What was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, which claimed winged humans lived on the Moon?

What was intended as a journalistic exercise in satire snowballed worldwide over the next few weeks, becoming a colossal prank gone wrong. It also highlighted the power wielded by the press at a time when few trustworthy sources of information were readily available. Here’s what happened.

What did the articles claim?

The Sun’s news reports referred to new scholarly research authored by Sir John Herschel in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, a journal which incidentally ceased all publication months before the stories came out, and claimed he had built a telescope “of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle.”

His being the son of William Herschel, an eminent philosopher who had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, added to his credibility.

The paper said, “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 discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon… has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what order of beings; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.”

The reports described how Herschel had reportedly sighted forests and plants with a few mammals such as miniature bison and beavers that stood upright, single-horned goats birds, and even unicorns.

The most outrageous of all the claims was the “sighting” of human beings with bat-like wings, which they designated Vespertilio-homo or man-bats. The newspaper also carried illustrations to reinforce these ideas.

The final installment described how the endeavour came to an untimely end as the telescopic lens caught fire from concentrated solar rays, disrupting all research.

How and why was this hoax conceived?

The New York Sun was a daily newspaper based in New York City, circulated between 1833 and 1950. Costing a penny, it had a wider readership than its costlier counterparts, which were targeted at the elites. The New York Sun also popularised the use of newsboys announcing the headlines and hawking newspapers to sell on the street.

When publisher Richard Adam Locke joined The Sun, its readership had fallen to 8,000 copies a day. He used the opportunity to try to ridicule the increasing influence of religion in scientific discovery at the time, specifically the field of “religious astronomy”.

Locke was reportedly inspired by Reverend Thomas Dick, a British church minister who had estimated that the Solar System was home to over 21 trillion inhabitants, with the moon alone housing 4.2 billion of these.

How were these articles received?

The news reports were widely read and reproduced in competing newspapers, with The New Yorker saying, “The promulgation of these discoveries creates a new era in astronomy and science generally.” The New York Times raved about the articles and said that “the account of the wonderful discoveries in the moon… are all probable and plausible, and have an air of intense verisimilitude.”

Some like The Philadelphia Inquirer took a neutral tone, saying, “It is not worthwhile for us to express an opinion as to the truth or falsity of the narrative, as our readers can, after an attentive perusal of the whole story, decide for themselves. Whether true or false, the article is written with consummate ability, and possesses intense interest.”

On September 16, 1835, The Sun finally admitted that the articles had been a hoax. This did not affect its readership, which swelled with every passing day.

Locke’s intention seemed to have gone completely undetected thus far. Matthew Goodman, the author of The Sun and the Moon, told the BBC, “What he had not anticipated – and this is the great irony of the moon hoax – was that the people of New York, and subsequently America generally, had been so schooled in these ideas of the religious astronomers that when these articles came out, they simply believed them… because it was so much like what they had already been reading.”

Author Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prominent voices to critique the stories, taking offence to the similarities between the articles and his fictional story, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”, also published by Locke. In his story, Poe describes the lead character’s voyage to the moon in a hot air balloon.

Poe was reportedly both impressed at the scale of the hoax and disappointed at its unironic acceptance by the masses, saying, “A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginia college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!” (The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe)