The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

The article clamed that Herschel made the discovery with a powerful new telescope which had been installed in the observatory a year earlier and published his findings in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had in fact ceased to exist a number of years previous.   

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The life forms supposedly found included goats, unicorns, two-legged beavers and bat-like, temple building humanoids complete with fur and wings.  Grant’s article also gave a vivid description of the moon itself, describing it as having craters, huge amethyst crystals, rivers and lush vegetation.

The New York Sun was founded in 1833 and was one of a new breed of paper known as the ‘penny press papers’, that quickly became popular because of they were cheap and had a new style of narrative journalism; from the day of the release of the first instalment of the hoax, sales of the newspaper rose considerably.

The articles are believed to have been written by Richard Adams Locke, a reporter for the Sun who probably intended it as satire designed to mock, amongst others, Reverend Thomas Dick, known as  ”The Christian Philosopher” after the title of his first book.  Dick, a famous science writer, clamed that the solar system contained over 21 trillion living beings and that the moon probably had around 4.2 billion inhabitants of one sort or another. 

Another astronomer that was probably being ridiculed was Professor Franz von Paula Gruithuisen of Munich University.  In his 1824 paper entitled ‘Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings’. Gruithuisen claimed to have observed evidence of intelligent life on the moon in the form of vegetation zones and geometric shapes and lines that he interpreted as walls, roads, buildings and cities.

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The public failed to see the satire and large numbers believed the story to be true.  Reporters at the Sun even managed to fool a group of visiting Yale University scientists, who travelled to New York to find out more about the ‘discovery’.

The Sun came clean on September 16th 1835 and the hoax was regarded with general amusement by the public.  Herschel was himself amused at the hoax to begin with, but later became annoyed at having to answer questions on it from people who still believed it to be real.  Sales were not affected and the newspaper continued to operate until 1950, when it merged with the New York World Telegram, a merger that folded seventeen years later.