21 Facts About Eliot Higgins

Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence.

Eliot Higgins has investigated incidents including the Syrian Civil War, the Russo-Ukrainian War, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal.

Eliot Higgins first gained mainstream media attention by identifying weapons in uploaded videos from the Syrian conflict.

In 2012, when Higgins began blogging about the Syrian civil war, he was unemployed and spent his days taking care of his child at home; his wife is Turkish.

Eliot Higgins took the pseudonym Brown Moses from the Frank Zappa song "Brown Moses" on the album Thing-Fish.

Eliot Higgins operates by monitoring over 450 YouTube channels daily looking for images of weapons and tracking when new types appear in the war, where, and with whom.

Eliot Higgins began reporting on the use of improvised barrel bombs by the Syrian government in 2012, around the time their use was first reported.

Eliot Higgins has investigated the Syrian regime's alleged use of chemical weapons, including the Ghouta chemical attack in detail.

Eliot Higgins has performed contract work for Human Rights Watch and Action on Armed Violence.

Eliot Higgins used geolocation to publish an estimate of where the James Foley execution video was made outside Raqqa, an Islamic State stronghold in north-central Syria.

Eliot Higgins used visual markers in stills from the video and his interpretation of satellite images of the terrain around Raqqa.

From 2016 until early 2019, Eliot Higgins was a senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab and Future Europe Initiative projects.

In 2018 Eliot Higgins was a visiting research associate at the Centre for Science and Security Studies at the Department of War Studies at King's College London and visiting research fellow at University of California Berkeley's Human Rights Center.

On 15 July 2014, Eliot Higgins began a new website called Bellingcat for citizen journalists to investigate current events using open-source information such as videos, maps and pictures.

In 2023, Eliot Higgins published an image on social media of former President Trump in jail in a jumpsuit, generated by AI.

In 2015, Eliot Higgins was one of five co-authors of the report Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin's War in Ukraine published by the Atlantic Council, which examined direct Russian military involvement in Ukraine.

Eliot Higgins was one of five authors of an Atlantic Council report released in 2016, Distract, Deceive, Destroy, on Russia's role in Syria.

Eliot Higgins has received significant praise and support from human rights groups, journalists, and non-profit organisations.

Chivers said, in 2013, that fellow journalists owe a debt to Eliot Higgins' investigative reporting in Syria.

Eliot Higgins has been a subject of interest for the British and US media.

Eliot Higgins has been profiled in print by The Guardian, The Independent, The Huffington Post, and The New Yorker.