Absolutely True, Totally Absurd: The Bat-Men of the Moon Hoax

On August 25th, 1835, The New York Sun reported the discovery of winged, bat-like humanoids living on the Moon. Right. Just a normal Tuesday. And unlike our story last week, where a con man sold the Eiffel Tower to a single scrap dealer, this particular deception was sold to the entire reading public of New York. And they bought it. Completely. Okay, so a newspaper just decides to print that there are bat-men on the moon. How do they even begin to sell that story with a straight face? They attributed it to a credible source. The articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, and they detailed observations made by Sir John Herschel, who was one of the most famous astronomers of the era.

A real person. A very real, very respected person. The story was that Herschel had built a new kind of telescope, one so powerful it could see the lunar surface like it was, you know, a few hundred yards away. The articles were written with this dense, scientific-sounding language. They didn't just say "bat-men." They called them Vespertilio-homo. That gives it a certain… legitimacy. But what else did they supposedly see? It can't have just been the one thing. Oh, no. It was a whole ecosystem. There were descriptions of blue unicorns, bipedal beavers that lived in huts and carried their young. There were vast forests and oceans. It was a six-part series, and each installment added another layer of, um, detail.

A six-part series. So this wasn't just a one-off joke. This was a sustained campaign of disinformation. For what? For sales. The New York Sun was a new "penny press" paper. It was cheap. And this story made its circulation explode. It went from a few thousand copies to over 19,000, making it the largest-selling daily newspaper in the world at the time. So it's the original clickbait. The incentive structure is exactly the same as viral content today. Publish something outrageous, get all the attention, get the revenue. Precisely. And other papers, at first, just reprinted the stories. They didn't want to be left out. Did anyone stop to ask the actual Sir John Herschel if any of this was true?

He was in South Africa at the time, but he wasn't unreachable. Eventually, yes. But it took a while for news to travel. For weeks, the public was completely swept up. A committee of scientists in Massachusetts discussed raising money to fund an expedition to verify the findings. People were genuinely excited by the prospect of lunar life. The story wasn't just believed; it was celebrated. Which is almost more revealing. People wanted it to be true. Exactly. The desire for wonder is a powerful thing. The bubble finally burst when a rival editor, who had been losing sales to the Sun, pointed out that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had actually gone out of business years earlier.

Ah. A fatal flaw in the backstory. A pretty big one. The Sun never issued a formal retraction. They just, uh, sort of quietly admitted a few weeks later that the story might have been a hoax. But by then, it didn't matter. They had the subscribers. The author, Richard Adams Locke, never officially confessed, but it's widely accepted he wrote it. So it’s a business model. A successful one. You create a spectacle, you monetize the attention, and when it's exposed, you just… move on. The audience doesn't even seem to punish you for it. They don't. Because for a few weeks, they got to believe in a world that was bigger and more mysterious than their own. They got to imagine blue unicorns on the moon.

And apparently, for the price of one cent, that was a trade they were willing to make. It makes you wonder what we’re paying our one cent for today. And whether we'd even want a refund if we found out it was fake.