The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

Did you know that people once believed there was an entire civilization that lived on the moon? Crazy, right?! Especially since we all now know the moon is made of cheese. In celebration of the full moon tonight, I thought we should explore The Great Moon Hoax of 1835.

Let’s take a step back in time to provide some context. The year is 1835. Andrew Jackson is president. He paid off the national debt (for the first and only time), and then someone tried to assassinate him. The state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan are in a war over the city of Toledo. Yes… Toledo. Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain were born. The Second Seminole War began. The Great Fire of New York will go on to destroy over 500 buildings in the city. The Texas Revolution begins. And so does P. T. Barnum’s career as a showman in New York, where he purchased a blind, paralyzed, and enslaved woman named Joice Heth, who was billed as the 161-year-old former baby nurse of George Washington. Now you might be thinking, wait… I thought slavery was outlawed at that time in New York… and you would be right. Except, there was a loophole. Although it was illegal to purchase a slave, it was legal to purchase the right to lease a slave. So Barnum “leased” her for a year, removed her teeth so she would appear older, and made her work 10 hours a day in a public exhibition until she died less than a year later. He then hosted a live autopsy of her body in a saloon, charging 50 cents a ticket to an audience of over 1,000 onlookers, where the surgeon declared Joice to be merely 80 years old, and P. T. Barnum was outed as a conman. He eventually admitted the age claim was a hoax, and later would be remembered for his infamous phrase, “There’s a sucker born every minute”. But let’s get back to the sky…

Celestial happenings were all the rage in 1835, most notably Halley’s Comet, which would later be blamed for all of the chaos mentioned above. Davy Crockett credited the comet as his inspiration to go to Texas. The Seminoles believed its tail would mark the end of their sovereignty. Mark Twain would later comment in 1909, “I came in with Halley’s Comet. It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’”, as the comet’s perihelion, the moment closest to the sun, happened two weeks before his birth, and prophetically 74 years later when it returned to that position, Twain died. Everyone was looking up!

It was Sir John Herschel, an English astronomer, who made the observations of the comet from the Cape of Good Hope in August of 1835. He was in South Africa because a year prior he built an observatory, the Royal Observatory, with a very powerful telescope to map out the stars in the southern hemisphere. His father, Sir William Herschel, was the astronomer who discovered Uranus, like the planet, like his dad literally discovered a planet. Not to say that John was a disappointment, because he had his own successes like inventing the blueprint, discovering the cause of astigmatism, and naming the seven moons of Saturn. So they were pretty well-known.

It was the morning of August 25, 1835, when readers took to newsstands to discover the first in a series of six articles published in a daily New York newspaper called The Sun, reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, written by Dr. Andrew Grant, a colleague of Herschel. It alleged that Sir John Herschel, built the largest telescope ever created and had “solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy”, “firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena”, and… wait for it… discovered life on the moon. Unfortunately the observations were forced to end after the observatory burned down due to the lens in the telescope acting as a “burning glass” sparking a fire from the sun. You know, like how sociopathic children murder ants with magnifying glasses.

So you can see why this would be fairly believable. A well-known astronomer, whose dad discovered a planet, and was just in the news for having a fancy telescope to see Halley’s Comet, has made another discovery. Sounds plausible. The New York Times certainly thought so as they called the discoveries “probable and possible”. A committee of scientists from Yale University went to the offices of The Sun to see the original articles from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and the newspaper employees sent them on a wild goose chase between the editorial and printing offices, eventually returning back to Yale empty-handed, but still believers.

However, what should have tipped off readers was the type of life discovered. He saw vast vegetation, rushing rivers, an island with sapphire cliffs, mini bison, two-legged tailless beavers, giant amethysts, kitten-like goats, unicorns, cranes, and “large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds”… hybrid bat-humans. Or as Herschel allegedly classified them, Vespertilio-homo, a.k.a. bat-man. Please take a moment to enjoy this lithograph, which was published with the article, of the bat-people in the “ruby amphitheater” of the moon.

The Sun, founded in 1833, was a “penny press” newspaper that made most of its profit from selling advertising space, so it dabbled in salacious stories in order to sell papers. It was a pioneer and the first New York newspaper to report on crimes, personal events, murders, and divorces. You could think of it as ye ole Daily Mail. When Richard Adam Locke, a Cambridge University educated writer, joined The Sun, it was only selling 8,000 copies a day, making it one of the less successful papers in the city. Many believed Locke to the be the true writer of the articles, and the hoax to be an elaborate marketing scheme to increase sales. Life in 1835 was hard and boring. Think about how excited you are today when the latest episode of a streaming show airs. Now imagine you are living in 1835 and there are SIX daily installments of a newspaper article claiming that life on the moon is REAL. I know I’d be the first in line each morning.

Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, but this wasn’t one of those times. It took several weeks for the public to determine it a hoax. The Edinburgh Journal of Science was a real scientific journal, however, they ceased publication years prior. And for Dr. Andrew Grant? Well, he didn’t exist. Yet, The Sun never issued a retraction. Locke went so far to pen a non-denial denial published in The New York Evening Post on August 31, writing, “I beg to state, as unequivocally as the words can express it, that I did not make those discoveries and it is my sincere conviction, founded on a careful examination of the internal evidence of the work in which they first appeared, that, if made at all, they were made by the great astronomer to whom all Europe, if not an incredulous America, will undoubtedly ascribe them”. This continued to fuel the flames as now both the original story and the story of the hoax spread, first across America, and then internationally, as one of the greatest hoaxes of all time. This transmuted again into a third story about journalistic integrity. Please enjoy this lithograph of a bat-man, published with the hoax, by a newspaper in Naples, Italy.

It wasn’t until an entire year later, on September 16, 1835, that The Sun admitted to the hoax. As Herschel was in South Africa, it took some time for the news to get to him. Initially he was amused with the ruse, but later became agitated when people still believed in it. Locke later admitted in 1840 that he was the author, and claimed that he never thought readers would take the story seriously. Many believe that his story was a critique and satire of Scottish amateur astronomer Reverend Thomas Dick, known as “The Christian Philosopher”, who wrote a bestselling book that claimed he mathematically determined that 21.9 trillion inhabitants existed in our Solar System, with 4.2 billion inhabitants on the moon. Rev. Dick was very popular and many Americans made pilgrimage to see him in Scotland, including writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Others believe that Locke was inspired by an article titled “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings” written in 1824 by German astronomer Baron Franz von Paula Gruithuisen.

There was however one famous vespertilio-homo denier, a man named Edgar Allan Poe. He said, “Not one person in ten discredited it… A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!“. Poe wasn’t upset because he believed in journalistic integrity. He was upset because he believed Locke plagiarized his own moon hoax. In June of 1835, just two months prior, Poe published “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” or “Hans Phaall -- A Tale” in the Southern Literary Messenger. In the story, Poe details a firsthand account of Hans’ voyage to the moon, in a balloon that produces breathable air, to find it inhabited, and after living on the moon for five years, returns to his native Holland. Although written as a true story, Poe’s readers did not take the account seriously as his writing was overly satirical and comedic. Despite Poe’s displeasure that Locke superseded him, he later believed that Locke did not intentionally plagiarize his story, and went on to praise “the genius of Mr. Locke”. In 1844, Poe wrote another hoax of his own, published by none other than Locke himself in The Sun, now known as “The Balloon-Hoax”, about a man named Monck Mason who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in a gas balloon in only three days.

Influence of the “Great Moon Hoax” can still be seen centuries later. Of course, fascination with the moon is as old as time itself; one of the first known fantastical and satirical accounts of the moon was written in the second century AD by Lucian of Samosata from Syria titled “A True Story”. French author Jules Verne, read both of Poe’s hoax stories, inspiring From the Earth to the Moon published in 1865 and then Around the World in Eighty Days published in 1872. When H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds played across radio in 1938, newspapers reported public panic of a real alien invasion. And its influence is even still present in today’s culture. If you ever purchased groceries in the 1990s, you’ll be familiar with the face of Bat Boy gracing the cover of the tabloid Weekly World News. And, of course, in 2017 “Fake News” was named the Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary.

So tonight, come join me under the October Full Moon, and let’s raise our hands to the sky and shout, “ALL HAIL THE VESPERTILIO-HOMO!". And then we’ll snack on cheese, organic locally-sourced from the moon, of course.

You can read all six installments of The Great Moon Hoax online here, courtesy of The Museum of Hoaxes.