The Story

On August 25, 1835, a daily newspaper in New York City called The Sun published the first installment of an extraordinary six-part series that would forever change how we think about the limits of public belief.

Imagine picking up your morning paper, breathing in the scent of fresh, damp ink, and reading that the mysteries of the cosmos have finally been solved. The Sun claimed that Sir John Herschel, a highly respected British astronomer and the son of Sir William Herschel (the legendary scientist who discovered the planet Uranus in 1781), had set up a massive, revolutionary telescope in South Africa. With this magnificent brass instrument, Herschel had supposedly peered deep into the lunar landscape, resolving objects on the Moon as clearly as if they were just a hundred yards away.

But the paper did not stop at craters and basalt plains. It gave the public what it truly craved: life. The articles painted a lush, vibrant picture of a lunar paradise. Readers gasped at descriptions of miniature bison-like brown quadrupeds roaming the valleys, playful goat-like creatures with the mischievous personalities of kittens, and elegant, long-beaked cranes wading through crystal streams. Most shocking of all were the winged, intelligent humanoids who flew through the thin lunar air and built magnificent temples of sapphire and gold, looking less like birds and more like a cross between humans and bats.

The mastermind behind this brilliant piece of science fiction was Richard Adams Locke, a British writer who had recently joined the staff of The Sun. At the time, the struggling newspaper was selling only 8,000 copies daily, lagging far behind its larger rivals. Locke needed a sensation to boost sales, but he also had a deeper, more mischievous goal. He intended the articles to be a biting parody of Thomas Dick, a popular Scottish minister and amateur astronomer who wrote best-selling books arguing that the Moon and other planets were densely populated by living souls.

To Locke's surprise, the satire flew right over the public's head. People did not laugh; they believed. While some modern retellings claim the famous New York Times fell for the trick, that is historically impossible since the modern New York Times was not even founded until 1851. However, an entirely unrelated 1830s newspaper of the same name did eagerly cover the story, describing the alleged lunar discoveries as both possible and plausible.

Among the skeptics was the brilliant and often bitter American author Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was deeply frustrated because he believed Locke had stolen the spotlight from his own serialized story about a man traveling to the Moon in a balloon. Yet, Poe could not help but admire Locke's sheer genius and realistic writing style. Poe later wrote that the public's gullibility was astounding, noting that a serious mathematics professor at a university in Virginia told him he had absolutely no doubt the Moon discoveries were entirely true. Poe eventually decided if you cannot beat them, join them. In 1844, Poe published his own successful newspaper hoax in the New York Sun, convincing readers of a miraculous, three-day balloon journey across the vast Atlantic Ocean.

Whether it is bat-men on the Moon, transatlantic balloon trips, or simulated Martian invasions, our appetite for the unbelievable seems hardwired into our nature. We want to believe that the world, and the sky above us, is far more magical and mysterious than our everyday lives suggest. And as long as we keep looking up at the stars with wide-eyed wonder, there will always be a clever storyteller waiting to sell us a piece of the Moon.