The story occasionally circulates that:

"NASA scientists were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets, 100 years from now and 1,000 years from now in order to plot space craft trajectories. As they ran their computers up and down the centuries, their machines came to a grinding halt because they showed a day missing about the time Joshua lived."

Perhaps the origin of this tale is a story which appeared in 1970 in "The Evening World," a newpaper in Spencer, Indiana, about a consultant to the space program named Harold Hill (deceased) citing that he was told a computer program had found a "missing day."

This story, often called "The Day the Sun Stood Still," is purely fictional (i.e., an "urban myth"). Computers do not have the ability to make such a discovery, and every effort to contact the scientists allegedly involved has resulted in either failure or denial. The July 1989 issue of "Bible-Science Newsletter" carries an excellent article which debunks this farce.

My sources of information --
1. http://tommy.jsc.nasa.gov/~woodfill/SPACEED/SEHHTML/still.html
2. newsletter "Reason & Revelation," August 1989, p. 31, published by Apologetics Press.

I hope this is helpful.

Respectfully submitted,
Michael S. Cole, M.D.

05/05/98

Dear Sir:

I received an E-mail that had a link to your Website, and it was an 
article mentioning a "missing" day during the time of Joshua, and 
how NASA had supposedly found it.

I was a computer repair engineer at NASA Manned Spacecraft Center 
in Houston, TX, when this story probably came out for the first 
time around 1969.  At the time, I was a young Christian, but even 
then, this story did not ring true.  

To make a long story short, you can only measure the length of a 
string if you can get to both ends of it.  NASA or anyone else can 
calculate where orbits of stars or planets will be in the future, 
with reference to where we can measure them to be today, or since
whenever we started keeping accurate records.  We have absolutly 
no reliable measurements of celestial placements from thousands 
of years ago, hense we can never find "missing" time going
backwards.  We have no reference points as to where the other end 
of the "string" is. 

You have an interesting and hopefully fruitful site.  
Keep up the good work!


Tom LeMay 
tomlemay@juno.com 

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