A video purporting to show Michael Jackson emerging alive from the back of a coroner’s van has been confirmed as a fake.

German broadcaster RTL has admitted it released the grainy footage of a man resembling the King of Pop escaping from the back of the coroner’s truck as an experiment to show how quickly misinformation can spread online.

The video became a YouTube sensation and was shown on a string of international networks when it premiered online last month.

“We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos,” says RTL spokesman Heike Schultz. “Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive (sic), even though everybody knows by now that he is dead – and the response was breathtaking. Unfortunately, many people believed it was true, even though we tried to create the video in a way that every normal user can see right away that it is a fake.”