1776

I love a good hoax story. On August 25th, 1835, the New York Sun published the first in a series of six articles about the discovery of life on the moon. This was made possible “by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle”.

The creatures discovered included elk, biped beavers, horned bears, bison, and bat-men.

They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead. The mouth, however, was very prominent, though somewhat relieved by a thick beard upon the lower jaw, and by lips far more human than those of any species of the simia genus.

The articles were the work of reporter Richard A. Locke, and may have been intended as satire.

The circulation of the paper rose as people read about the sapphire temples, forests, and creatures that the telescope was able to show.

The lunar observations were ended when the imaginary telescope was mistakenly left exposed at sunrise. It concentrated the sun’s rays and burned hole in the observatory fifteen feet in circumference.

The last resembles the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet. It carries its young in its arms like a human being, and moves with an easy gliding motion. Its huts are constructed better and higher than those of many tribes of human savages, and from the appearance of smoke in nearly all of them, there is no doubt of its being acquainted with the use of fire.

On September 16th, 1835, the Sun sort of admitted that the articles were false. “Certain correspondents have been urging us to come out and confess the whole to be a hoax; but this we can by no means do, until we have the testimony of the English or Scotch papers to corroborate such a declaration.”

Google Books has a reprint of all the articles, titled The Moon Hoax, or A Discovery that the Moon has a Vast Population of Human Beings, which is embedded below.

Near the upper extremity of one of these islands we obtained a glimpse of a strange amphibious creature, of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach, and was lost sight of in the strong current which set off from this angle of the island.

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