Neil Armstrong, as the first man on the Moon, is the last man you'd expect to call NASA's Moon missions a hoax. But that didn't stop two Bangladeshi newspapers, the Daily Manab Zamin and News Nation, from translating and printing an August 2009 Onion article that claimed Mr. Armstrong said just that.
The Onion cited the fictional Armstrong as telling a press conference that after he read "a few hastily written paragraphs published" by a Moon-landing skeptic, he realized "I had been living a lie."
"It has become painfully clear to me that on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module under the control of my crew did not in fact travel 250,000 miles over eight days, touch down on the moon, and perform various experiments, ushering in a new era for humanity. Instead, the entire thing was filmed on a soundstage, most likely in New Mexico," he "said."
The newspapers' editors later apologized for being fooled as easily as faux-Armstrong was.
"We thought it was true so we printed it without checking," associate editor Hasanuzzuman Khan told the AFP news agency. "We didn't know the Onion was not a real news site."
