Strange things are going on at the home of the Large Hadron Collider, but it’s nothing to do with the mysteries of fundamental particles.

A video has leaked online of a staged human sacrifice at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) campus in Geneva, Switzerland. It shows a mock occult ritual where a group of people wearing black robes pretend to stab a woman wearing a white robe in front of a statue of the Hindu god Shiva “The Destroyer”. At this point of the video, the person filming it from a window appears to panic, blurts out some curse words, and hides.

It may just seem like some bored scientists larking around, but it’s all getting a bit serious. CERN has insisted that the people in the video did not have permission and they don’t seem too pleased with whoever's involved.

“CERN does not condone this type of spoof, which can give rise to misunderstandings about the scientific nature of our work,” a CERN spokesperson told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

“CERN welcomes every year thousands of scientific users from all over the world and sometimes some of them let their humor go too far. This is what happened on this occasion.”

They added that a formal investigation was taking place. Although the Geneva police were contacted following the video, they won’t be involved in the “internal” investigation.

In between sparking conspiracy theories about the Illuminati and a portal to hell, CERN hosts the world’s most advanced and largest particle physics laboratory. The multinational lab has been at the forefront of some of the world’s biggest discoveries in physics, including the discovery of the Higgs boson – an elementary particle, often dubbed the "God particle," much to the annoyance of physicists.