About This Page
This page is part of the Museum of Hoaxes' Hoax Photo Archive, a catalog of photo fakery throughout history. Images are categorized by theme, technique of fakery, and time period.
Hoax Museum Archives
Shuttle Columbia Explosion Photos
Status: Falsely captioned movie screenshots
Technique of Fakery: False Caption.
Date and Time Period: Circulating online since 2003; (2000-2004)
Themes: Imagining Disaster, Planes
Technique of Fakery: False Caption.
Date and Time Period: Circulating online since 2003; (2000-2004)
Themes: Imagining Disaster, Planes
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When the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon re-entry on February 1, 2003, no cameras recorded the event. That didn't stop the circulation online of a dramatic series of images supposedly taken "from an Israeli satellite in space."
The pictures were actually screenshots from the opening scene of the Touchstone Pictures movie Armageddon (1998). In the movie the space shuttle Atlantis is struck by meteorite fragments. An unknown hoaxer lifted these images from a DVD of the movie, added the phony caption, and set the pictures loose on the web.
Use the navigation bar below to view the hoax photo archive one entry at a time, in chronological order.
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