2012-08-14 – After a week of increasingly implausible denials, NASA today admitted that its dramatic reports about landing a space probe on the planet Mars were a hoax. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden appeared at a hastily called press conference at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, to announce that he had offered his resignation to the President, saying, “I accept full responsibility for the deception.”

“The seven minutes of terror never occurred,” said Bolden. “We thought the scenario that we dreamed up was completely implausible and that no one would take it seriously,” he continued. “But when no one seriously questioned it, we had to keep it going. It was a hoot while it lasted, but the hoax got completely out of control.”

“The landing was not on another planet,” Bolden concluded. “It was in a remote region of the former Amazon tropical rainforest that has been subject to extreme desertification due to global warming.”