From the earliest nineteenth-century penny newspapers to the viral algorithms of twenty-first-century social media, outer space has always served as an irresistible blank canvas for hoaxers, satirists, and conspiracy theorists. Because the average person does not own an observatory telescope or a deep-space radio dish, sensational claims about alien megastructures, impossible planetary alignments, and staged government missions routinely fool millions of readers around the world. Examining twelve of the most absurd fakes and hoaxes about space reveals how easily human wonder can be hijacked by a clever story.
- 1. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (Man-Bats on the Moon)
- 2. The Mars “Two Moons” Email Viral Hoax
- 3. The Face on Mars (Cydonia Mensae)
- 4. The Apollo Moon Landing Studio Conspiracy
- 5. Planet Nibiru (Planet X) Colliding With Earth
- 6. The “Zero-Gravity Day” Planetary Alignment Hoax
- 7. The Black Knight Satellite
- 8. The Cancelled Secret Mission of Apollo 20 and the “Mona Lisa” Alien
- 9. The Flat Earth Ice Wall and NASA Penguins
- 10. The “Astronaut Floating Away Untethered” Viral Photo
- 11. The Green Moon of April 20th
- 12. Alternative 3: The Secret Elite Colony on Mars
1. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (Man-Bats on the Moon)
In August 1835, the New York Sun newspaper published a six-part series of front-page articles allegedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The stories claimed that the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a revolutionary twenty-four-foot lens telescope in South Africa boosted by “hydro-oxygen microscope” projection, had zoomed in on the surface of the Moon and discovered a lush lunar jungle populated by blue-skinned unicorns, bipedal beavers that built fires, and winged humanoid creatures called Vespertilio-homo (“man-bats”) who flew around lunar temples chatting and gesturing. Circulation of the Sun skyrocketed to the highest in the world before readers learned the entire story was a satirical hoax written by reporter Richard Adams Locke—and the Edinburgh journal cited had actually gone out of business years earlier.
2. The Mars “Two Moons” Email Viral Hoax
Every single August starting in 2003, millions of people forwarded chain emails and social media posts claiming that on August twenty-seventh, Mars would pass closer to Earth than it had in sixty thousand years and would look “as large as the full Moon” to the naked eye, hanging in the night sky like a second crimson moon. The hoax stemmed from a careless truncation of a real astronomical message from 2003, which had stated that Mars would look as large as the full Moon *if viewed through a telescope at 75x magnification*. In physical reality, if Mars ever came close enough to Earth to appear the size of the full Moon to the naked eye, its gravitational pull would trigger catastrophic oceanic tides and tear our planet’s crust apart.
3. The Face on Mars (Cydonia Mensae)
On July twenty-fifth, 1976, as NASA’s Viking 1 Orbiter photographed the Cydonia region of Mars searching for a landing site for Viking 2, it snapped a low-resolution black-and-white frame showing a two-kilometer-long rock mesa that, under low-angle morning sunlight and shadows, looked eerily like a human face staring up into space, complete with eyes, nose, and mouth. Tabloids and pseudo-archaeologists spent twenty years claiming it was a monumental sculpture carved by an extinct Martian civilization alongside nearby “pyramids.” When NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter finally photographed the exact same mesa between 1998 and 2006 using cameras ten times sharper in high midday light, the “face” vanished completely—revealed to be a completely natural, heavily eroded flat-topped hill where shadows had triggered human pareidolia.
4. The Apollo Moon Landing Studio Conspiracy
Popularized in 1976 by a self-published pamphlet written by Bill Kaysing—a former technical writer who left Rocketdyne years before Apollo 11 launched—the claim that NASA faked the six manned Moon landings between 1969 and 1972 on a secret Hollywood soundstage directed by Stanley Kubrick relies on basic misunderstandings of photography and vacuum physics. Conspiracy theorists point out that there are no stars visible in the black lunar sky (because the cameras were set to fast daytime shutter speeds to photograph brightly sunlit white spacesuits, which washes out faint background stars just like taking a photo under stadium floodlights at night) and that the American flag appears to “ripple” in a breeze (when in reality astronauts struggled to extend a telescoping horizontal metal rod sewn along the top edge of the nylon flag, leaving permanent crinkles in the fabric). Best of all, over four hundred thousand engineers worked on Apollo, the Soviet Union tracked the spacecraft’s radio transmissions directly from the Moon with every incentive to expose a fake, and anyone on Earth today can fire a laser at the retroreflector mirrors left on the lunar dust by Apollo 11, 14, and 15 and measure the reflected photon bounce back.
5. Planet Nibiru (Planet X) Colliding With Earth
Originally proposed in 1995 by Nancy Lieder—who claimed extra-terrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system had implanted a communications device in her brain—and later mashed up with Zecharia Sitchin’s mistranslations of ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablets, the Nibiru cataclysm hoax predicted that a rogue planet four times the size of Earth was hiding behind the Sun and would slam into Earth first in May 2003, and then again on December twenty-first, 2012. As astrophysicists repeatedly explained to frightened callers, any planetary body that large entering the inner solar system would have been visible to the naked eye for years and would have noticeably perturbed the orbits of Mars and Earth long ago.
6. The “Zero-Gravity Day” Planetary Alignment Hoax
On April first, 1976, the beloved British astronomer Patrick Moore went on BBC Radio 2 and announced with a straight face that at exactly 9:47 AM, the planet Pluto would pass directly behind the giant planet Jupiter, creating a rare combined gravitational alignment called the “Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect” that would temporarily weaken Earth’s gravity. Moore told listeners that if they jumped into the air at that exact minute, they would experience a strange floating sensation. Minutes after 9:47 AM, the BBC switchboard lit up with hundreds of callers claiming they had floated around their living rooms—only to be reminded of the date on the calendar. Hilariously, the exact same April Fools’ joke was recycled as a serious viral hoax on the internet in 2014 and 2015.
7. The Black Knight Satellite
According to internet lore, a thirteen-thousand-year-old alien reconnaissance satellite painted matte black has been orbiting Earth in a polar orbit since long before Sputnik, photographed right outside the Space Shuttle Endeavour during mission STS-88 in December 1998. In reality, the “Black Knight” myth stitched together half a dozen unrelated stories—including Nikola Tesla’s 1899 radio observations of natural pulsar signals—and attached them to a real NASA photograph from STS-88. What does that famous 1998 photo of a crinkly, black, angular object floating above Earth actually show? A thermal insulation blanket that accidentally slipped out of astronaut Jerry Ross’s tether while he was installing the Unity module on the International Space Station, which burned up harmlessly in the atmosphere days later.
8. The Cancelled Secret Mission of Apollo 20 and the “Mona Lisa” Alien
In 2007, grainy, scratched “16mm film footage” uploaded to YouTube by a user calling himself William Rutledge claimed that after NASA officially cancelled the final lunar missions after Apollo 17 in 1972, the United States and the Soviet Union secretly launched Apollo 20 in August 1976 from Vandenberg Air Force Base to explore a two-mile-long cigar-shaped alien spaceship parked inside the Delporte Crater on the far side of the Moon, retrieving the hibernating body of a humanoid female dubbed the “Mona Lisa.” Shortly thereafter, a French visual artist and sculptor named Thierry Speth came forward and demonstrated how he had crafted the alien face out of modeling clay and latex in his studio and composited old Apollo 15 footage as an elaborate sci-fi art hoax.
9. The Flat Earth Ice Wall and NASA Penguins
Revived in the nineteenth century by the English writer Samuel Rowbotham under the pseudonym “Parallax” and amplified by modern video algorithms, the Flat Earth movement claims that Earth is a flat stationary disk centered on the North Pole, while the Sun and Moon are tiny thirty-mile-wide spotlights circling just a few thousand miles overhead. To explain why the world’s oceans don’t spill off the edge and why sailors and pilots circumnavigate the globe daily, Flat Earthers claim that Antarctica is not a continent, but a giant one-hundred-and-fifty-foot wall of ice ringing the outer rim of the disk, patrolled by a secret international military armada that shoots down any unauthorized boat—ignoring everything from southern hemisphere star constellations and lunar eclipses to commercial flights between Sydney, Johannesburg, and Santiago.
10. The “Astronaut Floating Away Untethered” Viral Photo
One of the most terrifying photographs shared millions of times across the internet shows a lone astronaut in a bulky white spacesuit floating in the pitch-black void of space miles away from his spacecraft, accompanied by captions claiming this was the final tragic snapshot taken of an untethered astronaut drifting off to die alone in orbit. In reality, no human being has ever drifted away and been lost in space. The photograph is completely authentic, but the caption is a complete lie: it shows NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless II on February seventh, 1984, during Mission STS-41-B, purposefully testing the nitrogen-thruster Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU) jetpack to fly three hundred and twenty feet out from the Space Shuttle Challenger before flying smoothly right back into the cargo bay.
11. The Green Moon of April 20th
Beginning in 2016, a viral graphic spread across Facebook and Twitter promising that on April twentieth—or May twenty-ninth—several planets would align and reflect cosmic rays off the lunar surface, causing Earth’s Moon to glow a vibrant emerald green for ninety minutes for the first time since the year 1596. Notice the suspicious date: April twentieth, or “4/20,” a traditional slang date associated with cannabis culture. Created specifically as a lighthearted joke for April twentieth, the meme tricked millions of sky-watchers into staring up at an ordinary silvery-white Moon waiting for it to turn green.
12. Alternative 3: The Secret Elite Colony on Mars
On June twentieth, 1977, the British television network Anglia TV aired a sleek, deadpan investigative documentary episode of its series Science Report titled Alternative 3. Complete with interviews with “scientists” and “grainy space footage,” the broadcast claimed to have uncovered a top-secret US-Soviet conspiracy: realizing that pollution was about to make Earth uninhabitable, the two superpowers had secretly landed a joint spacecraft on Mars back in May 1962, discovered a breathable atmosphere, and were kidnapping missing British scientists and “batching” ordinary citizens as slave labor to build luxury underground bunkers for the global elite on the Moon and Mars. Although the closing credits explicitly listed the actors who played the scientists and the show was originally written to air on April first before scheduling delays pushed it to June, thousands of panicked viewers jammed British newspaper phones, and the hoax remains a foundational pillar of modern UFO mythology today.
