Irish spacers fool news agencies with North Korea tale

IT was a story too out of this world to be true – but that didn’t stop some news agencies believing a spoof news article by an Irish website claiming North Korea had successfully landed an astronaut on the sun.

Satirical news site Waterford Whisper News, quoting a fictitious account from North Korea’s Central News Agency, reported how 17-year-old astronaut Hung Il Gong had successfully landed on the far side of the sun after an 18-hour journey.

The article, which ran under the headline, ‘North Korea Lands First Ever Man On The Sun’, was picked up by legitimate news agencies based in Asia and Nigeria though many questioned whether it was the Korean regime who made the whole thing up.

As a result of its sensational spoof scoop, the Irish based WWN received over half a million visits to its site on the day its ‘story’ broke. ‘The story first went viral in eastern Europe, Latvia, Lithuania. Then Finland and Sweden. Yesterday it hit Asia and our servers went down,’ according to Colm Williamson, editor and creator of WWN. He said WWN’s web host had told him the site was under attack and visits to the web address were restricted to four per second.

Mr Williamson said added that the story had nearly a million views since it was first published on Tuesday and it didn’t look like stopping there. He said: ‘We had to suspend posting due to the poor server. The story itself has a quarter of a million Facebook likes and 1,500 comments.

‘It’s still going viral. Seems like the only place it didn’t [go viral] was Ireland.’

The spoof article said that Mr Gong had reached his destination in a specially designed rocket ship and had collected sun spot samples to bring back to supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-un.

‘We are very delighted to announce a successful mission to put a man on the sun,’ according to the fake announcement reported by WWN.

‘North Korea has beaten every other country in the world to the sun. Hung Il Gong is a hero and deserves a hero’s welcome when he returns home later this evening.’