In August 1835, a New York newspaper announced that the Moon was crowded. It had forests, beaches, blue unicorns, beavers that walked on two legs, and four-foot people with bat wings.
None of it was real. Plenty of New Yorkers believed it anyway.
This is the Great Moon Hoax: six front pages, one imaginary telescope, a famous astronomer who had no idea he was involved, and a reporter who later put “Author of the Moon Hoax” in his own byline. The paper told it one instalment a day, so that’s how we’ll tell it too.
The Great Moon Hoax in 30 seconds: From 25 to 31 August 1835, The Sun of New York ran six articles claiming that Sir John Herschel had seen life on the Moon through a giant telescope. Its source, a Scottish science journal, had closed two years earlier. The writer was the paper’s own editor. The Sun never printed a retraction.
Before the hoax: a penny paper and a new editor
The Sun cost one cent, a fraction of what the serious papers charged. Benjamin Day had started it in 1833, aged 23, and it was the first paper sold on the street by shouting newsboys. It ran on crime, gossip and anything that made a passer-by part with a penny.
In the summer of 1835, Day hired a new editor, an Englishman called Richard Adams Locke. Locke told people he had studied at Cambridge. He hadn’t. Keep that in mind; it sets the tone.
On Friday 21 August, page two carried a small teaser, supposedly copied from an Edinburgh paper. Sir John Herschel, one of the most famous astronomers alive, had made “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description” at the Cape of Good Hope. Herschel really was at the Cape, mapping the southern sky. He had no idea what he was about to discover.
Tuesday 25 August: a telescope that could spot insects on the Moon
The first instalment filled three-quarters of the front page and barely mentioned the Moon. It was all about the telescope.
Its lens was 24 feet across, weighed nearly seven tons and magnified 42,000 times. A second gadget, a “hydro-oxygen microscope”, lit up the image and projected it onto a canvas screen. The article boasted that it could study the Moon’s insects, if it had any.
The report came from Dr Andrew Grant, Herschel’s travelling companion, in a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Dr Grant did not exist. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publishing in 1833. Neither detail slowed anyone down.
Wednesday 26 August: red flowers and blue unicorns
On day two, Herschel finally pointed his telescope at the Moon. First came rocks, then a carpet of dark red flowers. Then the animals arrived.
There were herds of brown creatures like bison. There was a goat “of a bluish lead color” with a single horn, which made it, for all practical purposes, a blue unicorn. And there was a round, amphibious creature that rolled across a pebbly beach at great speed. Nobody has ever explained that one, possibly including its author.
Thursday 27 August: beavers that walk on two legs
By day three, Dr Grant had counted 38 species of trees and nine kinds of mammals. The star of the show was the biped beaver.
These beavers walked upright and carried their babies in their arms. They lived in huts that, the article said, were better built than many human homes. And smoke rose from the huts, which could mean only one thing. The beavers had discovered fire.
Friday 28 August: the man-bats
Day four delivered the headline act. In a valley ringed by red hills, the astronomers spotted human-like creatures about four feet tall. They were covered in short, glossy, copper-coloured hair, except on their faces, and had thin, hairless wings folded on their backs.
Herschel, the paper said, named them Vespertilio-homo: man-bat. They seemed to hold lively conversations, with plenty of hand gestures, so they were clearly rational. Dr Grant also noted, delicately, that some of their pastimes did not suit “our terrestrial notions of decorum”. In plain English: the man-bats were doing it in public.
For any doubters, Dr Grant promised signed statements from several church ministers who had visited the observatory and seen it all. The same day, The Sun boasted that its circulation had reached 19,360, the biggest of any daily paper in the world.
Saturday 29 August: a temple made of sapphire
How do you top man-bats? With architecture. On day five, the telescope found an empty temple of polished sapphire. Its roof was golden metal shaped like flames, wrapped around a large ball of copper.
The astronomers wondered what it meant. Then, showing more restraint than at any point so far, they decided not to speculate.
Monday 31 August: posher man-bats, and the telescope sets the observatory on fire
The final instalment found an even finer species of man-bat living near the temple: taller, lighter in colour and, the paper said, an improvement in every way. Every creature on the Moon seemed to live in perfect peace.
Then disaster. The astronomers had left the giant lens facing the wrong way. It caught the Sun’s rays like a magnifying glass and set the observatory on fire. By the time it was repaired, the Moon had moved out of view.
Dr Grant promised the full story would appear later, in Herschel’s official natural history of the Moon. It never did. It was the 1835 version of “the dog ate my homework”.
Did people really believe it?
Many did, at least for a while. A young New Yorker wrote in his diary that men had been found on the Moon. The former mayor, Philip Hone, summarised the whole thing in his. Edgar Allan Poe later claimed that not one person in ten doubted it. Other papers reprinted the series, and within a week nearly 100,000 copies were in print, in a city of about 300,000 people.
The Sun did very nicely out of it. It sold the series as a pamphlet, plus prints of the lunar animals, and one later account claims 60,000 pamphlets sold in under a month. The Bowery Theatre turned it into a show.
Not everyone was fooled. One rival paper answered with its own “exclusive”: the Moon people had lice, and the lice were amber-coloured with blue eyes.
Then there are the visitors from Yale. A group of scientific gentlemen reportedly turned up at The Sun asking to see the original Edinburgh journal. They were told it was in pieces with the typesetters, and the rest was with the printmaker. A later retelling adds that the paper sent a boy ahead to tell the printer to lock his door. When a Yale man wrote in to deny that any professors had visited, The Sun conceded they might just have been from New Haven.
The rival who called it out
James Gordon Bennett, editor of the rival New York Herald, had lost his printing press in a fire that month. He was back in print on 31 August with an article explaining the “astronomical hoax”. The Edinburgh Journal of Science, he pointed out, no longer existed. He also named the likely author: Richard Adams Locke.
Locke wrote to another paper to deny it. He said, very precisely, that he “did not make those discoveries”. Bennett replied that he had never said Locke made them, only that he did the writing.
Bennett kept the joke going for months. During an ice storm that December, he announced that Locke was building a 100-ton burning glass to melt the frozen river.
The Sun never confessed. On 16 September it told readers that people had urged it to admit a hoax, but it couldn’t possibly do so until British or Scottish papers confirmed it. It never printed a retraction.
What did Herschel think?
Herschel heard about it months later, in South Africa. By one account, an American visitor handed him the paper, and he laughed. His real observations, he said, would look rather dull by comparison.
The joke wore thin. In 1837 he complained to his aunt that he had been “pestered from all quarters” about the “ridiculous hoax”, in English, French, Italian and German. An unsent letter, found among his family’s papers in 2001, shows he worried people would start asking him for private stories about the man in the Moon and his family.
It may have gone further than questions. The English writer Harriet Martineau passed on a story that a group of American clergymen had written to Herschel asking whether science could find a way to send the Gospel to the Moon. Even she wasn’t sure it was true.
And the man who wrote it?
Locke reportedly confessed over a drink. According to a 1928 history of The Sun, he told a reporter from another paper not to rush the Moon story into print, because he had written it himself.
In 1836 he moved to a new paper and added “Author of the Moon Hoax” to his byline. In 1838 he tried a second hoax, the lost diary of the explorer Mungo Park. Nobody fell for it. Poe noted drily that Locke’s columns had become “a suspected district”.
In 1840 Locke finally explained himself. The whole thing, he said, was satire aimed at writers who mixed religion and astronomy. His main target was the Scottish writer Thomas Dick, who had calculated that the Moon had 4.2 billion inhabitants. Locke had simply gone and found some.
He later left journalism for a job at the New York customs house, which he got by telling one more lie: that he had been born in America. When he died in 1871, The Sun’s obituary called his story “the most successful scientific joke ever published”.
The Great Moon Hoax: would you have believed it?
A real astronomer’s name, a convincing journal title and a lot of scientific words were enough to put bat-people on the Moon for a whole week. Would you have queued for a copy, or sided with the editor who spotted the hoax? Tell us in the comments.
If this made you laugh, read how Australia sent machine guns after 20,000 birds in The Great Emu War (and lost), or meet some animals with real jobs. You can also read all six original instalments free at Project Gutenberg. And pin this one for the next time someone tells you fake news is new.