The headlines sound thrilling. One might say they bait a click.
"ANONYMOUS SAYS NASA HAS EVIDENCE OF ALIEN LIFE. DOES IT?" — Newsweek
"The world's biggest hacking group thinks NASA is about to announce alien life." — The Independent
Maybe you know of Anonymous as a band of socially enlightened hackers: liberators of knowledge from elites who want to hide it from the public. You certainly know what NASA is. So you click. And what you get, if you follow the articles to the amateur YouTube channel that is their source, is video of a man in a Guy Fawkes mask — "Anonymous Global," he calls himself — reading out old quotes from NASA spokespeople in a spooky, synthesized voice.
The man in the anarchist mask quotes a NASA science director's testimony from a congressional hearing in April, all totally public: "We are on the verge of making one of the most profound, unprecedented discoveries in history."
That quote — taken out of context and adorned with Anonymous Global's wild conspiracy theorizing — became the basis for millions of views and countless news articles, forcing the science director in question and NASA officials to explicitly deny the claims of a shoddily produced YouTube video this week. "There's no pending announcement regarding extraterrestrial life," a NASA spokesman wrote to The Washington Post, in case you were still in doubt.
Also at Space.com, MassLive, the The San Diego Union-Tribune, and The Guardian (editorial).
Update: (in response to a June 29th episode of The Alex Jones Show) NASA Denies That It's Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @12:27AM
It's being run by J'onn J'onzz, so it's under the DEO's jurisdiction. NASA has nothing to do with it.