The Moon Will Turn Green Wednesday – NOT!

Once again, a skywatching hoax has gone viral.

To go along with the infamous “Mars hoax,” which claims that the Red Planet will appear as large as the full moon in the sky; the “Nibiru cataclysm,” a supposed disastrous encounter between Earth and a large planetary object; and “Zero-Gravity Day,” when people on Earth supposedly can experience weightlessness, we now have the “nights of the green moon.”

This latest fallacy to sweep the blogosphere claims that on Wednesday (April 20), and again on May 29, the moon will appear to turn a shade of green. The full moon of April will occur on Friday, April 22. [The Moon: 10 Surprising Lunar Facts ]

The explanation given for the verdant metamorphosis is that several planets are going to align (wrong!), causing the moon to glow with an eerie, greenish light for about 90 minutes. This spectacle is exceedingly rare (so we are told), and last took place way back in the year 1596.

As has been the case with the bogus Mars, Nibiru and zero-gravity hoaxes, the green-moon message implores you to “share this event!” And sadly, many people have apparently been snookered into doing just that.

Interestingly, the date given for the first “moon of a different color,” April 20, is also “National Weed Day” — a day that celebrates the smoking of marijuana and cannabis culture in general. Pot enthusiasts refer to the day numerically (“four twenty”), and the stated interval between “green moons” is said to be 420 years.