Claim: One of the scenes in Back to the Future showed characters traveling via their time-machine car to July 11, 2012 from October 26, 1985.
Example:[Collected via e-mail, July 2012]
There are doctored images being posted on facebook from Back to the Future showing that the future date set in one of the scenes was today, July 11, 2012. I'm fairly certain the date was sometime in 2015.
Origins: In July 2012, images were circulated purportedly showing that 11 July 2012 was the date to which the character Marty McFly time-traveled from the past in the 1989 feature film Back to the Future.
This was the third iteration of the same hoax, in this case following on the heels of a similar outbreak just three weeks earlier:
The "Back to the Future Day" hoax has been perpetrated against the Internet yet again, as Doc did not really set the date to July 11, 2012, when he went to the future in the movie's famous Delorean time machine.
And he didn't set it to June 27, 2012, either, though this same hoax was carried out on that date. It's not clear why this trick has become a repeating theme, but, please, don't allow yourself to be fooled again.
As has happened at least twice before, someone released a Photoshopped or otherwise-manipulated image showing that the date was the one picked in the 1989 sequel to the classic 1985 film, but the date was actually set for October 21, 2015, more than three years from now.
The Chicago Tribune wrote of the June 2012 outbreak that:
Some Internet users were fooled by an image that claimed to show June 27, 2012, as the futuristic date the characters played by Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd were whisked to in their souped-up, flux capacitor-powered Delorean time machine. Not so.
In Robert Zemeckis' 1989 sequel, the characters are transported 30 years into the future, from Oct. 26, 1985 to Oct. 21, 2015. Sorry, "BTTF" fans, but the magic date is still more than three years away.
An apparently doctored image with the destination date changed to "June 27, 2012" raced across Facebook, Twitter and other sites, fooling some users.
Many were similarly duped two years ago when the movie site TotalFilm.com tweeted a bogus image using the date July 5, 2010, to substantiate its claim of that date as "Back to the Future Day." Total Film later admitted to the hoax.
A clip from the film shows the original date to have been October 21, 2015:
