Rory
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This has been explained by Snopes here (as well as elsewhere) but I want to add a few little details that I found interesting.
The story goes that various news outlets reported that a "NASA engineer/scientist" had told Conan O'Brien about a NASA mastubation ban, whereas the idea of a ban and the reasoning behind it was actually put forward as a joke by Conan's co-host Matt Gourley during a conversation with Smythe Mulikan, a mechanical engineer who works with a NASA contractor in Texas.
It seems that the story was first reported by The Daily Star on July 21st and then later by other news organisations such as The New York Post, Metro, Indy 100 and news.com.au, as well as many smaller blogs and "content farms" - especially, for some reason, in Africa.
The interesting bit for me is that The Daily Star version has now been replaced by an article headlined "Comedian's joke about Nasa ban on masturbation in space over pregnancy fears goes viral".
So they've changed their story to report on a "bizarre suggestion" (that they made) that went viral (started by them) with no mention of the previous version.
Several copies of the original version are on archive.org but they aren't accessible for some reason. However identical articles with the correct headline appear to have been duplicated in a number of places:
I guess I'm just thinking: naughty Daily Star for not at least mentioning it was an updated version of a previous article or that they started it (not that I expect much from them); and, moreso, have they asked archive.org to help erase the evidence of it? Or is it just one o' them things?
Plus interesting to see the source of it, and how it spreads to other news organisations, even after it's been widely debunked by prominent fact checkers.
The story goes that various news outlets reported that a "NASA engineer/scientist" had told Conan O'Brien about a NASA mastubation ban, whereas the idea of a ban and the reasoning behind it was actually put forward as a joke by Conan's co-host Matt Gourley during a conversation with Smythe Mulikan, a mechanical engineer who works with a NASA contractor in Texas.
It seems that the story was first reported by The Daily Star on July 21st and then later by other news organisations such as The New York Post, Metro, Indy 100 and news.com.au, as well as many smaller blogs and "content farms" - especially, for some reason, in Africa.
The interesting bit for me is that The Daily Star version has now been replaced by an article headlined "Comedian's joke about Nasa ban on masturbation in space over pregnancy fears goes viral".
External Quote:
So they've changed their story to report on a "bizarre suggestion" (that they made) that went viral (started by them) with no mention of the previous version.
Several copies of the original version are on archive.org but they aren't accessible for some reason. However identical articles with the correct headline appear to have been duplicated in a number of places:
External Quote:
I guess I'm just thinking: naughty Daily Star for not at least mentioning it was an updated version of a previous article or that they started it (not that I expect much from them); and, moreso, have they asked archive.org to help erase the evidence of it? Or is it just one o' them things?
Plus interesting to see the source of it, and how it spreads to other news organisations, even after it's been widely debunked by prominent fact checkers.
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