I’m stating the obvious when some rumors, urban legends, and hoaxes keep getting passed on through e-mail, text messages, and blog posts despite the presence of sites like the Urban Legends Reference Pages that serve as a sort-of clearinghouse for things like this. (Even to this day, I occasionally get the Microsoft-AOL beta e-mail tracking system hoax that’s been going on since 1997.)

A lot of these prey on the greed of people (who wouldn’t want $1,000 just by forwarding some e-mail your friends?). Yet even if some messages don’t have the greed or altruistic (helping a sick kid in Africa) or even religious (banning a Jesus-is-gay-themed film) hook in them, they still get forwarded by clueless people.

I received this SMS a few days ago from a friend who shall remain unnamed:

Planet Pluto will be brightest in the night sky starting July. It will look as large as the fullmoon to the naked eye.

This will culminate on July 27 when Pluto comes within 34.65M miles of earth. Be sure to watch the sky on July 27, 12:30 AM.

It will look like the earth has two moons.

The next time Pluto may come this close is in 2287. Share this with your loved ones & friends as NO ONE ALIVE TODAY will ever see it again.

This is so wrong on so many levels! Anyone who knows their basic science facts should immediately spot this message as suspicious.

Anyway, astronomy buffs should be able to instantly tell that this message is a really gross distortion of an actual occurrence. The real story behind this message is actually about the planet Mars. Back in August 27, 2003, Mars had its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years. Mars was also at its brightest in a long time but it did not look as if we had two moons. In fact, Mars still only appeared as a point to the naked eye but its brightness surpassed Jupiter by just a bit; Jupiter is normally the fourth brightest heavenly object in the sky after the Sun, the Moon, and Venus.

In the text message above, if you replace “Pluto” with “Mars” and “July” with “2003 August” and remove all references to the Moon, you essentially get a fairly correct description of an important astronomical event.

The fact that somebody distorted this with Pluto (which, barring some cataclysmic event, can never be seen with the naked eye from Earth) and somebody fell for this speaks volumes about a lot of things that I won’t mention anymore since this post is getting long already.