It was a big summer for Harry Potter. The seventh and final book in the series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released, as was the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. After reading the first and seeing the second, I was reminded of a hoax I've had sitting on my hard drive for a few years, just waiting to be debunked.

An e-mail claims that Mars will soon be looming so large in our skies that it will rival the moon. The truth is that while Mars did get very close to Earth a few years ago, that merely turned it into a slightly brighter red star in the sky. If it actually did get as close as the email claims, the Earth would be wracked by high tides and thrown out of its orbit.

An old virus hoax stumbles back to virtual life with a debunking bait-and-switch that points to a real threat, then repeats the same tired warning.

Snopes.com debunks the rumor that Willie Nelson quipped "It's a good thing I had a bag of marijuana instead of a bag of spinach. I'd be dead by now" after his tour bus was raided for drugs, and in the wake of hundreds being sickened by E. coli-contaminated spinich.

Neil Armstrong long maintained that when he uttered his famous phrase "One Small Step for Man, One Giant Leap for Mankind", there was an 'a' in there between 'for' and 'Man'. Austrialian programmer Peter Shann Ford analyzed NASA's recording of the phrase, and says Armstrong was right. It'd be nice to if other researchers confirmed the existance of the missing "a", which has dogged Armstrong for years (as this account on Snopes.com shows).

In related Neil Armstrong news, despite myriad rumors to the contrary, he has not converted to Islam. And no, Mr. Gorsky didn't get lucky when Armstrong touched down at Tranquility Base.

The "Virtual Card for You" e-mail hoax has mutated yet again, promising hard drive devastation in a slightly different form: that of an Olypmic torch that "burns" your hard drive. While it earns bonus points for imagry, "Invitation" remains just as false as its predecessors.

An e-mail claiming to showcase photos of a hanged/hanging and/or captured Osama din Laden is a hoax. The e-mail originated as an attempt to get people to download a trojan horse virus on to their computer, but it later morphed into a scare mail warning people about the alleged apocalyptic dangers of opening the e-mail. The virus itself has been neutralized, and the dangers were never as bad as what the hoax e-mail claims.

Full debunkings of this hoax/virus can be found on Snopes.com, About.com and Hoax Slayer.

The "WTC Survivor" virus hoax that first surfaced after 9/11 is back in circulation, almost unchanged since its initial release.

An hoax e-mail circulating since well before the November 2004 elections claims that congressmen sweet pension deal means they don't have to pay into Social Security.

An old e-mail hoax featuring the Budweiser Frogs has recently re-surfaced with a slighly re-tooled message of digital destruction.

The original version of the e-mail, which I last remember seeing when the Budweiser Frogs were still popular (about 1999) just promised to destroy your hard drive. But in keeping with the times, the new version also claims the virus will also steal your screen name and password and send it to "someone" on the net. That's last bit is a real tactic that some viruses try, but it doesn't make this hoax any more true.