Thats...sad.

What's even sadder is that this is not the first time someone thought an Onion article was fact. See this Snopes page for an example.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

I'm not surprised. Someone who easily accepts YouTube videos as evidence isn't going to get the joke about YouTube, and so on with all the other jokes in the story. And if they aren't familiar with The Onion, well . . .

We've had several people come here and point to the fake "Dark Side of the Moon" documentary as evidence for a moon hoax. In that case, there's a bit after the ending credits that admits it's a hoax, though it should be obvious much, much earlier as the jokes get utterly ridiculous. Yet there have been people that insisted it was real, and the bit at the end was "disinformation."

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

That is so sad, yet I found the Spirit article to be funny as anything

Vons

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Mission Control : "Please don't kick the robot Bill. "

I went ahead and googled the article title, and I'm not finding many that are taking it seriously. One was apparently a Bangladesh news site that posted the article without comment, as if it were real news. Another was an ATS board post, and was followed by people pointing out it was satire.

Pretty much everyone else in the top hits seemed to be in on the joke. Maybe I need different search terms?

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The ATS thread was the only one I found that clearly appeared not to get the joke, though I came across one or two more that were questionable. That thread has been deleted, but the Google cache is here.

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--Doug

"When your statics problem becomes a dynamics problem, you're in trouble." --me

Moor's Law: "As you go from freshman engineering to Ph.D., the amount of work required per credit hour doubles approximately every 18 months." --me, inspired by Prof. Scott Moor

BBC News: One giant slip in Bangladesh news

ETA: AFAIK the BBC News website is "a real news site."

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin | Meet the OOONG TOE.
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

Universe Today has picked up on it:

http://www.universetoday.com/2009/09...s-on-an-onion/

I have to say it. "KHHHAAAAANNNNN!"


He thought this was true? I don't think I'd trust anything that news site posted after this. They don't seem to be into basic fact checking.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

The quoted editor works at The Daily Manab Zamin in Bangladesh. Which issued a retraction. One would hope that editors around the world have at least a basic understanding of space history - but perhaps not. More to the point, why in the world would they pick up a story from a known satire site? Or even how did they pick it up? Oh well...

(while the William Shatner Roast is on Comedy Central here... your timing is impeccable again )

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin | Meet the OOONG TOE.
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

And why are they just lifting articles from other websites?

Because that's what the press does. They collect, they don't write. Copy paste your way through the day.

Overhere you even get articles starting with "bla bla bla bla, a NY based blogger says."

I don't care what some blogger says. I read a paper, I'm not surfing. I want facts, not what's written on the walls of the restrooms.

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To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

It's OK to re-publish stories from other publications so long as the re-publisher has permission ($$$) and attributes the story correctly. That's why you sometimes see stories from the New York Times or Wall Street Journal re-printed in your local paper. But I don't think the Onion is exactly a highly respected syndicated source!

Am I the only one able to see how utterly ridiculous the claim is in the first place?

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Spread the Love!

I lost my interest to read my very own thread. Yes, the claim that Armstrong remembers the low gravity but somebody the mission was faked was ridiculous. The story isn't real. Should we continue discussing it?

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.

Isn't it fun to share it when such a story actually gets picked up by mainstream media? I sure think so. And I have this strange notion that in a few months some other paper will fall for it, when news is slow.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin | Meet the OOONG TOE.
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

I don't think it's fun. Especially if people take it serious.

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.

Few are taking it seriously. It helps that the Onion is a known humor site. I suspect it would be taken more seriously if attributed to some source that wasn't easily checked (we've had things like that before).

I think the article is hilarious, since it plays so well on the stuff we typically see from the MH folks, and it's interesting to see the reactions to it.

Still, you started this thread, so you could report it, and ask the mods to close it.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

I don't think it's funny if someone who is unaware of what the Onion is all about wonders what it means. With the many attempts made by so many people to portray a falsehood as true on the internet I think it would be tough to find anyone who has never fallen for such a trick/fraud/parody. Happens to all of us, some time or other.

But when news agencies, who are supposed to check their source, fall for it, to the point of having to publish an apology and retraction... hilarious, IMHO. I don't see a need to close the thread, but as Van Rijn said, it's yours.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin | Meet the OOONG TOE.
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

Right, slang. No reason to close it.

I cannot be confused by an article or two. Conspiracy theorists expect the NASA's story to be consistent to its smallest details or there's a huge conspiracy behind it. This is called a false dichotomy in logics.

But I didn't know anything about The Onion. I almost thought it's a news agency. I'm a foreigner. I knew something was very, very wrong when I read this: "Although Armstrong said he "could have sworn" he felt the effects of zero gravity while soaring out of the Earth's atmosphere and through space, he now believed his memory must be flawed". And I told myself : It cannot be possible. But I had to know more about the story - the source, etc...

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.

Oh, no. I sent it to several of my friends and have received more than a few eyerolls. True, they are all, save one, familiar with The Onion, and it's not as though, for those of us familiar with it, their writing style is unfamiliar, but even the friend who wasn't saw the silliness of it.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

It'll be even funnier when we see HBs posting copies (or website scans) of the pages from the Bangladeshi newspapers without acknowledging the stories came from The Onion and claiming that the retractions were forced on them by NASA and that the other reportage on this is 'disinfo'.

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We all know those Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

John Sladek, The New Apocrypha, pg 34.

Well, you didn't take it seriously and asked about it. One of the things I'd suggest in cases like this is to do a bit of googling. The Onion is widely described as a humor/satire site. Or you could look at the site itself and note the other "news" stories, or check to see if major news sites are carrying the story.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Now I'm curious if moon hoax theories are popular in Bangladesh.

I have to admit they did better than these guys did:

It's pretty sad when they won't print a retraction.

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

At least they can blame the language barrier.

Jack White can't but I wouldn't be surprised if he believed it was real when he posted it:
http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/in...howtopic=14751

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"You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into"

Oh dear, Jackie oh Jack, what have you done? So desperate to publish anything that supports you.......

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There we were in the park when suddenly some old lady says I stole her purse..... I chucked the professor at her but she kept coming..... So I had to hit her with this purse I found.
-- Bender

This other news site tried to report the story, but they just ended up making their own mistake:

The two People's Republic of Bangladesh newspapers—the Daily Manab Zamin and the New Nation—both ran (supposedly true) articles stating that former U.S. Apollo astronaut Neil Armstrong recanted his story about his Apollo 13 Moon landing, saying it was all faked by the U.S. government.
http://www.itwire.com/content/view/27525/1066/

This wasn't just a typo, either; they make the same mistake repeatedly throughout the article.

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"One does not require alien ruins in order to absorb a profound sense of wonder and mystery from the moon. That our civilization had actually visited it is miracle enough." Jason Roberts

Why is it that if "NASA's story" is not consistent to the smallest detail then we are expected to accept a random disjointed conspiracy theory which is not even consistent with the laws of physics?

Well, at least they picked an alledged landing for which there truly is no evidence (of the landing part). A horrible blunder, or an in-joke? Who knows..

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" -- Charles Darwin | Meet the OOONG TOE.
"Your right to hold an opinion is not being contested. Your expectation that it be taken seriously is." -- Jason Thompson
'No, mad's when you froth at the mouf,' said Gaspode. 'He's insane. That's when you froth at the brain.'

Because this is the mindset of conspiracy nuts, that's it.

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Svetoslav Alexandrov, B.Sc. in Molecular Biology
A human return to the Moon is always 15 years in the future. A human mission to Mars is always 30 years in the future. This is the sad truth.