<story><title>The curious case of fake NASA geniuses</title><url>https://openthemagazine.com/feature/rocket-science/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>earthscienceman</author><text>Oh boy. I get to tell a story that I&amp;#x27;ve wanted to tell to HN forever. I grew up in no-where America, population 1,000, 100 miles from the nearest city of 10,000.&lt;p&gt;One day in High School a new teacher is hired in a quick hurry to replace someone who quit. The man shows up to teach biology wearing a NASA jacket and spends the entire first hour of class explaining all of the work he has done for the agency. He also insists we call him, &amp;quot;Dr. J, because I have enough class credits to have a PhD&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;The story could be 100 paragraphs of weird twists and turns, but the short of it is that the guy was a total fraud and had only once volunteered for a citizen science project. One of the things about rural schools is that they&amp;#x27;re often desperate for teachers, so he got to hang around &amp;quot;teaching&amp;quot; biology until he threatened to shoot some kids and he was finally fired.</text></comment>
<story><title>The curious case of fake NASA geniuses</title><url>https://openthemagazine.com/feature/rocket-science/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gurchik</author><text>This news outlet ANI seems to have done no research at all into these claims before publishing the story. According to their statement they did not contact NASA until the 26th, a week after publishing the original story. Only then did every detail fall apart:&lt;p&gt;- NASA never accepted a paper from the girl, and the screenshots shown were authored by IJSER which could have been Googled to show that they will accept anything&lt;p&gt;- The certificates shown in the original story were obviously fake not just in appearance but the names and positions from the people at NASA do not exist, like &amp;quot;President &amp;amp; CEO&amp;quot; of NASA, which could have been Googled&lt;p&gt;- NASA never gave any funding to the girl, so even the basic idea of the story that has a paid job with NASA is false, let alone the claim that they were paying for her to come to the US&lt;p&gt;They only contacted NASA a week after publication, and now they insist that &amp;quot;a large part of her story is verified and authentic&amp;quot; and rests all the blame on the girl saying &amp;quot;she duped us.&amp;quot; I can&amp;#x27;t help but feel that this national story would have never existed if the publication did their jobs, a story that will now follow the girl as long as people remember this.</text></comment>