Mid-Week Mini: The Moon Hoax

In this week’s Mid-Week Mini Episode, we talk about a strange newspaper hoax involving the moon.

Some fake news stories disappear in a day. Others change history.

In 1835, one newspaper convinced people that there were forests, beaches, unicorn-like creatures, and bat-winged humanoids living on the Moon. It wasn’t some tiny tabloid either. It was The New York Sun, one of the fastest-growing newspapers in America. The story spread around the world, was translated into multiple languages, and for a while, plenty of educated people believed every word of it.

The Internet Says It’s True.

The Great Moon Hoax began on August 25, 1835. The New York Sun announced it had obtained reports from the prestigious Edinburgh Journal of Science describing incredible discoveries by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel. According to the articles, Herschel had built a revolutionary telescope in South Africa so powerful it could see details on the Moon never before imagined.

The newspaper didn’t stop at mountains and craters. It described entire ecosystems. There were blue goats. Miniature bison. Beaver-like animals that walked upright and carried no tails. There were lush forests, sparkling lakes, and colorful flowers. Then came the headline-grabber: human-like creatures with bat wings, covered in copper-colored hair, peacefully living on the lunar surface.

The descriptions were incredibly specific, and that’s part of what made them believable. Instead of saying, “There are strange animals,” the articles measured wingspans, described the texture of the vegetation, and explained the geology of the Moon in convincing scientific language. It sounded less like fantasy and more like a field report.

Readers couldn’t easily check any of it. There was no internet, no television, and no quick way to verify whether an obscure scientific journal in Scotland had actually published these findings. Most people had never seen a photograph of the Moon. If a respected newspaper claimed a famous astronomer had discovered life up there, why wouldn’t you believe it?

Sales of The New York Sun exploded. Competing newspapers reprinted the stories instead of questioning them. Public lectures discussed the discoveries as though they were real. Some religious leaders even suggested the bat people fit neatly into God’s plan for creation.

There was just one problem. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had stopped publishing before any of these articles supposedly appeared. The telescope described in the stories couldn’t possibly have existed. And Sir John Herschel, who really was observing the skies from South Africa at the time, had absolutely no idea the world believed he’d discovered winged people on the Moon.

The hoax’s true author was almost certainly Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for The New York Sun. He later suggested the series was partly intended to poke fun at the sensational scientific claims that newspapers were publishing without skepticism. If that was the goal, it worked almost too well.

Even after the truth came out, many readers weren’t angry. They had enjoyed the ride. In fact, the newspaper’s circulation stayed high because people admired the creativity almost as much as the reporting.

Nearly two centuries later, the Great Moon Hoax still feels surprisingly modern. Dress it up with convincing technical language, attribute it to a respected expert, and publish it where people already trust the source, and even an impossible story can spread around the world.

Maybe the technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t.