Before clickbait headlines and conspiracy YouTubers, there was The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Join us as we talk lunar lies, Victorian media chaos, and a fake discovery so elaborate it makes some modern conspiracy theories look tame. All that, and one astronomer who just wanted to mind his own telescope.
I’ll start you off with this video from the BBC that talks about the details of the Great Moon Hoax.
This really just tells you what the Great Moon Hoax is in a very short and sweet way.
Let’s do some pictures.
This was the telescope that Herschel was building down in South Africa, and you can see it was huge, but not as big as people said it was, and not big enough to see the moon in the detail the articles said.
And in this slideshow, you can see the creatures and environment the articles were claiming existed on the moon.
In this article, it looks at when the then-newspaper, The New York Sun, published wildly sensational “reports” of life on the moon attributed to Sir John Herschel. The write-up argues the hoax wasn’t only a prank or marketing stunt, but rather, it played on contemporary fears, racial ideas and pseudoscientific beliefs, recasting lunar creatures in ways that echoed social prejudices of the day. In doing so, it helped transform print media, prioritizing sensational stories, a shift the article links to the origins of “fake news” in modern media.
This JSTOR article does basically the same thing as the last article but in a more academic, peer-reviewed way. So if you want a deeper look into how The Sun was playing on fears of the time and the penny press model was the early basis of the fake news of modern days, you can read this.
This paper is also a more academic look at the whole hoax but it’s free to access whereas the JSTOR article is something behind a paywall or academic account. So this, rather than simply labeling it a bizarre piece of fake science, treats the Hoax as a defining moment in early American journalism, one that reveals how much the penny press catered to readers’ appetite for sensational stories. By tracing the social, cultural and scientific context of the time, the essay argues the Hoax helped spark a conversation about what constituted “news,” truth, and entertainment in a mass-media world.
This one talks about what it is and has a few pictures in it, but it also talks about the connection between Edgar Allen Poe and Locke and the little sidetrack I talked about in this episode that has to do with those two and the other hoax that happened shortly after the Moon Hoax.
These are all six of the original articles that were published by The Sun. They are a little long and sometimes dense to read, but really interesting.
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