The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Unicorns, Batmen, Jungles and Satire Gone Horribly Wrong
On August 21, 1835 a shocking advertisement ran in the New York Sun. It read in big bold letters at the very top of the broadsheet:
GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES LATELY MADE
By Sir John Herschel
At the Cape of Good Hope…
This advertisement in one of New York City’s leading newspapers of the time told readers about an upcoming series of six feature articles that the paper would run over the course of the next week which would detail the discovery and existence of life on the moon!
With the running of this advertisement in block letters on the front page of the New York Sun, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 was on.
These feature articles, which would be published over the course of the following six days, one each day which supposedly detailed a different aspect of life and civilization on the moon, were attributed to the Edinburgh Courant of Scotland. The Edinburgh Courant was Scotland’s oldest, and most well respected newspaper, dating back all the way to 1705. Attributing the Courant as the original source of the feature articles republished in the Sun gave instant credibility to the reports of life on the moon to readers all across New York City.
The New York Sun was a new and burgeoning daily broadsheet newspaper in the Big Apple, having begun publication only two years previously in 1833. Along with the venerable New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune, editors at the Sun sought desperately for new and innovative ways to make their paper the most widely read, and well respected, daily newspaper in the City, if not the entire United States in the mid 1830’s.
Most probably, those editors who were in charge of the New York Sun at the time knew all along that the Great Moon Hoax was just that, a hoax, or perhaps as later admitted by many, they ran the feature articles as a form of nineteenth century satire, but without a doubt, it was hoped by all those who worked for the Sun that the feature articles would increase circulation for their new newspaper, and as it turned, the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 did just that, and established the Sun, with its cheaper workingman’s price of only a penny a paper as perhaps New York City’s most popular broadsheet by the end of the decade.
The discovery of life on the moon was credited to Sir John Herschel who at the time was a well known British scientist and the world’s most respected astronomer. Herschel lived from 1792 to 1871 and was known for a variety of scientific investigations into physics, chemistry and biology. He was a polymath who did, in fact, conduct almost daily astronomical observations from observatories near Edinburgh in Scotland (not from the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa as reported by the New York Sun) utilizing his own high powered telescopes. Today, Sir John Herschel is perhaps best remembered as the inventor of the modern architectural blueprint.
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| Sir John Herschel |
Over the course of the last week in August 1835, beginning on the 25th of that month, the New York Sun ran a different article each day for a total of six consecutive days, that detailed different aspects of civilization on the moon’s surface that Herschel had observed through his supposedly newly invented special high powered telescope.
Each successive article became more and more detailed as the feature was run in the next day’s issue of the New York Sun.
The first articles contained descriptions of animals that had been observed on the surface of the moon including creatures that resembled giant goats and enormous bison.
This was followed by an article that detailed an outlandish lunar creature that was described as a prehistoric sized tailless beaver.
There were reports of unicorns flying on the moon and of lush tropical forests and beaches and jungle habitats.
Finally, the series of week-long feature articles culminated in a pages long segment that detailed the existence of an intelligent civilization of half-bat and half-man creatures, real-life batmen of the 19th century if you will, who ruled the moon and governed from a gigantic amphitheater, their own ‘Moon Temple’ that was apparently considered the moon’s holiest and most sacred sites.
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| Moon Creatures as Described by the Sun |
A description of a lunar temple in all of its glory ended the series of feature articles about life on the moon.
The New York Sun reported in the first feature article that it ran supposedly pertaining to astronomer Sir John Herschel’s discoveries that each observation had been made with an, “Immensely powerful new telescope that operated with an entirely new principle.”
Direct authorship for the articles that were published by the Sun, courtesy of the Edinburgh Courant was attributed to a traveling companion of Sir John Herschel named Dr. Andrew Gant, a Scottish scientist who had supposedly worked with Herschel on the lunar observations that had been made from his Cape of Good Hope observatory.
Only days after the articles were printed in the pages of the New York Sun a statement was issued by Sir John Herschel and published in all the leading newspapers of Scotland, and Great Britain of the time, and in many of the United Kingdom’s leading scientific journals as well, in which he categorically asserted that he had never made any observation of any living creature on the moon’s surface and in which he also asserted that he had never, in his life, met any man by the name of Andrew Gant.
It didn’t matter.
Once other papers caught wind of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 they almost instantly picked up on the story as well. Both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune ran similar stories about Herschel and Gant’s lunar discoveries within days of the Sun’s reporting.
Periodicals as far away as Italy and Poland published descriptions of life on the moon along with detailed drawings of the humanoid bat-like creatures that Herschel and Gant had supposedly observed through their high-powered telescope.
After a week of publishing a new article each day, the Sun was forced to report that all observations and new discoveries pertaining to life on the moon by Herschel and his team had to come to an abrupt and tragic halt because Herschel’s observatory located at the tip of the Cape of Good Hope in southernmost Africa had, “[B]urned to the ground after the heat of the sun had coursed through the concave lens of his telescope and ignited an enormous conflagration.”
So successful was the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 that it would go on to inspire details in the science fiction literature of such legendary authors as H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, each of whom would borrow heavily during the latter half of the 19th century from the archives of the New York Sun’s reporting that sparked the Great Moon Hoax to help furnish details in their other-worldly sci-fi novels.
Finally, perhaps fearing some sort of legal retribution on the part of Sir John Herschel, or perhaps realizing that their stunt though it may indeed have increased newspaper circulation might have at least gotten somewhat out of control, by the end of September the New York Sun issued a complete retraction of the Moon Hoax articles, stating that they had only been published as a form of scientific satire and were never meant to truly be believed by anyone at all.
Neither famed astronomer Sir John Herschel, nor his fictitious compatriot Dr. Andrew Gant were the real authors of the Great Moon Hoax articles, but rather, that honor goes to a man named Richard A. Locke.
During the 1830’s Richard A. Locke was a struggling middle-aged author and part time reporter for the New York Sun, who bordered, quite possibly on being an atheist or an agnostic. Locke was alarmed at what he considered to be the religiosity that he saw infiltrating modern scientific research at the time, since the start of the 19th century was a time of great Christian revival and reawakening in the United States.
As written in The Sun and the Moon by researcher and scientific historian Mathew Goodman, “For many years Locke explained that he had been deeply concerned by the popularity of what he referred to as, ‘The imaginative school of philosophy and its damaging effects on science.’” (Goodman, Basic Books, 2008)
Obviously, as it turned out, Locke’s attempt at satire and his criticism of the so-called ‘Imaginative school’ of natural philosophy backfired. Almost everyone, other than those already incredulous men and women who were highly educated and steeped in a highly technical scientific background at the time, whole-heartedly believed in the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 and many of them could not be dissuaded from their belief in the existence of civilized life on the moon no matter how many retractions the editors of the Sun chose to publish.
Richard A. Locke may have written the articles that launched the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 as a reaction against the fundamentalist religious revival that took place in 1830’s America. He may have intended his articles to be nothing more than enlightening and harmless satire, but as it were, the New York Sun willfully chose to publish the articles knowing full well that they were false, but containing no disclaimer as to their authenticity, simply to boost their young newspaper’s sales and notoriety.
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| Richard A. Locke |
In the end the Sun did dramatically boost its sales and the New York Sun remained a popular daily newspaper in New York City until well into the 1950’s. Surprisingly though, and perhaps unexpectedly, many people ended up believing whole-heartedly in the authenticity of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.
Perhaps they believed simply because they wanted to believe, or perhaps they believed because in an ever changing society the idea of life on the moon seemed not only plausible but entirely possible at the time.
Today, as the United States seeks to launch Artemis I into orbit and land once again on the lunar surface in the hopes that we as a nation can, within the next decade, use the moon as a base from which to launch humankind’s first manned mission to Mars, perhaps one day sooner than we all think, society may once again be gripped by its own new present-day form of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835.
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