The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where “Fake News” Began

Think­ing back to the many child­hood gro­cery-store trips made with their par­ents, Amer­i­cans of a cer­tain age will remem­ber noth­ing so vivid­ly as the Week­ly World News. It always stood out on the check­out stand’s impulse-buy rack, in part because of its adher­ence to stark yet jum­bled black-and-white cov­er designs even as all the oth­er mag­a­zines grew slick­er and sim­pler. But what real­ly caught our young and impres­sion­able eyes had even more to do with the con­trast between the sur­round­ing pub­li­ca­tions’ mun­dane cov­er­age of home, fam­i­ly, and celebri­ty and the WWN’s unfail­ing­ly, scream­ing­ly out­landish head­lines: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S LOVE SLAVE!” “WILD WEST TOWN ON VENUS!” “BAT BOY LEADS COPS ON 3 STATE CHASE!”

For many of us, the temp­ta­tion to buy (or at least flip through) an issue of the WWN lay in keep­ing up with the exploits of Bat Boy, the most promi­nent of many fic­tion­al char­ac­ters to which its extrav­a­gant­ly lurid yet odd­ly sober sto­ries returned again and again. Though intro­duced only in 1992, he has notable ances­tors in his indus­try: take the “Ves­per­tilio-homo,” or “man-bat,” a race found to have made its home on the moon in 1835.

Or at least that’s what the read­ers of New York news­pa­per the Sun were told in a series of illus­trat­ed arti­cles, lat­er col­lect­ed in book form, that cred­it­ed the dis­cov­ery to the astronomer Sir John Her­schel. Her­schel was real, but as the Sun admit­ted the fol­low­ing month, the Ves­per­tilio-homo was­n’t — nor were the uni­corn-goats, minia­ture zebras, and beavers walk­ing on their hind legs report­ed­ly also seen through his tele­scope.

The “Great Moon Hoax,” as it’s now known, and about which you can learn more from the BBC video at the top of the post, was­n’t Her­schel’s doing. A reporter called Richard Adams Locke admit­ted to the fab­ri­ca­tion, seem­ing­ly moti­vat­ed by a desire to boost the cir­cu­la­tion of the Sun, one of the many “pen­ny paper” tabloids of the day that lived and died by sen­sa­tion and scan­dal, and also to make light of the extrav­a­gant astro­nom­i­cal claims then in the air. Much like the writ­ers of the Week­ly World News — or lat­er, the Onion — Locke want­ed less to fool read­ers than to enter­tain them by sat­i­riz­ing an over-cred­u­lous pop­u­lar cul­ture. Yet what he pio­neered was, quite lit­er­al­ly, “fake news,” though that label by now refers to media cre­at­ed with clear intent to deceive. The world has changed since the eigh­teen-thir­ties, and indeed, even since Bat Boy’s late twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry hey­day, when the WWN pre­dict­ed his elec­tion as Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States in 2028. Stranger things have cer­tain­ly hap­pened.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed con­tent:

“Moon Hoax Not”: Short Film Explains Why It Was Impos­si­ble to Fake the Moon Land­ing

The 1957 “Spaghet­ti-Grows-on-Trees” Hoax: One of TV’s First April Fools’ Day Pranks

The Birth of the Moon: How Did It Get There in the First Place?

A Field Guide to Fake News and Oth­er Infor­ma­tion Dis­or­ders: A Free Man­u­al to Down­load, Share & Re-Use

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.