The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: How New York Fell for Bat-Winged Lunar Men

On August thirtieth in eighteen thirty five, readers across New York City were in the grip of a fever that had nothing to do with any actual disease and everything to do with the moon. The New York Sun newspaper was in the middle of publishing a sensational series of articles claiming that the renowned astronomer Sir John Herschel had built an enormous new telescope in South Africa, one so powerful that he could observe the surface of the moon in astonishing detail. By this point in the series, readers had already been told about lunar forests, inland seas, herds of bison wandering across the gray plains, strange blue unicorn like creatures, and even pelicans and cranes soaring through what was supposedly a breathable lunar atmosphere. On this very day, the story was building toward its most incredible claim yet, the discovery of bat winged humanoid creatures the paper called Vespertilio homo, described as intelligent beings who built structures, seemed to converse with one another, and lived in a strange golden lit paradise on the lunar surface.

What makes this such a fascinating piece of unexplained territory is not the moon men themselves, since we now know with total certainty they never existed and the entire series was a hoax cooked up by a writer named Richard Adams Locke. What remains genuinely puzzling, even to historians and psychologists today, is the sheer scale and intensity of the coll