'Remember The 13th.' Will NASA Announce A Historic Discovery?
A website has been launched teasing NASA's "biggest discovery that will shake the Earth, it will never be the same again." Set for November 13th, but brought forward to October 6th due to a "change of plans", questions have been raised about its legitimacy.
Launched on October 1st, rememberthe13th.com announces that NASA has made a discovery that will be "a day to remember and one for the history books." It requests users to sign up and stay updated on the upcoming unveiling on November 13th.
This made for some rather outlandish conspiracy theories, as some reports suggest that the 13th is the day the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will do a power grid blackout test across America. So what if they announce the discovery of aliens, cut out the grid, and fake an alien invasion in the darkness to force a state of martial law? They most probably won't, but it was our favourite conspiracy theory on Reddit.
However, a recent amendment to the website shows the discovery being made public to the media on October 6th instead, dramatically cutting the time until we get to find out. So before we start conspiring further, it will be best to collate the evidence that has been gathered thus far to prove whether this is real or fake.
A small trip onto whois.net shows the domain registrar, enom.com, listing the website belonging to an online anonymity service called Whoisguard, operating out of Panama. This points to the site being falsified, due to their being no ties with NASA officially.
Further supporting this opinion, the traceroute shows its original source on craftinghost.com, a commercial server which advertises Minecraft servers. And plus the whole 'NASA is shut down' thing, due to the governmental bill not passing in Congress. This does not seem to add up.
Another interesting discovery (leading to parody) would be Manipal Posters, an identical website promoting the launch of their new design. Whoever is behind the "hoax," it looks like they took this and ran with it. And after running this through whois, it's clear there's no connection. In return, a reddit r/space community member built rememberthe14th.com, describing how this will be "the biggest non-discovery that will not shake the Earth."
We have reached out to NASA for comment, who will probably not respond because of their current circumstances, but the evidence gathered does point to this being a hoax. If this is the case, take caution when signing up for updates, as this may exist only to harvest email address for spammers.
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