Will there be a green moon on 420?
420 has arrived and with it comes the appearance of the legendary ~green moon~. It’s a natural phenomenon no one can seem to explain, and only a few stargazers have ever seen it. If you have yet to cast your bloodshot eyes upon an April 20th green moon, don’t get your hopes up. It’s not real. Sorry, tokers: The 420 green moon is just a myth.
When 420 rolls around each year, a influx of “green moon” posts flood social media. Most posts say that the moon will turn green for “about 90 minutes” as a result of planets aligning. It also says that a green moon, oddly enough, only occurs once every 420 years. (Huh.) But if you do the tiniest bit of research, you’ll learn that the green moon was also supposed to happen last year, and the year before, and the year before that, according to recycled social media posts.
The bottom line is that the green moon is not, and never has been, real. And if you believed your friends’ green moon Instagram post, they’ve successfully punked you.
Snopes, the urban legend research site, has covered this prank in the past. But it recently reiterated that the updated 2018 version of the green moon post is just as fake as those from past years.
The site traced the prank back to March 2016, when Facebook user Miles Johnson posted that a green moon would appear on May 29th, 2016. He even went into a lot of convincing detail in the comments about why the moon will appear green because of its closeness to Uranus.
Johnson’s original post, intended to be a joke, took off on Facebook and has been shared almost 18,000 times. In 2017, Johnson’s green moon post came back…but it looked a bit different:
And just like that, the 420 green moon lie was born.
So, no. Unfortunately, there’s no green moon tonight. Bu, hey — depending on how you celebrate 420, the moon might turn green if you believe it will.
