The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Was Sci-Fi Passed Off as News

We will state at once, that by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle, the younger Herschel, at his observatory in the Southern Hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of our solar system;…has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the naked eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of a hundred yards;…[and] has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what order of beings.

So reads part of the first installment of what would later be called the Great Moon Hoax. The series of six articles, which New York City’s daily newspaper The Sun began to publish on August 25, 1835, purported to describe research of real-life English astronomer Sir John Herschel (son of Sir William Herschel, who had discovered the planet Uranus—hence The Sun’s designation of John as “the younger”). The story alleged that Herschel had built the biggest telescope in existence to study the stars and that with this instrument, he had “solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy,” “firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena,” and discovered life on the Moon.

To a savvy reader (or, let’s admit it, even to a not-so-savvy one), the type of life Herschel had “discovered” should probably have been a clue that the story was fake news. What he’d supposedly found was neither microscopic evidence of long-dead organisms nor brine shrimp left behind after lunar experimentation. Rather, The Sun claimed, Herschel had sighted bountiful vegetation, “brown quadrupeds” resembling miniature bison, goatlike creatures with the playful personalities of kittens, long-beaked cranes, and “large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds.” Rather than looking like birds, the story claimed, the creatures looked like a hybrid between humans and bats.

The architect of the hoax was British writer Richard Adam Locke, who had arrived at The Sun when it was selling only about 8,000 papers per day and thus being outsold by most of its chief rivals. He would later say that he’d never expected readers to believe that his satire was factual reporting. In fact, he had likely intended to parody popular writings by Scottish minister and amateur astronomer Thomas Dick and others who had been arguing that the Moon had a substantial atmosphere and could support life. In the six days of the story’s initial publication, Locke had plenty of chances to clarify his intent. But why would he when the story was giving The Sun a chance to profit from readers’ misunderstanding?

During that week, many believed Locke’s story. The New York Times called “Herschel’s” discoveries “probable and possible,” and religious groups started making plans for missionary work on the Moon. One denier was American writer Edgar Allan Poe, who was both impressed by Locke’s rhetorical skill and dismayed by his acquaintances’ eagerness to believe such an absurd story. “Not one person in ten discredited it,” Poe wrote. “A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!”

For a time, Poe wanted The Sun’s story to be proved wrong, but not because he was opposed to newspaper hoaxes per se. Rather, he initially believed that the Great Moon Hoax had plagiarized a hoax of his own—a serialized story about a man traveling to the Moon in a hot-air balloon. After he came to believe that Locke had not intentionally plagiarized him, Poe expressed admiration for “the exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” and “the genius of Mr. Locke.” In 1844 Poe published another hoax of his own—a newspaper story “reporting” on a fantastical three-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean in a gas balloon.

The eventually widespread realization that the Great Moon Hoax was in fact a hoax didn’t spell the end of media falsehoods. Just over a century later a 1938 radio dramatization of English writer H.G. Wells’s science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds didn’t manage to fool many listeners, but newspapers seeking a more sensational story reported that the broadcast had sparked panic among listeners who believed that it was reporting a real alien invasion.

Of course, there are more recent examples of the press taking advantage of the public’s desire to believe—even if what people want to believe is as ridiculous as bat-winged men on the Moon. Just under two centuries after the Great Moon Hoax, in 2017, two major word authorities had ample cause to name fake news their Word of the Year.