Great Moon Hoax - August 25

Happy Great Moon Hoax Day!

On this date in 1835 The Sun, a New York newspaper, began publishing a series of articles claiming that life has been found on the Moon now called the Great Moon Hoax. Though the "discovery" was attributed to the well-known astronomer John Herschel, this was done purely to add credibility to the story; Herschel never had anything to do with the story other than expressing a mixture of amusement/annoyance when hearing about it.

Bison, goats, unicorns, heron-like birds, bipedal beavers, bat-winged people, and butterfly-winged women were some of the wonders "discovered" on the Moon. They were supposed to have built temples, walls, roads, fortifications, and cities.

The hoax went on for several weeks, and was never retracted, so theoretically the newspaper stood by their reporting even though it was never anything more than a fabrication.

Apparently Edgar Allen Poe had preceded this story with his own Moon hoax story, though his was written in a much more satirical style and wasn't considered to be real news.

More images of the Great Moon Hoax can be found here.

Benjamin Henry Day (1810-1889), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By Unknown author - http://wilsonsalmanac.blogspot.com/2005/08/great-moon-hoax.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41491982