The Great Moon Hoax
Public DomainAn illustration printed in The Sun alongside stories about life on the Moon.
Beginning on August 25, 1835, the New York Sun published a series of articles pushing a shocking claim: British astronomer Sir John Herschel had discovered life on the Moon through his powerful telescope.
Of course, Herschel never discovered life on the Moon, nor has anyone else. And this was not the only false claim printed by the paper. The Sun published six articles headlined “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” reporting that they were reprinted from The Edinburgh Journal of Science.
From the start, the claims were sensational. Even the details of Herschel’s telescope were effectively science fiction. The Sun had reported that Herschel’s telescope was connected to an “oxy-hydrogen” projector, allowing it to screen moving pictures. Through this, Herschel had reportedly seen vast forests, seas, and deposits of precious minerals on the surface of the Moon.
More shockingly, though, he had seen living creatures, including unicorns, miniature zebras, beavers that walked on two legs, and “man-bat” humanoids:
“We could then perceive that they possessed wings of great expansion, and were similar in structure to this of the bat, being a semi-transparent membrane expanded in curvilineal divisions by means of straight radii, united at the back by the dorsal integuments. But what astonished us very much was the circumstance of this membrane being continued, from the shoulders to the legs, united all the way down, though gradually decreasing in width.”
This so-called “lunarian” life was said to worship in triangular temples scattered across the Moon’s surface — and the story eventually pulled in elements of Reverend Thomas Dick’s literal interpretation of the Bible, suggesting the Moon’s inhabitants were “unfallen” creations of God.
Other outlets did ultimately decry these articles as a hoax, but it took several days for this to happen. For better or worse, the writing style mimicked an academic journal so closely that people had actually been duped.
Public DomainAn 1836 illustration of the “inhabitants of the Moon.”
As Stephanie A. Hall of the American Folklife Center noted in a blog for the Library of Congress, The Sun writer behind the articles, Richard Adams Locke, had not necessarily been trying to fool people, though.
Just before the Great Moon Hoax articles were published, Edgar Allan Poe had written a similar story about life on the Moon. It was printed in the Southern Literary Messenger, but it was so obviously humorous that it was almost instantly recognized as satire.
Locke’s articles were similarly meant to satirize Dick’s theories — at one point, Dick had estimated the universe’s population to be around 21 trillion — during a time when speculation about life beyond Earth was reaching a fever pitch.
Unfortunately for Locke, that also meant people were more willing to believe media reports, especially if they were convincing enough. Dick’s theories had already been gaining traction, as he was the most widely-read popular astronomer at the time. Ironically, the same “science fiction” ideas that inspired the Great Moon Hoax were, for a time at least, more emboldened by it.
It didn’t help that Herschel was conducting research in South Africa at the time and could not quickly reply to the claims about him.
After the truth behind this weird historical event was revealed, though, it at least presented a challenge to some of Dick’s wilder theories. He continued to be a popular figure, but some grew more critical of what he was saying.
