How a Newspaper Convinced New York That Bat-Winged People Lived on the Moon

History

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

Have you ever wondered how thousands of people once believed that winged creatures were building temples on the moon? In the summer of 1835 in New York, that is more or less what happened. It began on the twenty-fifth of August, when a newspaper called The Sun printed the first of six articles announcing extraordinary astronomical discoveries.

Readers learned about lunar oceans and beaches, forests, herds of bison, tiny zebras, unicorns, and beavers that walked upright on two legs. And then the bat-winged humanoids, who the paper said had built temples. All of it supposedly seen through an immense telescope of an entirely new principle, with a lens 24 feet across and 7 tons in weight.

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Great Moon Hoax

Planner: Eli Hart

4 hours ago

A lithograph of the hoax's "ruby amphitheater", as printed in The Sun

Why people believed it

So why did anyone believe it? Part of the answer is a name. The discoveries were credited to the astronomer Herschel, a real and respected scientist who was then observing from South Africa, far away and slow to be reached by any awkward question. Beside him, the articles invented a traveling companion, a Dr. Grant, who never existed at all.

But the second part matters more. The ground had already been prepared. The professor grew to ways and had claimed to see walls, roads, and cities on the lunar surface. The clergyman Dick had assured the public that the moon was home to billions of beings. Readers were not being asked to believe something strange and new. They were being handed proof of something they already half expected.

The admission and the lesson

And the sun, it never printed a retraction. On the 16th of September, it quietly admitted the articles were fabricated. The reporter behind them, Locke, confessed only years later.

That is the thing about a great hoax. It rarely creates a belief. It finishes one.