Now what's wrong here?

Ok, this was kinda wierd to me but here it goes...:
My little brother's science teacher said that on August 27 Mars would
be the closest it was in 6000 years and it would be the size of a full
moon. I was mainly skeptical at first and my initial opinion was
confirmed while I was looking throught these forums and found a topic
like this. So, I told my brother to tell the teacher that it was merely
a rumor and the next day he told me "someone else told him it before I
could, but he still said it would be quite close". Now this even
further conflicted my brief research. I read that Mars is in fact on
the other side of the sun at this time. I could accept this all from
maybe a chain mail or spam... but here's the catch:
He got this info in a science journal. I have no clue which one but I
would think it wouldn't be something like Scientific American or
anything like that, it was probably a little kid's journal with the
intellogical equivalence of "Highlights" but how could any official
journal get information off that much? Is my Scientific American
getting articles from anonymous e-mails?!