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The Great Moon Hoax Of 1835 That Made People Believe in Bat Men
A newspaper tried to gain more readers with a fantastic series of articles designed as satire, but many thought it was real
Sometimes a successful hoax starts with convincing a small number of people that something that is made up is actually true. From there, it can snowball into a scale of unimaginable proportions. That’s what happened with the Great Moon Hoax of 1835, where a series of newspaper articles purporting that an entire society of people had been discovered on the moon led to widespread intrigue and exaltation before it was finally debunked as fake.
Beginning on August 25, 1835, The Sun, a newspaper out of New York, published the first in a series of six articles about life that had been reportedly found on the moon. This wasn’t just signs of life, but a full-fledged civilization of people who lived in far-away view of earth. The alleged discoveries were said to be a result of the work of Dr. Andrew Grant, a supposed colleague of Sir John Herschel, one of the leading astronomers in the world at the time. However, it turned out that he was not actually affiliated with this in any way.
The resulting articles were referred to as being reprinted from the respected Edinburgh Currant and described…
