And even if it's not true, it's sufficiently reminiscent of the Mars probe where they confused imperial and metric measurements.

This one comes up a lot but I suspect most people don't really know what happened. JPL was flying the Mars Climate Observer (MCO) that was built by Lockheed-Martin. LM was providing JPL with a lot of essential information. One piece of information dealt with the delta-v imparted by thruster firings during momentum wheel unloads. It was this delta-v information that was incorrectly reported to JPL in English units instead of metric. The actual delta-v imparted by these unloads was quite small and the error was on the order of 1 part per million or less (the flight path from Earth to Mars was something like 400 million miles and the accumulated error was approximately 40 miles*. It wasn't as if they got all of the measurements wrong.

*Just goes to show once again that Murphy's Law or something like it works in space. The 40 mile error was in the worst possible direction - the MCO hit the martian atmosphere 40 miles too low and burned up. Had the error been in the other direction (or any other direction) then the vehicle might've ended up in a slightly incorrect orbit but likely would've survived. Unfortunately, JPL didn't catch the navigation error in time to correct it, which is very unlike them.