I received an e-mail announcing that Mars was going to be closer to the Earth than it had been in 50,000 years, and will be for thousands more to come. That would be cool. Sadly, it's from the "too good to be true" department; funny, but false.

Very simply, Mars is too far away to appear as large as the Moon.

A quick peek at http://solarsystem.nasa.gov and we find that the equatorial radius of Mars is 3397km, while the radius of the Moon is 1737km. This makes Mars conveniently about twice as wide as the Moon, or when viewed as a disk in the sky, about 3.8 times as large. That means that Mars would need to be closer than four times as far from the Earth as the Moon is to look the same; the Moon is 384,400km from Earth, so Mars would have to be about 1.5-million km away from you to appear as large as the Moon does. A far cry from the 60-million plus according to the article.

Mars is visible to the naked eye when it's visible at all (i.e., not behind the Sun or some other obstruction). It's not going to be as bright as the Moon, however, and it's often hard to distinguish from other stars. It's easy to see if you've got a good strong pair of binoculars or a decent telescope, and if you know where to look. Even Jupiter is visible to the naked eye, when visible.

I did a quick Google search for "mars close earth big moon" and the first link was a warning of the hoax http://www.universetoday.com/am/publish/beware_mars_haox.html which had another that led to a press-release from NASA http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/07jul_marshoax.htm saying the same thing

It's a harmless hoax; just a picture in an e-mail--no malware that made it through to my copy, anyway. It's meant to have you send it to everyone you know. Probably just someone trying to get a rumor started. Mostly harmless.