-year Reich” plays out across a thousand years, into space combat.

The post itself offers no synopsis, and names no tool or model. What the poster did say, in replies, is that the creator is “a big UFO guy” and that the trailer is centered on the 1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg, the 16th-century “sky battle” that UFO lore has been citing for decades — the one place the trailer has a documented source.

The soundtrack is 111 years old#

The most arresting thing about the trailer may be its oldest component. The voice chanting over the images is not AI-generated at all. It is a 1915 recording of American actor Taylor Holmes reading Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots,” first published in 1903 in The Five Nations. The poem imagines a British infantryman marching through South Africa in the Second Boer War, and Holmes’s reading has had a long second life: it has reportedly been played in U.S. military survival training for its psychological effect, and it drove the first trailer for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later in December 2024, then the film itself.

The poster pointed commenters to the poem’s Wikipedia page and to the 28 Years Later trailer when they asked what the music was. The pairing is deliberate in a way the visuals are not: the newest video technology cut to a recording older than cinema’s sound era, a marching chant about men losing their minds on an endless march, laid over images of civilizations rising and burning. It is the trailer’s strongest creative decision, and it cost the creator nothing — the recording is more than a century old.

The 1561 thread#

The Nuremberg event is real as a document, whatever it was in the sky. In April 1561, the Nuremberg broadsheet printer Hans Glaser published an illustrated news notice describing how, at dawn on April 14, “many men and women” of the city saw spheres, cylinders and crosses fighting in and around the sun for over an hour, before a large black triangular object appeared and the exhausted combatants fell to earth in smoke. The broadsheet, woodcut and text together, is archived in the prints and drawings collection at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

What the witnesses actually saw is still argued over. Skeptics note the likeliest explanation is a sun dog, an atmospheric optical effect that 16th-century observers, primed by religious imagery, read as a battle in the heavens. Carl Jung analyzed the woodcut’s symbolism in his 1958 book on flying saucers, and the ufologist Jacques Vallée has called the broadsheet a possible “stock myth” rather than a report. The trailer borrows the woodcut’s visual vocabulary wholesale — spheres, crosses, rods and a black wedge in the sky — and drops it into a montage that also includes Tesla, Nazis and starships, as if four centuries of fringe lore were one continuous story.

Reddit’s verdict: awe, with an asterisk#

No top comment calls the video fake, misattributed or old. The criticism is about form, and the top-voted comment on the thread states it plainly. “It’s good but always like a trailer, never the actual long footage,” wrote Dioxbit, in a comment that gathered 335 upvotes. The highest-scoring reply, from ToTheBatmobileGuy, put it sharper: “It is crazy how we are getting bombarded with these insane trailers that are clearly AI and yet still, no movies.” Others were blunter still — “Ok. But still it’s just a bunch of 1–3 seconds scenes,” wrote Anu_Rosa — while the most upvoted praise came from StaticFanatic3: “Shot after shot I’d have never pinned as AI. Angles and camera tricks that felt like they had a real director behind them.”

The one concrete flaw anyone spotted is telling. In the crucifixion scene, a commenter noted that the soldier’s spear thrust does not track physically: he winds up to thrust, “but then the only way the motion makes sense is if the spear is somehow attached to his elbow.” It is a small artifact — the kind that survives in a montage of three-second shots precisely because no shot lasts long enough to be examined.

The tool question went unanswered. One commenter said they had tried MiniMax H3 that morning and could recognize “spliced together videos made by MiniMax and their ilk,” but that is a commenter’s impression, not evidence, and no model attribution in the post could be verified. The post names no tool, and the creator has not, in the thread, said what generated the clips. It is the third AI-video argument to top an AI subreddit this week, after the Matrix parody and the “next generation will never see a real video” pitch — and the pattern is now familiar: a striking clip, a split verdict, and a comment section doing the verification the post does not.

What to watch#

The open question is the one Dioxbit’s comment poses: when does someone ship the film instead of the trailer? The barrier is no longer the quality of any single shot — Reddit’s own verdict is that individual frames are now hard to pick from real footage. It is duration, continuity and story: holding a scene for thirty seconds, keeping a character the same person from one shot to the next, making a sequence mean something rather than merely look like something. Until a creator clears that bar, the trailer will remain the form AI video is best at, and the argument will keep repeating.

Two things to watch: the economics — one commenter asked what a minute of this actually costs to make, and whether anyone has a business model beyond the clip itself — and attribution: if the next viral AI video names its tools, the guessing ends and the comparison begins. Until then, “AI video has come pretty far” is both the title of the post and the most honest summary of it — a long way, in 86 seconds, toward a film that does not exist yet.

Sources: the original post by u/socoolandawesome on r/singularity; tupacabra’s original post on X; Wikipedia, “Boots (poem)”; Wikipedia, “1561 celestial phenomenon over Nuremberg”; Gizmodo, “Danny Boyle Explains How ‘28 Years Later’ Got its Creepy Poem”. Vote and comment counts were read from the Reddit post page around midday on November 14, 2026. The video names no generation tool, and no model attribution could be verified.