The Moon and space exploration are magnets for fake news.
August 2022, a prominent French physicist discovers a star later admits it was a piece of chorizo.
July 1969. Man lands on the moon.
Or didn't, according to conspiracy theorists.
But before any of this, it was August 1835 that launched
the most imaginative moon hoax of them all.
And it was this time, when the world looked up at the moon,
they saw an entirely new lunar landscape
that would change humanity as we know it. Lift
off, we have a
lift-off. There s was a journey like no other,
for they were the first to set foot on the lunar surface.
The eagle has landed. It all began in Scotland,
where the story cited its source from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The headline read Great Astronomical Discoveries,
made by prominent astronomer Sir John Herschel,
who at the time was at a remote field trip in South Africa.
And for the first time in history, by means of a remarkable new telescope,
he was able to glimpse life fantastical on the moon.
The New York Sun published a series of six articles claiming
that life had been discovered on the moon.
Life, including unicorns and beavers that walked on their hind legs.
The crowning touch of it, was the discovery of the so-called man-bat.
The Vespertillio Homo was supposedly the Latin name.
These remarkable four foot tall creatures who flew and talked
and built temples and did art and apparently fornicated in public.
Let's stop here.
In case you missed that, he did say man bats
on the moon fornicating in public and people actually believed it.
The series caused a tremendous sensation.
It was reprinted in rival newspapers.
By some estimates, 90% of the people in New York City believed it.
And by the time that the hoax was over,
the New York sun was the most widely read newspaper in the world.
But it turns out Sir John Herschel did not make these astronomical discoveries,
nor were they reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The two key players behind these fabricated lunar discoveries
were New York Sun's publisher Benjamin Day,
and New York Sun's editor Richard Adams Locke.
The two men tested their moon legs
and began setting their scientific experiments.
The New York Sun was one of the first penny papers.
Its publisher, Benjamin Day, set out to create
a tabloid paper affordable for everyone,
with means of advertising cheaper and faster steam-powered printing methods.
Papers plummeted from $0.06 to $0.01 before the penny price papers were
subscription-based and marketed to the elite.
The penny papers were hawked on the street by paper boys
and available to everyone.
Richard Adams
Locke had created the most successful newspaper hoax of all time,
but he had not intended it as a hoax.
And while this was a successful fake news story for Day,
it was a satire gone wrong for Locke.
But to understand why people believed this fantastical story meant
as a satire, we need to see what was happening back down on earth.
New York 1830s. New York was divided between pro-slavery and anti-slavery.
Violent anti-slavery riots had hit the streets.
People were hungry to escape the civil unrest. The remedy?
To the moon. And while people looked to the skies,
religion was also having a second awakening.
The astronomers of the time were religious astronomers,
and the general belief among the astronomers was
that all of the heavenly bodies were populated
because God would not have created these worlds
without also creating intelligent beings there to appreciate them.
And one of the popular astronomers was Thomas Dick.
He was the Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson of the day.
And he believed there was a population on the moon
of over four billion creatures.
Now, Richard Adams Locke found this all preposterous.
He felt that this was religion impinging on the free play of science.
And so what he decided he was going to do was to write a series
of articles that lampooned the beliefs of these religious astronomers.
And he said, If you believe that there are Lunarians, creatures on the moon,
I will give you lunar man bats.
And if you believe that there are seas full of water on the moon,
I will give you seas full of water on the moon.
And meanwhile, I will dress it all up in the kind of
high flown scientific rhetoric that you use just to expose your ideas.
And while Scientific Locke play devil's advocate,
little did he know God's work was already done.
What he had not anticipated, and this is the great irony of the moon hoax,
was that the people of New York and subsequently of America generally,
had been so schooled in the ideas of these religious astronomers
that when these articles came out, they simply believed them.
They simply believed that they were true because it was so much like
what they had already been reading.
And to add to the irony, religious groups started
raising money to get Bibles up to the moon.
This was not something that he had anticipated at all.
He was in a great deal of distress because he knew that it wasn't true,
and yet he did not feel that he had the right to reveal this
because the series belonged to his publisher.
The New York Sun wanted to profit as much as they possibly could,
and so they put out a lithograph.
They hired a local artist to create a drawing of the lunar landscape
based on the remarkably detailed descriptions that Locke had given.
But then what happened was that the series became republished not just
in America, but all over the world.
And so if you go back and look at these 19th-century editions, you see
lunar man-bats in all kinds of artistic styles.
Today, it's impossible to escape fake news.
In 2017, Fake News was even named Word of the Year.
But fake news is not a new phenomena.
This story went viral before social media, Internet, TV, radio.
And whether you believe in science or religion,
we all want a ticket to the moon. And when we get there,
we want to see two-legged beavers and unicorns and men bats.
Because after all, the moon is a strange place for men to be flying to.