Could a double moon be seen tonight thanks to Mars?

“Mars will look as giant as the complete moon” and ended with the message in capital letters: “NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN”. Similarly, Mars was closest to earth at 56 million kilometers, nearest ever in history and visible to naked eye. Again in 2003, Mars made its closest strategy to Earth for over 60,000 years in an occasion often known as the perihelic opposition. But as The Huffington Post pointed out at the time, the iguana, rat and other animals spotted in photos from the Red Planet have yet to be shown to be anything but oddly shaped rocks.

Mars has been an object of human fascination since its discovery, from the Roman god of war to H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, the planet’s similarities to Earth gives it a special place in the celestial pantheon. Readers apparently missed the line saying that it would take a 75-power magnification in a telescope to make Mars appear as big as the full moon. And that makes sense – while the Moon is about one light-second away from Earth (roughly 240,000 miles), it can take as many as 20 minutes for a beam of light shot from our surface to reach Mars. In fact, the Red Planet wasn’t even the second-brightest night-sky object that night.

Based on a vague quote from the Curiosity rover’s chief scientist, rumors swirled in late 2012 that Curiosity found complex organic compounds (organics contain carbon, which can be a building block of life). Mars looks like a big star when it is in the range of about 56 to 70 million KM but certainly not as wide as the Moon.

As technology has evolved, so have the ways that the Mars hoax has spread.

Lately, Facebook has become the new host of the Mars hoax phenomenon. NASA has grown vexed with such hoax messages that it has stopped responding to them since 2005.

Still, Mars seems especially beloved by the general public – it’s hard to imagine a Neptune hoax circulating for so long, so widely. Fans gnashed their teeth when Pluto lost its status as a planet in 2006 – a scientific nomenclature decision that drew more attention than any other, except perhaps the ongoing debate over Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus. A certain nostalgia factor could be at play with Pluto, as well, Bandfield speculated. “It’s our neighbor in the solar system, and it’s the most Earth-like planet”. [Why Do We Believe in Mars Hoaxes?]. Especially if the Mars colonists are Americans, they will all remember the American revolution as part of their personal mythology, and will not take kindly to a faraway government that claims ownership of a new civilization.