MILDLY NSFW Staff at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) spend their days trying to prise open the secrets of other dimensions … including by staging occult rituals.

So says Agence France Presse (AFP) which became aware of this NSFW YouTube vid in which a ritual staged at CERN's Geneva campus is depicted. The “ritual” takes place before a statue of Hindu deity Shiva, the destroyer of the world. Narration of the video suggests the rite acknowledges CERNs true purpose: destruction of the Earth.

CERN told the French newswire that the video was indeed taken on its grounds, does depict staff, was intended as a joke but was not in any way authorised.

“Cern welcomes every year thousands of scientific users from all over the world and sometimes some of them let their humour go too far. This is what happened on this occasion,” said a statement emailed to AFP.

Particle colliders tend to excite apocalyptic folk. In 2014 lawyers tried to stop the US government funding a collider, claiming the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider could be bad for the future of this plane of existence. US botanist Walter L Wagner has also used the courts in a futile attempt to shut down CERN's Large Hadron Collider before it produces “strangelets” that severely disrupt local spacetime.

Perhaps CERN staff decided to have some fun with such theories. Turned out the joke was on them. ®