Moon Hoaxes & Man-Bats: The Wildest Fake News of 1835

On August twenty-fifth, 1835, the world learned about man-bats living on the moon. Not as a joke, but as a scientific fact reported in New York’s most popular newspaper. Last time, in episode fifty-nine, we saw how an entire army could destroy itself at Karánsebes through a tragic, almost comical, misunderstanding. Today, the chaos isn't accidental. It’s manufactured, sold for a penny on a street corner, and it reveals something fundamental about how we believe what we believe. The story starts with The New York Sun, a new paper trying to make a name for itself. And they came up with a brilliant plan. They published a six-part series claiming that the famous astronomer Sir John Herschel—a real, respected scientist—had built a revolutionary new telescope in South Africa.

A telescope so powerful, it used what they called "hydro-oxygen" illumination to project an image of the lunar surface onto a wall, like a movie screen. They claimed he could see objects just eighteen inches across. From two hundred and forty thousand miles away. And what did he see? At first, it was just geography. Fields of poppies, vast forests, oceans of sapphire blue. Then, the animals appeared. First, herds of what looked like... brown unicorns. Then, bipedal beavers that lived in huts, carried their young, and had discovered the use of fire. I know. It sounds completely insane now. But the articles were written with such dry, scientific precision, filled with technical jargon and plausible-sounding details, that people were hooked.

Rival newspapers, desperate not to be scooped, just reprinted the Sun’s articles verbatim. Then came the big reveal. Part four of the series. Herschel supposedly focuses his lens on a new region and sees them. Winged humanoids. Vespertilio-homo, the articles called them. Man-bats. They were described as being about four feet tall, covered in short, glossy, copper-colored hair, with wings like a bat’s stretching from their shoulders to their legs. The articles reported, with serene confidence, that these creatures were "innocent and happy," spending their days collecting fruit and bathing in rivers. And New York… and then America… and then the world, lost its mind.

The Sun’s circulation exploded, making it the most-read paper on the planet. A group of women in Springfield, Massachusetts, reportedly started a collection to raise money to send missionaries to the moon to convert the man-bats. Scientists at Yale University were so convinced they sent a delegation to New York to try and see the original source material from Herschel. The problem was, you couldn't just call up South Africa in 1835. Disproving the story would take weeks, even months. And in that information vacuum, the lie flourished. So where have we seen this before? This is the part that gets me. The Great Moon Hoax is the perfect nineteenth-century blueprint for modern viral misinformation.

The New York Sun was a penny press paper—it was cheap, it was for the masses, and its business model depended entirely on capturing attention. It was the social media feed of its day. The incentive structure is identical: create the most outrageous, engaging content possible, and watch the clicks—or in their case, the pennies—roll in. The analogy holds up. They used a trusted authority, Sir John Herschel, as a shield for their fiction, the same way a modern deepfake might put false words in a real person’s mouth. They relied on the slow speed of fact-checking. By the time anyone could definitively prove it was a lie, the paper had already won.

Its circulation was permanently higher. But here’s where the analogy breaks. The hoax was eventually exposed, not with a bang, but a whimper. The author, a reporter named Richard Adams Locke, eventually admitted it to a friend, and the story trickled out. The Sun never printed a retraction. They didn't have to. They just let the story fade and enjoyed their new status as the world’s biggest newspaper. There was no accountability. Not really. The most incredible discovery of 1835 wasn't unicorns or winged humanoids on the moon. It was the discovery of a new, powerful, and terrifying force on Earth: a mass media that could, for a price, convince the public of anything, and a public that was, perhaps, more willing to be fooled than anyone had ever imagined.