who started that mars hoax?

Answer 1

This is about the 4th year for this hoax. Notice it has no year for the date. It started with an uninformed member of the press and it just wont die. In 2003 Mars was as bright in light magnitudes as the moon due to its orbit bringing it the closest to the Earth in something like 117 years, but it never was as big or close as the moon. The journalist misunderstood brightness for size and distance. We would die if that were true due to the gravity and magnetic pull from Mars. You can probably find this on snoops.com now too. I believe that in October this year, Mars will be sort of close again but not as close as it was back in August of 2003. You can see it now fairly close to the Pleaties.

Answer 2

It started in 2003 when Mars really was (relatively speaking) closer to the Earth. Nowadays, folks use the search engines and don't notice whether or not a site has a "year" on the article. I noticed that the hoax becomes more exaggerated every year.

Answer 3

I'd like to know that myself. I posed that question two days ago when a friend sent me an e-mail all excited about Mars being so close it would appear as large as the full Moon. It seems this same hoax circulated back in 2004 I was told by an answerer.Check out my question and the answers I received.
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http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070813161035AAWq1DK
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Answer 4

Which one?

If you mean the face on Mars hoax then NASA, specifically JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) is responsible. They control all the spacecraft that visit other planets. Someone at JPL said; this is an interesting feature, see how it looks like a face? He was trying to point out something not claim that it was a sculpted face on Mars.

It got out on the Internet and through conspiracy theorists and suddenly there was a "face" on Mars "carved" by some intelligent beings. It even made it into a movie; all from an innocent remark made by a scientist to point out an example of land and light. Later, closer, observations proved it was just a chance formation of rocks and from another point of view it doesn’t even look like a face.

Conspiracy theorists love to work on little evidence to make huge claims like Man never went to the Moon. Think about it if this conspiracy was true then the size of it would be huge. It would have to involve all the astronauts from Apollo 8 on, all their back up crew, all the engineers and scientists that ran the program and the Soviet Union.

1969 when Apollo 11 landed on the moon was in the middle of the Cold War. Russian scientist has beaten the US into space with the first satellite, the first man, and the first woman. Then the race to the moon started. The U.S.S.R. had its pride at stake and since a nuclear war wasn’t survivable the Cold War had to be fought by proxy. The race for advanced technology proved that a nation was powerful, and nothing was more high tech than space travel.

Russia had radar and observatories they watched the Apollo program like hawks. It was broadcast on all three major networks (NBC, ABC, and CBS) so it was easy to track. We had to use tracking stations in Spain, Turkey, the US, and Australia to keep track of the Apollo Mission. The spacecraft orbited right over Russia.

If Russia could catch the US in a lie then it would be a huge Cold War victory on par with the huge loss of face that Khrushchev faced in the Cuban Missile Crisis. He and President Kennedy almost went to nuclear war over missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy was the man who proposed the race to the moon in his State of the Union Speech, the most important speech, of the year, made by a President. Russia wanted to beat the US to the moon and would have killed to do it; in fact they did lose several cosmonauts in the effort. Yet Russia has never questioned that the US went to the moon. They have never given any of those conspiracies a moments glance, because they were watching for just that, they had spies looking at our space program and had our greatest secret program; the Manhattan Project penetrated. A great US scientist and inventor Edward Teller, was found to be a Russian spy under Stalin.

So if the US had never been to the moon then Russia would have screamed bloody murder in all the media and to the entire world. Even if there was a doubt of the US having reached the moon they could have started a propaganda campaign against the US, but they didn’t. They didn’t because they knew it could be proved 14 ways to Sunday.

Besides there is a mirror placed on the moon by an Apollo Astronaut. The mirror still is there today and is still shot with lasers to measure the exact distance between the earth and the moon. That means any skilled astronomer could prove that the mirror was there and it was planted by a manned mission. Yet, still the conspiracies ran around, there was even a movie made about a fake mission to Mars.

Most conspiracy theories fail due to two reasons; one the number of people involved and two the greed of people. One of the greatest secrets of the last quarter of the 20th century was who was the source for the Watergate leak. The two news reporters promised to never reveal the person’s name until he died, but he got sick and needed money for his medical bills so he came forward and sold his story.

There is an old saying that two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead. In major conspiracies like a manned mission to moon or alien spacecraft at Area 51 the number of people involved makes the secret improbable and the amount of money that would be paid for any information would be huge. Yet no credible information has come forward on either case. Those conspiracies are just too hard to keep secret.

Conspiracies do exist and I am sure that our government is involved in some. But, Watergate, Iran Contra and a lot of other secrets come to light because it is so hard to keep a secret. The same is true with any conspiracy about Mars.

As for Internet rumors anyone can start them, I could start one here right now if I claimed I had proof that J.F.K. was assassinated by the mafia (sorry I don’t have any such proof). There is a famous case of a high school student who committed stock fraud by rumor. He would buy a stock then write a lot of emails saying good things about the stock. The stock price would increase and he would sell it making a profit. That is the strength of Internet rumors. It is next to impossible to say who starts them or why.

Answer 5

As far as I know, Mars is real and noone has seriously tried to prove otherwise!