The assertion that National Aeronautics and Space Administration computers had dis¬ covered a missing day (actually 23 hours, 20 minutes) at a point in time that corresponds to an incident recorded in the biblical book of Joshua 10:12. The Hebrews had just defeated the Amorites, and Joshua commanded the sun to stand still so that the victors could revenge themselves on the Amorites. Analogous to the Joshua story is the account of Isaiah making the sun move backward for King Hezekiah in II Kings 20:8-11. These stories have continually been produced to question the accuracy of the Bible on matters of scientific fact.
From the 1970s to the present, however, a story circulated among Evangelical Christian groups that at one point in the 1960s, the staff at NASA were checking the positions of the planets by computer, and they discovered two missing periods of time. These periods corresponded in time with the two incidents involving Joshua and Hezekiah.