Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the “Convention du Mètre.”
These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150.
That certainly was a lot more energy to debunk the lie than to tell it, but that’s a neat fact, TIL.
That’s kinda why it works so well on so many stupid people, the lies are easy to consume and fixing the damage is difficult.