Fake CNN Report Claimed Inevitable Asteroid Impact

A fake CNN iReport that saw more than 300,000 hits before being taken down by the news agency claimed that a "Manhattan-sized" asteroid was headed for Earth and would make impact by 2041.

The report, which was posted on May 26, was written by an "iReporter" from Pasadena, Cali. using the internet handle "Marcus575," rather than his real name. Many are saying that that alone should have been cause for skepticism, but it did not stop the article from being shared on Facebook at least 30,000 times.

The article was up for 22 hours before finally being taken down, allowing it to circulate among the highly amused and the highly gullible - who of course were urging people to get their bucket lists in order.

If you try to visit the article now, you will be redirected to a page with a brief statement by David Williams, the CNN iReport community manager and producer.

"CNN PRODUCER NOTE: NASA has confirmed via email that this story is false. A spokeswoman for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory says that the largest object detected by NEOWISE measures 3 km in diameter and poses no risk to Earth. The iReport has been removed," the statement reads.

The NASA email in question may have directly resulted from blogger Phil Plait of "Bad Astronomy" contacting his friend Amy Mainzer, the Principal Investigator of the NEOWISE mission.

"She was, um, less than happy about the article," Plait wrote.

Despite a decent number of gullible people temporarily panicking, it is likely that very little damage - aside from damage to the CNN iReport reputation - has been done in the wake of this debacle.

A brief snapshot of the article reveals there were dozens of clues that it was a hoax. For one, the article claimed that the asteroid was going to strike the Earth on March 35 - an impossible date. For another, the keywords for the page were "war, gaming, stocks, science, cyrus, space, obama, earth, states" and even a misspelled "beiber."

CNN iReports are not directly produced by CNN writers, and are "not vetted by CNN" according to small statement in the upper-right corner of every article. However, even these articles are screened by community editors when they go up.

So how did this one slip by? The article was published on Memorial Day, a national holiday where even editors can take off, and that's seems likely what happened here.

If you would like to read the hoax article for yourself, Plait was quick enough to screen-grab it just before it was taken down. The photo can be viewed here.