The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where "Fake News" Began | Open Culture

-->

-->

-->

-->

-->

-->

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where "Fake News" Began

-->

The best free cultural &<br>educational media on the web

-->

-->

--><br>Online Courses

Certificates

Degrees & Mini-Degrees

--><br>Audio Books

Movies

Languages --><br>Podcasts

Textbooks --><br>K-12

K-12<br>--><br>eBooks

Languages

Donate

--> -->

Jun<br>25

-->

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

in History, Media | June 25th, 2026 Leave a Comment

-->

-->

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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (0) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!

-->

Place related post plugin php here...

-->

-->

Comments (0)

Be the first to comment.

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

--><br>XHTML: You can use these tags:<br>--><br>Message

Click here to cancel reply.

Wordpress Hashcash needs javascript to work, but your browser has javascript disabled. Your comment will be queued in Akismet!

Essentials

1,700 Free Online Courses

100+ Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs

1,150 Free Movies

1,000 Free Audio Books

150+ Best Podcasts

800 Free eBooks

200 Free Textbooks

300 Free Language Lessons

Support Us

We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use...