A Brief Intro…
In 1835, an English scientist by the name of Sir John Herschel was studying the stars of the southern hemisphere at the Cape of Good Hope. Sir Herschel was a man of many talents, an astronomer and chemist- he had passions in photography and plants. He also co-founded the Royal Astronomical Society in London.
South Africa became his new obsession, and so he took to building the observatory with a state-of-the-art telescope.
However, while John Herschel is busy studying the stars, he had a colleague, a certain Dr. Andrew Grant, who was busy publishing these fantastic discoveries to the Edinburgh Journal of Science and the New York Sun.
Now, this is where it gets interesting…
The New York Sun starts publishing the first article of a series of odd revelations…
It isn’t just the stars the scientists are able to see through their telescope but a whole fauna and flora growing on the moon. White sands beaches, vegetation and forests inhabited by strange life forms. There were discoveries of one-horned-goats, tiny reindeer and beavers walking upright on two legs. There were so many unique creatures seen from the Observatory.
And yet one discovery stands out among the rest… John Herschel and Andrew Grant have seen winged human-like bats, nicknamed man-bats (so close!). They were described as “innocent and happy”.
The public was obviously thrilled with these epic discoveries – and they grabbed every edition – from the first publication, sales of the New York Sun blew up. Indeed, everyone was dying to know.
These publications grew to the extent that scholars of Yale University travelled to New York just to retrieve these articles – however, journalists refused them access to these writings – they did not want to see them go deeper into their research…
The truth was that this was all a hoax. John Herschel never saw any bipedal beavers, nor did he see these man-bats. And the most shocking discovery was that Dr Andrew Grant, Hershel’s colleague and journalist, never existed in the first place, and neither did the Edinburgh Journal of Science! (It went out of business months before.)
Behind this scandal – this unknown author and the recently disappeared magazine, is Richard Adams Locke, the reporter for the New York Sun. He started this all as a joke – a satirical article aimed at making fun of gullible minds and the belief of aliens. By mocking the scientists, Locke created one of the first cases of Fake News.
The Outcome…
Obviously, without intending on this to blow up as it had, he got caught up in it all, and the Sun admitted to the public to having made it all up. John Herschel discovered these stories about him and he laughed at every bit of it, as did the readers.
Fun Fact: Edgar Allen Poe did not find this amusing at all. He even accused Locke of taking inspiration from a separate newspaper article published months before, from an entirely different newspaper, describing a trip to the moon.
The image above is actually the image printed on the New York Sun press papers.