The Great Moon Hoax of 1835, Part 2

As the New York Sun's series of astonishing moon discoveries concluded, most people recognized that it was a hoax. But what made people buy into the tall tale in the first place? Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Polly Fry and I'm
Tracy Vie Wilson. And today is the second part of
our two part episode on a series that ran in
the New York Sun in August of detailing some incredible

(00:27):
and amazing discoveries that have been made by viewing the
lunar surface through a brand new type of telescope created
by Sir John Herschel. It had discussed at some length
bison that had been seen, Flora goat like unicorns, and
in the last chunk that we talked about before we

(00:49):
cliff fung the first episode bat people right, and also
the bipedal beavers with no tales that carried their babies
around like human babies. Yeah. I was telling our producer
Nol that I want to start a band called Lunar
Beavers because that's funny to me. I don't have any
musical talent, but I'm going to do it just the same.

(01:12):
I figure I can at least make band t shirts. Right,
It's a great idea. So now we're going to pick
up with the fifth entry in this sixth part series.
Uh and we will go on to describe it and
the sixth part UH and what they contain, and then
we will talk about sort of the cultural context of
all of this and how it affected people. The fifth

(01:35):
entry in this series appeared in UH in the newspaper
on Saturday, August twenty nine, and this one started with
the description of three oceans on the surface of the Moon,
which were visible even with the puniest of telescopes. That
also described seven seas and innumerable smaller bodies of water. Additionally,

(01:56):
there were all matter of outcroppings that the astronomers really
started to struggle to name because there's not really a
comparable geography on Earth. And while they were surveying all
of these lunar attributes, and again this is after they
had just this is the the following session, after they
had discovered these bat people, UH, the astronomers identified an

(02:21):
unusual architectural figure in the landscape. So they paused for
a moment and they adjusted their instruments lenses in its
setting so that they could take a closer look at it.
What they discovered was a triangle shaped temple that was
made entirely of sapphire or some other bluestone that closely
resembled Sapphire. The temple had numerous massive columns around its

(02:44):
outside edges that were estimated to be six feet or
one point eight meters wide and seventy ft twenty one tall.
These columns were spaced at about twelve feet or three
point seven ms apart. Yeah, and when we say triangle shaped,
what we mean is the footprint of it was triangle shaped.
It wasn't a pyramid. It was kind of like if

(03:04):
you were looking at it from above, it was a triangle,
but it rose like a column UH in the sum
of its parts. And it was according to Dr Andrew Grant,
who you will recall if you listen to the first
part was the assistant to UH, Sir John Herschel, who
was relaying this information to UH in Edinburgh Scientific Journal
and sharing these notes with the press. And he said

(03:26):
that this was quite a beautiful structure. The roof was
a golden metal, and it appeared to mimic the look
of flames, and within the flames, as though it was
being consumed by them, was a sphere that the astronomers
have observed that looked as though it were made of
a clouded copper. And on each of the temple's three
corners was a smaller sphere of what appeared to be

(03:48):
the same copper material. A scroll made from the same
metal as the flames unfurled from the roof over the
upper walls of the building, and the temple was open
and airy. There weren't really any additional walls. Are are
altars um that existed in addition to all these columns.
With the inclusion of the flame ornamentation on the top,

(04:09):
they estimated that it was almost a hundred feet or
thirty meters high. There were no man, bats, or other
humanoid moon beings at the temple, only birds. And this
fifth entry pretty much just describes this temple uh. And
then it concludes with speculation about the meaning of the

(04:29):
temple and its flame symbolism. It asked the question quote,
did they, by this record any past calamity of their
world or predict any future one of ours. The sixth
and final entry in the New York Sun's Lunar series
was printed on Monday, August one. Yes, so that at

(04:50):
this point they've run basically for a week uh, not
far from the temple discussed in the fifth entry, which
they referred to as the veil of the triad. The
astronomers saw similar beings to their man bats that they
had talked about in the fourth entry, which they had
named Vespertilio homo. These creatures, however, were a lot larger

(05:12):
and they were lighter colored than the ones that they
had seen in the Ruby Colosseum. Doctor Grant claimed that
these man bats were quote an improved variety of the race.
The team observed these larger man bats eating yellow gourd
like fruits and then sucking the juice from a red
fruit that was sort of shaped like a cucumber. Uh.

(05:33):
The astronomers observed these creatures and their group dynamics, and
they noted how polite they seemed to be in terms
of their society and their seeming serenity overall. They also
observed eight or nine previously unseen quadruped species, including a
really elegant stag like beast that had a white coat
and black antlers. Grant commented on the way that all

(05:57):
of the beings of the moon seemed to cohabitate peacefully
with out any sort of predator prey kind of relationship,
which kind of contradicts the earlier accounts where they decided
that there must be fish in the water because the
birds were diving for them. Yeah, that's not brought up
again at all, um And at this point, uh, they

(06:19):
sort of it's a shorter observational period. They kind of
conclude the day's observation. However, this is not the end
of this sixth entry in the newspaper series. After gawking
at all of this amazing stuff and the more advanced
man bats of the moon, the astronomers wrapped up for
the night by accidentally failing to correctly lower the lens

(06:41):
and place it horizontally. They lowered it, but they left
it in a perpendicular position, and consequently, Uh, the observatory
that Herschel and his team had constructed caught fire because
of the light that continued to reflect in the telescope
because it hadn't been laid down flat. So while the
structure and its contents were safe, there was a massive

(07:04):
hole that had been burned in the reflecting chamber of
the observatory, and that's why everything was abruptly cut short.
Of course, workmen were hired for a rush repair job,
according to this account by Grant, and within a week
the telescope and its supporting elements were once again fit
to do their work. But unfortunately, at that point the

(07:24):
moon had moved out of observable position and it wouldn't
come back again for a bit. What follows is a
whole section where the telescope was then turned to Saturn
and its rings, and the account detailed various things about
that celestial body rather than the moon, which is all
a very fascinating read, but we're going to keep focused
to the moon stuff for UH for this UH. And

(07:47):
by the time the moon had moved back into an
observable position UH, Grants notes indicated that Herschel was still
really deep in his Saturn studies, so that he couldn't
quite refocus back to the moon. And yet but doctor
Grant and the other two assistants that were there did
decide to take another peak at the moon, and at
this point the three found an even more beautiful group

(08:09):
of Vespertilio homo, which seemed to have a ceremonial social
structure which was similar to what they had seen among
the bat people near the Sapphire Temple, and an even
more advanced proclivity for producing art. But that's where the
account of doctor Grant ends he said he wished to

(08:29):
quote let the first detailed account of them appear in
Dr Herschel's authenticated Natural History of this planet, which is
so kind of him. Did not want to steal the spotlight. So, uh,
we are going to talk next about how the world
of felt about all of this Moon talk and these

(08:51):
amazing and fantastical discoveries. But before we do, we're going
to pause for a word from a sponsor. Okay, So
back to uh the New York Sun's published accounts based
on the notes of doctor Grants of the things they
had seen on the Moon as part of Sir John
Herschel's expedition. Uh So, this newspaper series featured a Moon

(09:16):
filled with lush landscapes of crystals and poppies, fauna similar
to bison, unicorn, and sheep, and a relatively advanced race
of bat people. Uh So, you are probably wondering what
on Earth did the public make of all this? And
the short answer was people were really excited. They debated

(09:37):
over the veracity of these reports from the lunar surface.
There were lectures given and open panels to discuss the
implications of this new finding of life on the Moon
and other news outlets started picking up the story even
before all of the installments had been published, so like
by the second one, they began to reprint this and
within weeks the tale of Lunar civilization had really kind

(10:00):
of traveled around the world. Uh as one outlet picked
it up and shared it with another, etcetera, etcetera. The
Sun made a nice chunk of cash from this hoax.
The readership numbers might have bumped up a little, but
the paper also sold really popular pamphlets about the discoveries,
prints of artist renderings of the various elements that have
been described in the series, and that included the solar

(10:22):
temple and the back people. Yeah, those images are fantastic.
I love them um And in terms of context in
the greater cultural landscape. A decade before the Great Moon Hoax,
German professor at Munich University had published a paper that
translates to discovery of many distinct traces of lunar inhabitants,
especially of one of their colossal buildings. And this one

(10:45):
was not intended as a hoax. That discusses the multicolored
patches of the moon and how they might relate to gradations. Uh.
How those gradations might relate to possible different climate zones,
different crops, and perhaps even different cities and man made structures.
Just a few months before The New York Sun ran

(11:06):
this story, there was also an Edgar Allen Post short
story that came out called The Unparalleled Adventure of One
Hans Fall And that had been published in the Southern
Literary Messenger. This was the story of a man's return
to Holland that when he was filled with stories of
a balloon adventure that had taken him to the moon.

(11:26):
This had been intended, as was the case for satire
at the time, to fool at least some of its readers,
but Post story was quickly recognized as fiction by typical
readers most of the time. Further, the Southern Literary Messenger
had a really small circulation, whereas The New York Sun
had a much larger readership. Yeah, some of the numbers

(11:47):
that you'll see, uh word like in the nineteen thousands
for distribution. There is some debate about what the true
numbers were and how much of that was a bump
from this story, but thousand versus a much smaller group
that we're reading uh the Southern Literary Messenger, and whether
the Hans Fall Taiale inspired this lengthy fae scientific series

(12:10):
of notes that The Sun published. We don't know for
certain uh it's certainly entirely possible that both were developed independently,
But this was a time when an expedition like Herschel's
trip to South Africa, which was a real thing to observe.
Haley's comment, was big news and astronomy and the possibility
of life on other worlds were really sparking the imaginations

(12:32):
of the general public. And in fact, forty years earlier,
Sir John Herschel's father, William Herschel, had published a paper
speculating about life on other planets. So this was a
topic that was kind of rumbling through culture already. The
Sun's series had been really carefully designed to capitalize on
all that interest in space and life on other worlds,

(12:54):
and all of that It was grounded in true thanks
to the use of Herschel's name and his very well
reported trip research trip to Cape Town. It developed slowly,
first establishing all of the scientific instruments that were being
used in the research, and then it unwound the details
of these lunar wonders bit by bit, and while you

(13:16):
will hear and read. If you look at many historians
treatment of this, different accounts of really how this kind
of uh came out in terms of numbers of like
what proportion of the population believed it versus what didn't.
At least for the first several installments, it seemed that
a lot of people did believe these claims, or were
at least sort of wanted to believe them enough to

(13:38):
think about them of flora and fauna that were being
observed with this amazing fictional telescope. But the fourth installment,
so that's where they introduced these bat people, uh, went
a little too far past believability for a lot of readers.
That kind of tipped the scale of like, uh, you've
gone too far now. By the time the fifth entry

(14:00):
was published, most of the other papers had started denouncing
the entirety of this series as a hoax. Richard Adams Lock,
a British journalist who had moved to America, was accused
of penning the faux discovery narrative. Block had been hired
as an editor of the Sun just two months before
this hoax began, and Locke actually addressed these accusations with

(14:21):
a nebulous denial letter that he wrote to the New
York Herald on August thirty one, so that was the
same day that the last installment of the tale was
published in the New York Sun. And in this letter
Locke wrote, quote, 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

(14:43):
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. A
Philadelphia paper reprinted Locke's letter along with an advertisement for
real estate auction to sell off newly discovered property identified

(15:04):
by Sir John Herschel, the sale of which could include
the native one horn sheep with the fleshy lid flaps
if the buyer so desired. Yeah. So, some people were
definitely kind of picking up the joke and running with
it in their own ways. Uh. And even though at
this point it clearly seemed to all be one big
lark and most people had accepted it as such, there

(15:25):
were still people who believed the accounts. Plus there was
this added complication, remember we're talking about a hundred and
eighty years ago, that in some places the news of
the discovery had spread, but the follow up hoax discussions
had not, So they were only getting the accounts as

(15:46):
though they were real. They had not had any of
the follow up talk that was going on in other papers.
Of course, there was no doctor Andrew Grant who had
been traveling and working with Sir John Herschel. He was
completely made up, but hers did exist, and he had
been working on a new telescope, and he did travel
to the Cape of Good Hope in eighteen thirty four.

(16:07):
It was on that trip that he made some important
observations of how he's comments, So that little tiny kernel
of truth fueled the fires of belief as this whole
hoax played out, and Edgar Allen Poe believed that Locke
was the author of the Great Moon Hoax as the
serial came to be known. It certainly wasn't published that way,
but later on people started calling it that, and he

(16:29):
suggested that Locke had actually stolen the Hans Fall idea
and reworked it, and after almost ten years of complaining
about this, as though it had been a slight to him.
Poe wrote another story which was entitled The Balloon Hoax.
And this is about an intensely speedy balloon trip across
the Atlantic Ocean. If I'm remembering correctly, it like took
seventy five hours. And this too was a hoax, apparently

(16:50):
inspired by the Great Moon Hoax, and it ended up
being published in The New York Sun. The Balloon Hoax
fooled a lot more people than the story of Hans Fall,
so The New York Sun never retracted this story. It
also never named the true author, although most historians do
believe that it was Locke, and we'll talk about that
more in a moment. While most people and other news

(17:12):
publications seemed unbothered by this, the Sun's primary competitor, The
New York Herald, declared The Sun's printing of the series
to be quote highly improper, wicked, and in fact a
species of impudence swindling. But most people saw it as
basically a clever joke. The reason that most people were
willing to let this hoax go without protests about the

(17:34):
Sun's journalistic integrity and the ethics that they should have
upheld sort of stem from the fact that The New
York Sun was a penny paper. Uh at the time,
there were penny papers, and there were six cent papers,
and six cent papers at the time were aimed at
more discerning readers, usually a little more educated, a little
more high brow, whereas penny papers, uh printed more lurid news.

(17:56):
They would print gossip, they would print crime reports and
murder sheets, and they were aimed at sort of a
wider audience. They just weren't considered on the same level
as the six cent papers. I think this is similar
to the divide between the tabloid format papers and broadsheet
papers today. It is, although penny papers would report real

(18:18):
news as well, but it sort of that leverage to
have a little bit of wits and yeah, yeah, and
tabloids have basically have definitely broken some legitimate stories before uh,
you know you are the classic bat boy cover of
a you know, a tabloid papers is what this whole
story kind of reminds me of. And who doesn't love

(18:41):
that boy. We're gonna talk a little bit more about
Locke and about Sir John Herschel in just a moment,
but before that, we are going to have a quick
word from a sponsor, if that's cool with Racy. Sure so.
Almost five years after The Great Moon Hoax was published,
and after Locke, who as Uh noted to be kind

(19:01):
of a heavy drinker, was said to have confessed his
authorship to various colleagues in the newspaper industry in various
states of intoxication, Locke actually wrote a letter to the
paper New World, and at this point he had returned
to life as a freelance writer. After he left The Son,
he went to another job at the New Era, but
then when he resigned from that, he went back to freelance.

(19:23):
Locke's letter appeared on the front page of The New
World on May sixteenth of eighteen forty, and in it
he said that he had written the Great Moon Hoax,
but that it had not been intended as a hoax.
He claimed that it had been written as satire, intended
to skewer the effect that religion was having on science,
which he believed led to the acceptance of fanciful thinking

(19:45):
over solid truth. And so that would seem to clear
the um the case on whether or not Alack had
written it. However, there is still some debate over whether
he could have even written this series, given the inform
nation about astronomy that can that it contained, and that
some people say he just would not have known. Uh.

(20:06):
It is of course entirely possible that Locke could have
consulted with experts, or that multiple writers worked on these
accounts that they put forward as the work of this
fictional uh Dr Andrew Grant. And it's also entirely conceivable
that Locke may have learned enough about astronomy through his
own reading. He was apparently a very well read man
and sort of a lifelong learner that he could have

(20:29):
written this piece without assistance. So it's not an open
and shut but most people still think Locke did do
the writing. You may be wondering, I know, I was
exactly what Sir John Herschel thought of all of this.
And while all of this work was going down in
the States, Sir John Herschel was still in South Africa
doing actual, legitimate astronomy work. In late eighteen thirty five,

(20:53):
he was given a copy of the narrative that The
Sun had published, which had cited his work, and his
initial react and seemed to be one of amusement. He
said to have remarked that his own actual work would
probably seem quite dull by comparison once it was published.
So even though the initial reception on his part was
pretty jolly, over time that amusement wore right off. Uh.

(21:16):
Several years down the road, he wrote a letter to
his aunt, Caroline Herschel, who was also an astronomer of
some renown. I have been pestered from all quarters with
that ridiculous hoax about the moon in English, French, Italian,
and German. As for the Sun, it continued its circulation
until it merged with the New York World Telegram in

(21:38):
nineteen fifty, and that company eventually went under in nineteen
sixty seven. And that's the great Moon hoax, which I
think I did not credit earlier. But our listener Brian
wrote to us and mentioned this a while back, and
it kind of went on my list, and I've been
eyeballing it ever since. So I'm glad that this was
the week that I carved out time to do it. Yeah.

(22:00):
I um, I was actually out of the office while
you were working on this, and you had emailed me
and said that we were going to talk about the
moon hooks. And I was immediately really excited because I
loved that episode of The Memory Palace that you mentioned
at the top of the episode. If you don't listen
to the Memory Palace, it is quite different from what
we do. They are very short episodes. They usually have

(22:22):
some music that goes along with them in the background,
and it's more like a brief story about something that
happened in history. Um. I find them to be very
lovely and charming, and the one on this is particularly
lovely and charming. Yeah. I like to think of it
as it, uh like history as art podcast. Yeah, there there,

(22:43):
it's really really delightfully done. I like it heaps. Uh.
And now we are going to shift gears to listener mail. Uh.
This email comes from our listener Angie. I'm not going
to read her entire thing, and it actually harkens bent
quite a bit to our Halloween Candy episode, and we've
read a few different emails about it, but this one
just made me laugh so hard that I wanted to

(23:04):
share it. So I'm picking up kind of in the
middle of hers. But she says, I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri,
and in that city, it is tradition read required for
kids to tell a joke when trick or treating, or
else they will not be given any candy at all.
When I was growing up, all the kids have planned
for weeks ahead of time what jokes they would tell
on Halloween night. The jokes are The jokes are usually

(23:26):
really very simple and corny, but it is very important
to have a good one. Here are a couple of
simple examples. Question what kind of music do mummies listen to?
The answer is rap music? The w R A p uh.
The other one is what did the skeletons say to
his friend at dinner? The punchline is bone appetite and

(23:48):
Ay says. For as long as I can remember, on
Halloween night, my mother has stood at the front door
holding her bowl of candy, just out of reach of
the kids, while she pointedly asks each one for their
joke before handing over their candy reward. I even remember
one of our little neighbors, who was probably only three
years old at the time, doing a somersault in the
front yard as a trick because she was too young
to tell a joke. Normally, we do not hold babies

(24:10):
to the same high joke standards as older kids. That
summersault was completely voluntary. Uh. It was not until I
went away to college in New Jersey that I found
out that this was not how Halloween happened throughout the
rest of the country. Before then, I literally had no
clue that St. Louis was an anomaly in this way.
I still remember jokingly asking my freshman your roommates what
their Halloween jokes were going to be that year, only

(24:32):
to be met with blank stairs, followed by laughter and
endless teasing. I love that you can hear me laughing
while I read this. Uh. At Thanksgiving that year, when
I returned home for the holiday break, I compared notes
with my friends who had also left town for college,
and found that many of them had had similar experiences.
I began asking around my family, and none of my
parents or grandparents, all of whom were also born and

(24:54):
raised in the St. Louis area, could remember a time
when jokes were not part of trick or treating, and
they simil literally did not know this tradition was just
the St. Louis thing. I met my husband in college,
and therefore I now permanently live in New Jersey. Now,
when we get tricker treaters at our house each year,
I'm always so tempted to ask them to tell jokes
for the candy, but my husband patiently reminds me that

(25:15):
the kids are coming to that the kids coming to
our door will have no idea what I'm talking about,
so it would be better not to freak them out
by asking. Uh. She found a similar tradition in Des Moines, Iowa. Uh,
but she didn't find anywhere else that it occurs. And
I sort of love this idea. This is my aside
uh of treating a joke for candy. To me, that

(25:36):
seems like a great way. She thinks that it might
be a way that people thought up to deter kids
from causing mischief on Halloween night, which I think is
a perfectly valid theory. Uh, but I love it. I
think kids should all be telling jokes for their candy
on Halloween. Yeah. Well, and I sort of like how
it's a departure from showing up and essentially being like candy.

(25:59):
Like that's why that's what trick or trek means effectively.
I mean, it used to mean trick or treat there
could be a trick involved, but now it basically means
give me candy. Yeah. I think you know, one of
the reasons I wanted to read this now, in the springtime,
far away from Halloween. We could get the ground swell
going on this if we let people know the expectation Now,

(26:20):
kids have months and months to plan their jokes, and
I know at our house my husband gets really furious
when kids show up without a costume, or like older
kids that are just kind of not into it. They're
just there for free candy. But I think if we
got him to tell us jokes, he might go for it.
I don't know why that delights me so much, but
it does. So Thank you so much, Angie, because that

(26:41):
was just a big smile maker. Uh. If you would
like to write to us and share your bizarre candy rituals,
or your thoughts on hooaxes, or your thoughts about the possibility,
then maybe there are poppies and bad people and goat
unicorns on the moon. You can do that at History
Podcast at how Stuffworks dot com. You can also can
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(27:03):
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Type the phrase moon hoax into the search bar and
you will get the article why do some people believe

(27:24):
the mood Landings were a hoax? That's a whole other
moon hoax to talk about. Uh, really more of the
province of Matt and Ben from stuff they don't want
you to know. Uh. But you can also visit us
at Misston history dot com if you would like an
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(27:47):
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