The culprit responsible? None other than your favourite film magazine and website, Total Film . Yeah... sorry about that.
Here's the original tweet;
A casual office conversation brought up the 'fact' that 5th July 2010 is referenced in Back To The Future (though Doc and Marty never actually go there), so sensing a bit of fun for our Twitter feed (and without checking) we posted the Tweet. Then things got interesting.
As our 30,000 followers began retweeting the post it gathered pace, and die-hard BTTF fans began replying demanding an explanation for our grevious mistake.
For a bit of fun we photoshopped an image of the digital time display from the dashboard of the DeLorean to say '05 07 2010' (above) and loaded it onto twitpic;
You can see the original post here .
Underneath the picture we posted this;
What was meant as a tongue in cheek apology just stoked the fire massively and became a Twitter version of Chinese whispers.
The image ended up being used as proof that 5th July 2010 is mentioned in the movie, not proof that we were wrong.
By the afternoon Back To The Future became a trending topic on Twitter worldwide, and one of the most searched topics on Google in the past 24 hours.
The Guardian have blogged about it, two Australian newspapers have done stories, along with one in the Arab Emirates. One news story by World Correspondants referred to us as a 'Photoshop artist' - not too sure about that, but thanks all the same.
This morning tweets are circulating with a new image, photoshopped by a third party to say that today, July 6th 2010, is Future Day. There is now an email circulating with the same image;
As of the time of posting, Hollywood actors Elizabeth Banks and Colin Hanks have retweeted the post, as have Joe Jonas, Ivanka Trump and even the producer of all three Back To The Future movies, Frank Marshall - it looks like this one could run for a few more days folks...
And that's how we started Future Day, it truly is an accidental global phenomenon.
So apologies, film fans. We were wrong. It seems some lax research and average photoshop skills go a long way on Twitter these days.
Did you believe it? Did you call hoax? Leave a comment - then follow us on Twitter !
