Two people have told me they read in Newsweek and saw a television news report that a meteoroid impact as big as the one that caused dinosaur extinction is going to happen on September 28 of this year. They said they saw this last week.
I have not witnessed any open weeping or an increase in streetcorner evangelism, and searches of the Sky and Telescope and Scientific American sites for that date didn’t turn up any obvious references, so at this point I have to guess no lifestyle changes are in order.
Nevertheless, at least one of these people is absolutely trustworthy. So does anybody know what this is about?
Now that I think about it, the April issue of Maxim magazine had a story about a giant meteor that was going to hit earth in September. It also had an “Interview with Osama bin Laden” and other stories that were obvious jokes.
Unfortunately, I no longer have the issue. Any other Dopers have it handy?
Asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which is a few miles in diameter, will make its closest approach to earth on September 29, 2004 (probably on the 28th in some time zones). This will be the closest approach of such a large asteroid to earth this century, but it will still be four times farther away from the earth than the moon. It is possible that Toutatis could hit the earth far in the future, but not this time around. http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/4179_Toutatis/toutatis.html
I did some googling and apparently an asteroid named Toutatis will pass close to Earth in September of this year. It’ll come to within a million miles (which is pretty close, about four times the distance between the earth and the moon) but no one seems to be panicking over it, so it looks like it’ll be another of those asteroid near-misses that happen every few years.
My personal theory is that some geek has deployed software that snoops on all e-mail that gets sent anywhere on the internet. By monitoring the number of occurences of the phrases “Nigerian prince” and “thirty million dollars”, it determines what addresses belong to really gullible people, and it then dispatches randomly generated conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies to those addresses on certain dates. All this is done purely for amusement’s sake, of course.
Magazines get mailed out several weeks before their assigned month, which would somewhat obscure the April Foolishness of the article. In fact, reading references to months and dates in mags often feels odd due to their inherent untimeliness.
