Case file · Folklore / legend
Buzz Aldrin's evacuation and the fake 'evil' tweet
On 1 December 2016 the 86-year-old astronaut Buzz Aldrin, on a private tour, was flown out from the South Pole with fluid in his lungs; days later a conspiracy site published a screenshot of a tweet in which he supposedly warned of 'evil' found in Antarctica.
2016 CE · -90.00, 130.00 · status: hoax
The account
The real evacuation went by LC-130 to McMurdo and on to hospital in Christchurch, and Aldrin recovered. The 'tweet' appeared on 7 December 2016 on the now-defunct SuperStation95 site; no such post exists on his account, and Snopes and later AAP FactCheck found the image fabricated. It still resurfaces.
The sceptical view
The medical evacuation is documented; the tweet is a fabricated image.
Connections in the atlas
- Patriarch Kirill among the penguins
- The 'pyramids of Antarctica'
- John Kerry in Antarctica on election week