Man-Bats on the Moon: How the Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Fooled New York

On the morning of Tuesday, August 25, 1835, New Yorkers who paid a penny for the Sun found most of its front page taken up by one long article. The headline promised “Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D. F.R.S. &c. At the Cape of Good Hope.” The text said it was reprinted from a supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and it opened with a list of breakthroughs so grand they barely fit in a sentence. Using “a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle,” Herschel had found planets around other stars, solved “nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy,” and seen objects on the Moon as clearly as the naked eye sees things a hundred yards away. He had also settled whether the Moon was inhabited, “and by what order of beings.”

Over the next six issues the answer arrived in installments, ending with a race of four-foot-tall people with wings like bats. None of it was true. Herschel had never seen any of it, and the journal that supposedly printed it had stopped publishing two years earlier. Yet the story spread through New York within days, crossed the Atlantic within weeks and was translated into French, German, Italian and Welsh. Today it is remembered as the Great Moon Hoax, one of the most famous newspaper fakes ever printed.

It is also a surprisingly good story about science. It worked because of a real astronomer who happened to be at the far end of the world, a genuine argument among scientists about life on the Moon, and a new kind of newspaper that could put one story in front of a whole city at once. And it hung on a telescope that the laws of optics say could never have worked.

A famous astronomer, out of reach

The man whose name the Sun borrowed was about as famous as a scientist could be in 1835. John Herschel was the son of William Herschel, who had discovered Uranus, and he had made his own name in mathematics, chemistry and astronomy. In late 1833 he sailed for South Africa with his family and his big telescope to finish the job his father had started, a survey of the whole sky, by charting the stars and nebulae of the southern hemisphere. He arrived in Cape Town in January 1834 and set up at Feldhausen, an old estate on the slopes below Table Mountain.

That made him perfect for a hoax. Everyone knew he was at the Cape with a powerful instrument, and nobody in New York could ask him anything. There was no transatlantic telegraph cable until the late 1850s, so news from Europe came by sailing ship, weeks old, and news from southern Africa took longer still. Whatever the Sun said Herschel had seen, readers would have to wait a long time to hear him deny it.

His real telescope was a reflector with a metal mirror about 18 inches across, mounted in a tall wooden frame with a 20-foot tube. The telescope in the Sun was something else entirely. Its main lens, the paper said, was 24 feet in diameter and weighed 14,826 pounds, “or nearly seven tons,” and magnified 42,000 times. That should let it show objects on the Moon “of little more than eighteen inches in diameter.” The trick that made it work was a “hydro-oxygen microscope,” a powerful lamp that supposedly brightened the faint image from the lens so it could be magnified again and thrown onto a canvas screen. When Herschel explained the idea, the story claimed, the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster leaped “half-way to the ceiling” and shouted, “Thou art the man!” King William IV was said to have paid for it after asking only whether it would help with navigation, a nice touch in an age when sailors still depended on the stars and on clocks like John Harrison’s chronometers to find their way.

Six days of wonders

The setup began on Friday, August 21, with a short notice, supposedly copied from the Edinburgh Courant, saying Herschel had made “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description.” The series itself ran from Tuesday, August 25, to Monday, August 31, about 17,000 words in all. Its narrator was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as Herschel’s assistant and longtime companion. Grant did not exist.

The first installment was all about the telescope. In the second, Herschel turned it toward the Moon on January 10, 1835, and saw basalt rock “profusely covered with a dark red flower,” then herds of brown animals like bison, a single-horned goat “of a bluish lead color,” and a round amphibious creature that rolled across a pebbly beach at high speed. On the third day came the first sign of intelligence: beavers that walked upright, carried their young in their arms and lived in huts with smoke rising from them.

The fourth installment, on Friday, August 28, was the one everyone remembered. In a valley ringed by red cliffs, which Grant named the Ruby Colosseum, the astronomers saw winged people about four feet tall, covered in short, glossy, copper-colored hair except on their faces. They seemed to talk with one another, so the observers concluded they were rational. “We scientifically denominated them as Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat,” Grant wrote, “and they are doubtless innocent and happy creatures, notwithstanding that some of their amusements would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.” Readers were left to imagine what that meant.

The last two parts added an abandoned temple of polished sapphire, its golden roof shaped like flames licking at a copper globe, and a superior race of man-bats living nearby in peace with every other creature. Then the author found a way to stop. The astronomers had left the giant lens pointing where the morning sun could shine through it. Acting like a huge magnifying glass, it burned a hole through the observatory wall, set a clump of trees on fire and melted the plaster into blue glass. By the time repairs were done, the Moon had moved out of view.

A penny paper and a perfect moment

The Sun was barely two years old. Benjamin Day, a 23-year-old printer, had started it in September 1833 with the slogan “It Shines for All.” Most New York papers cost six cents and were aimed at merchants and politicians. Day charged a penny and filled his pages with crime reports, courtroom drama and human-interest stories for working people. The Sun was also the first paper to hire boys to sell copies on the street, shouting the headlines, and it relied on new steam-powered presses that could print tens of thousands of copies cheaply.

The writer behind the moon series was almost certainly Richard Adams Locke, a well-read Englishman from Somerset who had arrived in New York in 1832 and become the Sun‘s editor in the summer of 1835. He told people he had studied at Cambridge, although the historian Matthew Goodman found no sign he ever did. Day had already learned he could sell long stories as pamphlets, and he wanted more.

A popular legend says the hoax made the Sun the best-selling paper in the world overnight. On August 28 it did boast a circulation of 19,360, “the greatest of any daily paper in the world.” But two weeks earlier it had claimed 26,000 copies in a single day, and the historian Mario Castagnaro has argued that cause and effect ran the other way: the Sun‘s huge readership is what made the hoax a sensation. Almost every other paper in town reprinted the story, and within a week close to 100,000 copies of it were in circulation, in a city of about 300,000 people. The Sun made its money on the extras, a pamphlet edition of the whole series and lithographs of the lunar scenes, like the one at the top of this page.

Why it seemed believable

Today, man-bats sound like an obvious joke. In 1835, life on the Moon was still an open question. In 1824 the Munich astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen had published a paper titled “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings,” describing what he took to be roads and walls. Some respected German astronomers discussed ways to signal the Moon’s inhabitants. The Scottish writer Thomas Dick, a hugely popular author who mixed astronomy with religion, had calculated that the Moon held 4.2 billion people and the solar system nearly 22 trillion, by applying the population density of England to every surface he could measure, on the belief that a Creator would not make an empty world.

The best astronomers were more doubtful. When the Moon passed in front of a star, the star winked out instantly instead of fading, which suggested the Moon had no air. “The moon has no air,” the German astronomer Friedrich Bessel told a lecture audience in 1834, “thus also no water.” Herschel himself had written, in a textbook published in America the year before the hoax, that telescopes “must yet be greatly improved, before we could expect to see signs of inhabitants.” To a reader who knew that line, a giant new telescope was exactly the missing piece.

The story also passed the quick checks a careful reader might make. Herschel really was at the Cape. There really had been an Edinburgh Journal of Science, though it had merged into another journal in 1833. The writing was dense with real astronomical detail, and many readers doubted that a scrappy penny paper could have invented such learned prose.

How many people actually believed it is harder to say. People who remembered the summer of 1835 later described a city carried away; one rival editor wrote that “the credulity was general.” But the newspapers of the time show plenty of doubt. By one count, at least half of New York’s major papers were skeptical. The Journal of Commerce said the article “belongs to the same school as Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels.” On August 31, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald ran a piece called “The Astronomical Hoax Explained,” pointing out that the Edinburgh Journal of Science was no longer published and naming Locke as the likely author. Many readers seem to have simply enjoyed the story without deciding whether it was true. The Bowery Theatre turned it into a show.

Satire, Poe and a confession

Locke never got the pleasure of a quick reveal. When he was named, he wrote to another paper, “I beg to state, as unequivocally as the words can express it, that I did not make those discoveries.” The Sun never printed a real retraction. In mid-September it said only that it could not call the story a hoax until English or Scottish papers confirmed it. Locke finally explained himself in 1840, in a long letter to the weekly New World. He had meant the series as satire, he said, aimed at writers like Thomas Dick, whose pious guesses about life on other worlds he saw as “theological and devotional encroachments upon the legitimate province of science.”

One reader was furious for a different reason. In June 1835, the young Edgar Allan Poe had published “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” in the Southern Literary Messenger, a mock-serious account of a balloon trip to the Moon. Poe was convinced Locke had stolen the idea, though his own story got little attention, partly because the Messenger had few readers and the Sun had many. Poe later wrote that the moon series was “decidedly the greatest hit in the way of sensation” ever made by such a fiction. He was fascinated by deception: a year later, in the same magazine, he tried to work out the secret of the Mechanical Turk, the chess-playing machine then touring America, and in 1844 he sold the Sun his own fake news story, “The Balloon-Hoax.”

Herschel learned about his discoveries from an American showman who handed him a copy at the Cape. He laughed at first, and said his real observations would seem very humble by comparison. The joke wore thin. “I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the Moon,” he complained to his aunt Caroline Herschel, “In English French Italian & German!!” In 1836 he drafted a letter to a London magazine disowning “the incoherent ravings under the name of discoveries which have been attributed to me.” It was never sent, and it turned up in his family’s papers in 2001.

What a 24-foot lens could really see

The moon series fails on its own physics, even before you get to the bats. The detail a telescope can show is limited by the width of its lens or mirror, not by how much it magnifies. Light waves spread slightly as they pass through any opening, so every point of light becomes a tiny blur, and the wider the opening, the smaller the blur. For a perfect 24-foot lens using green light, that blur works out to about 35 meters, or roughly 115 feet, at the Moon’s distance of 384,000 kilometers. Magnifying the image 42,000 times, or a million times, would only make the blur bigger. Nothing 18 inches wide could ever show up.

And the real limit is worse. Earth’s moving air smears a telescope’s view to about one arcsecond on a typical night, which at the Moon’s distance is nearly 2 kilometers, more than a mile. A good backyard telescope with a lens of about 3 inches can show craters roughly 2 to 3 miles across on a steady night, which is plenty to keep you at the eyepiece for hours, as our guide to home telescopes explains. But no telescope on Earth will ever pick out a person, or a bat-winged one, on the Moon.

To see the Moon the way the Sun promised, you have to go there. In 2011 NASA lowered its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to as little as 21 kilometers above the surface, and its camera captured the Apollo landing sites at about 25 centimeters per pixel. The pictures show the descent stages of the landers, the parked rovers and the trails of footprints left by the astronauts. It is a gray, airless world with no flowers, no lakes and no one home. The next people to walk on it will probably land near the south pole, where China and the United States are racing to reach Shackleton crater.

The joke that outlived everyone

Locke never matched his success. In 1838 he tried another hoax, a supposed lost journal of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, and almost nobody noticed. He left journalism, took a job in the New York customs office and died on Staten Island in February 1871. His obituary in the Sun called the moon series “the most successful scientific joke ever published.” Herschel died that May. He had come home from the Cape in 1838 with a catalog of the southern sky, and went on to name seven of Saturn’s moons and coin the word “photography.” A crater on the real Moon now bears his name.

The hoax holds up as a lesson because its ingredients are so familiar. It borrowed the name of a real expert and the title of a real journal. It arrived through a new medium that could reach a whole city in a morning. It told people something they half wanted to believe, and it exploited the weeks it would take anyone to check. In 1835 that delay was the length of a voyage across the ocean. Today a claim can be checked in minutes, and a fake can still travel around the world before anyone does.

Further reading