# In 1835 a New York newspaper reported that life had been discovered on the Moon, including winged man-bats

**Verdict: Contradicted.** The Great Moon Hoax was a deliberate fabrication. Over six installments beginning August 25, 1835, the New York Sun claimed the astronomer Sir John Herschel, observing from a giant new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, had catalogued forests, oceans, bison, unicorns, bipedal beavers, and flying 'man-bats' on the Moon. The reports were credited to a fictitious 'Dr. Andrew Grant' and said to be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, a publication that had stopped printing in 1833. There was no such survey and no such discovery. The series is generally attributed to the Sun reporter Richard Adams Locke, who acknowledged authorship in 1840. Herschel had nothing to do with it. It is rated debunked.

Category: Hoaxes & Pop Culture · Era: Jacksonian America · First circulated: August 25, 1835, when the New York Sun ran the first of six articles under the headline 'Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel' · Believed by: Tens of thousands of Sun readers in the late summer of 1835, plus clergy and curiosity-seekers who took the discoveries as real; rival editors and Herschel himself soon treated it as an obvious fabrication
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/great-moon-hoax

## Summary
For six days at the end of August 1835, the New York Sun told its readers that the Moon was alive. Drawing, it said, on the work of the celebrated astronomer Sir John Herschel and a powerful new telescope erected at the Cape of Good Hope, the paper described lunar forests and inland seas, herds of bison, blue single-horned goats, beavers that walked upright and carried fire, and a race of winged humanoids it dubbed Vespertilio-homo, the man-bat. None of it was true. The articles were credited to a nonexistent colleague of Herschel and attributed to a scientific journal that had ceased publication two years earlier. The series is generally attributed to a Sun reporter, Richard Adams Locke, who admitted to it in 1840. The hoax sold papers by the tens of thousands and helped make the Sun the most-read daily in the world, and it has been remembered ever since as a foundational episode of American 'fake news.' This case file lays out what the paper claimed, how the fraud was built and caught, and why so many readers wanted the Moon to be full of life.

## The claim
That in 1835 Sir John Herschel, using an enormous new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, genuinely discovered abundant life on the Moon: vegetation, oceans, lunar bison and unicorns, fire-carrying bipedal beavers, and intelligent winged 'man-bats,' and that the New York Sun was faithfully reporting these real astronomical findings.

## Origin and timeline
- 1833: Benjamin Day launches the New York Sun as a 'penny paper,' cheap, sensational, and aimed at a mass urban readership. Its business model runs on street sales and eye-catching stories rather than costly subscriptions, an incentive structure that rewards spectacle over verification.
- Jan 1834: The real Sir John Herschel, one of the most famous scientists of the age, sails for the Cape of Good Hope in southern Africa to survey the stars of the southern sky. His genuine and widely reported expedition gives the later hoax a real, verifiable anchor to hang its inventions on.
- Jun 1835: Edgar Allan Poe publishes 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,' a tale of a voyage to the Moon by balloon, in the Southern Literary Messenger, roughly two months before the Sun's series. Poe would later accuse the Sun's account of borrowing from his idea.
- Aug 25, 1835: The Sun runs the first of six articles under the banner 'Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel.' The pieces are credited to 'Dr. Andrew Grant,' described as Herschel's travelling companion, and said to be reprinted from a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
- Aug 25–31, 1835: Across the six installments the wonders escalate. The paper describes a telescope of vast magnifying power, then lunar forests, beaches and inland seas, herds of bison, blue single-horned goats and 'unicorns,' bipedal tailless beavers that carry their young and build huts with fire, and finally an intelligent winged species, Vespertilio-homo, the 'man-bat.'
- Late Aug 1835: The Sun's circulation surges, from a daily run in the neighborhood of 8,000 toward roughly 19,000, and the paper trumpets itself as the most widely read daily in the world. Pamphlet reprints of the 'discoveries' sell briskly, and lithographers issue prints of the lunar landscape and its inhabitants.
- Sep 1835: Skeptical editors begin picking the story apart. The most damning point is simple: the Edinburgh Journal of Science, the outlet the Sun cited, had stopped publishing in 1833 and could not have carried the account. Pressed by a rival journalist, Locke is said to have conceded privately that the series was his invention, and by mid-September the fraud is widely acknowledged.
- 1840: Richard Adams Locke publicly admits authorship of the series in a letter to the weekly New World, cementing the attribution that had circulated since 1835. Herschel, who learned of the hoax only after the fact, was at first amused, then wearied by having to correct the flood of questions it produced.
- Apr 13, 1844: In a coda to the affair, Poe places his own 'Balloon-Hoax,' a fabricated report of a transatlantic balloon crossing, in the same New York Sun, where Locke was by then an editor. The Sun retracts it within days. The episode underscores how ready the penny press was to print a thrilling fabrication.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The reports came from Sir John Herschel, a real and eminent astronomer who was actually observing at the Cape of Good Hope.
  Evidence: Herschel was genuinely at the Cape surveying the southern sky, which is exactly why the hoax chose him, but he had no connection to the articles and made no such observations. He was not a source, a co-author, or a party to the series in any way. When word of the fabrication reached him he treated it as an absurdity and was left, by his own later account, annoyed at having to field questions from people who believed it. His real work on the Moon recorded no forests, animals, or man-bats.
- Claim: The account was reprinted from a respected scientific publication, the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which lent it authority.
  Evidence: This was the fraud's fatal flaw. The Edinburgh Journal of Science had ceased publication in 1833, two years before the Sun said it carried the lunar supplement, so the cited source could not have run the story. The named author, 'Dr. Andrew Grant,' Herschel's supposed amanuensis, did not exist. The scientific-sounding provenance was a stage set, built to borrow the credibility of real institutions the paper had no ties to.
- Claim: A powerful enough telescope really could have resolved animals and winged people on the Moon in 1835.
  Evidence: No telescope of the era, or since, could do what the articles described. The Sun claimed an instrument that magnified by many thousands of times and could pick out individual creatures on the lunar surface; the optics and light-gathering this implies are physically impossible, and the described views bear no relation to what any real telescope shows. The 'discoveries' were literary invention dressed in the vocabulary of astronomy, not the product of any working instrument.
- Claim: The Moon has abundant life: forests, oceans, herds of animals, and an intelligent winged species.
  Evidence: The Moon is an airless, waterless, heavily cratered world with no forests, seas, animals, or civilization. This was already understood in outline by nineteenth-century astronomers, and every subsequent observation, culminating in the Apollo landings and modern spacecraft, has confirmed a barren surface. The bison, unicorns, fire-carrying beavers, and man-bats were fictional creatures, several of them lifted from familiar earthly and mythical templates.
- Claim: So many readers believed it that there must have been something real behind the reports.
  Evidence: Belief measures the skill of the hoax and the appetite of its audience, not the truth of the claim. The series was engineered to be believed: a real astronomer, a real expedition, a scientific-journal byline, and a slow escalation from plausible geography to fantastic zoology. Circulation soared because the story was thrilling and cheap to buy, and the Sun had every commercial reason to keep it going. Wide readership is what a good fabrication produces, not evidence that the Moon was ever inhabited.
- Claim: The Sun was simply passing along a scientific report in good faith and was fooled like everyone else.
  Evidence: The paper manufactured the report rather than receiving it. The invented author, the defunct journal, the escalating structure, and the profitable pamphlet and print spin-offs all point to a deliberate construction, not an honest mistake. The series is generally attributed to the Sun's own reporter, Richard Adams Locke, who acknowledged writing it in 1840. This was the newspaper inventing a sensation, not being taken in by one.

## Why people believe it
- It wore the authority of real science. The expedition, the telescope, and above all Sir John Herschel were genuine and famous, so the fantastic parts arrived wrapped in verifiable fact. Attaching invented discoveries to a real astronomer doing real work at a real observatory is what made the impossible feel reported rather than imagined.
- The idea of life on the Moon was already in the air. Serious thinkers had speculated for years about lunar and planetary inhabitants, so a claim of moon creatures did not sound like nonsense to an 1835 reader; it sounded like the confirmation of a live scientific question. The hoax exploited an expectation the public already held.
- The penny press had not yet trained readers to be skeptical of it. A cheap daily built to sell excitement on the street was a new kind of institution, and the habits of sourcing, verification, and correction that readers now expect were not yet established. A confident, detailed, scientific-sounding report in a newspaper carried weight simply by being in print.
- The craft was genuinely good. The series escalated slowly, from believable lunar geography to animals to intelligent beings, and it was written in dense, technical prose full of invented measurements and Latin names. That patient, plausible build is precisely what lets a fabrication carry an audience past the point where it should have balked.

## Open questions
- Locke's exact intent is still debated. Some read the series as pure circulation-driving fraud, others as satire, aimed at overheated speculation about extraterrestrial life or at a particular astronomer-theologian who had mused about moon-dwellers, that was simply taken literally by readers who missed the joke. Whether it began as a swindle, a spoof, or a blend of both does not change that the underlying claim was false, but it does color how the episode is understood.
- The precise circulation figures are approximate. The Sun's run is usually reported as climbing from around 8,000 toward roughly 19,000 or 20,000 during the affair, and the paper's boast of being the world's most-read daily is part of its own promotion. The general scale, a large and lucrative jump, is well attested; the exact numbers vary by source.
- Poe's charge of plagiarism is unresolved and probably unresolvable. He believed the Sun's series drew on his 'Hans Pfaall,' published weeks earlier, but the two works differ in form and aim, and the resemblance may reflect a shared fascination with lunar voyages rather than direct borrowing. It is a footnote to the hoax, not part of its debunking.

## Sources
- Belief, Legend, and the Great Moon Hoax, Library of Congress (Folklife Today blog) (2014): https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/08/the-great-moon-hoax/
- Lunar animals and other objects Discovered by Sir John Herschel in his observatory at the Cape of Good Hope, Library of Congress (Prints & Photographs Division) (1835): https://www.loc.gov/resource/pga.02667/
- The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Was Sci-Fi Passed Off as News, Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/story/the-great-moon-hoax-of-1835-was-sci-fi-passed-off-as-news
- 'The Great Moon Hoax' is published in the 'New York Sun', HISTORY (A&E Television Networks): https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/august-25/the-great-moon-hoax
- The Great Moon Hoax (1835), Hoaxes.org (The Museum of Hoaxes): https://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_great_moon_hoax
- The Great Moon Hoax Was Simply a Sign of Its Time, Smithsonian Magazine (2015): https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-moon-hoax-was-simply-sign-its-time-180955761/
- Richard Adams Locke (Scientist of the Day), Linda Hall Library: https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/richard-adams-locke/
- How the Sun Conned the World With 'The Great Moon Hoax', JSTOR Daily: https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-sun-conned-the-world-with-the-moon-hoax/
- Great Moon Hoax, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/great-moon-hoax