The Great Back to the Future Day Hoax

Yesterday, all over Twitter, Facebook, and blogs across cyberspace, people were posting what seemed to be a screen-grab of an image from the 1985 movie Back to the Future that showed the time-travel Delorean vehicle's dashboard computer with the future destination date. Fans were ecstatic that the future had arrived and we had caught up with the time-hopping adventures of Marty McFly and Doc Brown. The problem was that the whole thing was a hoax. The actual future destination date was (or will be) October 21, 2015, not June 27, 2012.  I too fell for the trick and was one of many who reposted the fake image gone viral.

I should have known something was fishy, since the bottom row of digital numbers gave me pause, but I didn't remember the actual date of the future year, so I just believed that, yes, this was Back to the Future Day and that seemingly distant time had now arrived as our present. I had previously written about science fiction futures catching up to us, in Space: 1999, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Terminator movies for example, so this seemed to be just another example of that, but we were fooled.  Here is the actual screen-grab from the movie with the correct date, which still hasn't arrived yet.

The hoax was created by the mobile application Simply Tap to promote a Back to Future DVD box set. A similar hoax was perpetrated two years ago by the Web site Total Film. Maybe, like the boy who cried wolf, when October 21, 2015 arrives and it actually will be Back to the Future Day, we won't believe it (unless hover boards actually become a reality).

The fact that so many people eagerly reposted the image, believing it to be true, proves how much that science fiction trilogy was beloved and still resonates with us all these years later.