College students on LSD stared at the sun until they went blind.

The first version came from Santa Barbara. On 19 May 1967 the New York Times ran an Associated Press item saying "the vision of four users of LSD has been impaired for life" after they stared at the sun. Its only source was an unnamed spokesman for a local ophthalmological society.[1] Reviewing the coverage in 1994, Snopes noted that "nowhere in this entire article is a single name mentioned".[1]

The famous version came from Pennsylvania in January 1968. Norman Yoder, the state commissioner for the blind, said six college students had taken LSD, lain in a clearing and stared at the sun, and that "the retinas of their eyes were destroyed". He would not say where: "Yoder had refused to identify the college or name the students".[2] Newsweek described them as "all nice kids, not hippies", found "all totally, permanently and helplessly blind".[1]

Governor Raymond Shafer ordered an inquiry, and "within a week the hoax was revealed".[3] The state attorney general said inconsistencies in the "case records apparently doctored to fit the story" led investigators to question Yoder "until he admitted the incident was false". Yoder was suspended, and a state official said he had been sent to a psychiatric hospital in Philadelphia.[2] Newsweek later printed a correction saying it had "ran the story in good faith".[1]

Sun-gazing on LSD can still hurt. The pharmacologist David Nichols points to "two documented cases of eye damage" in the medical literature.[1] One is a 1973 report titled "Solar retinopathy from sun-gazing under the influence of LSD".[4] The other describes a 23-year-old man who "sustained severe macular damage by sun gazing" while on a hallucinogen.[5] Each is one patient with a burned macula, not a group of students struck blind.[4][5]

The story travelled because officials and the national press carried it. It reached readers through the Associated Press and Newsweek before anyone checked it.[2][1]