For several hours, millions of people around the world thought it was a real golden eagle swooping down and snatching a tot from a Montreal park before dropping the baby unharmed.

A YouTube video titled “The Golden Eagle Snatches Kid” went viral, leaving many to ask: Could this be a hoax or did this happen?

Well, the truth came out Wednesday afternoon when a Montreal animation school admitted that the hoax was hatched by third-year students.

Both the eagle and the child were created in 3D animation and integrated into the real shooting, the school, Centre NAD, said.

Normand Archambault, Antoine Seigle, Loïc Mireault and Félix Marquis-Poulin, who were taking part in the simulation workshop class, had brain-stormed with each other about making a video with wide appeal.

And they decided on their subject because everyone loves babies and animals.

But how to combine the two?

The idea took flight about five or six weeks ago. Once the project was approved, they made a deal with their teacher that if the video surpassed 100,000 views on YouTube, they would get 100 per cent on the assignment.

It did much better than that, wildly growing past 5 million views by Wednesday afternoon, which made the 400 hours they put into the project well worth it.

The video was picked up by dozens of media outlets across Canada, the United States and Europe.

“We were also surprised by the events,” Claude Arsenault, spokesperson for the school, told the Star.

“We’ve done some hoaxes in that class before, but they never reached such proportions. We were the first ones this morning to see the numbers going up,” she said. “We’re very proud of our students. This was definitely great quality work. Needless to say the students will get a full mark on that assignment.”

Other hoaxes performed at the school involved a penguin that had apparently escaped from a zoo in Montreal, and another about controlled quantum levitation on a wipeout track.

None achieved anywhere near the numbers of the eagle hoax.

This video was so good that bird experts contacted by the Star were fooled — at least partly.

Although none believed this was a golden eagle, or even a North American bird, their analysis was that the bird was real, perhaps an osprey.

Having fooled the world that an eagle would pluck a child from a public park, however, has left a bitter taste in the mouth of bird experts.

David Bird, 63, professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, said he’s all for a “good joke” and he thought the video was at first “amusing.”

Later, however, he said the bird-expert community felt that the students “did a disservice” to birds of prey with this hoax.

“We’re trying to educate people to show that these birds play a role in the food chain, but they don’t attack people,” Bird told the Star.

However, Arsenault said the students were sensitive to that issue and that’s why they came clean a little more than 12 hours after the video was released.

“With the reach that it got, it made no sense for us to wait any longer,” the school spokesperson said.

“Our goal was never meant to make people believe that a child had been attacked by an eagle. It was simply to showcase the talent. The goal of that class is really to take 3D to its limits and show how realistic something can look.”

These are students who are going to be looking for opportunities to perform special effects for movie studios once they graduate.

The goal was never to “harm the reputation of the bird,” Arsenault stressed. “That’s why we went ahead and took ownership of the hoax as fast as we did.”

The one-minute, undated clip shows what is being described as a golden eagle swoop down to pick up a baby, only to drop the child a few moments later to horrified comments from the cameraman as he drops the camera and runs to the scene.

But critics quickly speculated that this was hoax.

None of the bird experts who viewed this video thought this was any kind of North American bird and certainly not a golden eagle.

One bird expert in the United States was so upset that he called the video “garbage.”

Kenn Kaufman, who is on the board of directors at the Black Swamp Bird Observatory in Oak Harbor, Ohio, posted his feelings on the group’s Facebook page when he saw this at 1:30 a.m. Wednesday.

“With all the ignorance about nature that’s out there already, the last thing we need is this kind of stupid garbage,” he wrote.

Kaufman’s anger had subsided when the Star talked to him Wednesday afternoon, but he still maintained this video undermined the understanding of birds of prey.

Kaufman, author of many birding books including the Kaufman Field Guide to Advanced Birding, said that, while he salutes the creativity behind this video, he thinks it created unnecessary fear of eagles.

“Some of the morning news shows in the U.S. played the clip as if it were real,” Kaufman complained. “We’re trying to get people to like birds and appreciate birds. You’re making people afraid they can’t let their kids outside and they have to go out and shoot eagles to protect their kids.”