Almost
a hundred years before Orson Welles
soiled the knickers of radio listeners across the country with his broadcast of
A
War of the Worlds, a New York newspaper
had many of its readers convinced that the world’s most famous astronomer had observed a civilization on the Moon through a powerful telescope.
On
August 25, 1835 the New York Sun published the first of six articles which claimed that noted British astronomer Sir John Herschel made the observations through a powerful new telescope “of a new
design.” The telescope was so powerful
that the scientist could allegedly observe and identify a number of species
of animals including types of bison, goats, and giant
tailless beavers that walked erect on their hind legs. Most miraculous of all were the winged
humanoids, dubbed Vespertilio-homo who built civilizations with great temples on the shores of vast oceans.
All of this was made more credible by the claim that it was reprinted from The Edinburgh Courant who in
turn referenced a report in The
Edinburgh Journal of Science and accounts by Herschel’s traveling companion and amanuensis, Dr. Andrew Grant. Herschel was
real enough and his observations and naming of the moons of Saturn and Uranus
had made him famous. Dr. Grant,
however, was entirely fictional.
According to the stories, observations came to an
end when the telescope was left open and pointing in the direction of
the Sun causing the lenses of the telescope to act as “burning lenses”
igniting a fire which burned down the observatory.
The Sun, a broadsheet aspiring to ascend to the first ranks of
newspapers in New York’s highly competitive circulation wars, was just
two years old when the Moon stories first ran. They were intended to build circulation, and
they certainly did. Some claim that the paper
tripled its sales and that its numbers stayed strong enough after to push
it to the front ranks.
In 1835 it did not even need screaming headlines to attract readers to the Sun's fantastic story on the front page of its August 25 edition. |
The stories ran before science fiction had
established itself as a popular literary genre. All though there had been fantastical
tales of trips to the moon by the real Cyrano de Bergerac and
attributed to the Baron Von Munchausen, few Americans would have ever
heard of them. The inventions of Jules
Verne, including his novel From
the Earth to the Moon were decades in the future. Edgar Allan Poe had published
his story Hans
Phaall—A Tale
about a man who ascended to the Moon in a hot
air balloon a few months earlier in the Southern Messenger, but
it is unlikely to have made much of stir in the northern city. A rival paper
did reprint it in September in
response to the success of the Sun series.
Readers
had no cultural understanding of
these fantastic stories about space. They
were regularly exposed to claims of scientific
discoveries and the inventions
that were a staple of the period. Many
were quite legitimate as major advances in many fields were
being made regularly. Others were patently false. The latter category included was Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, Professor of Astronomy at Munich University
who had claimed he had seen evidence of civilization on the Moon and The Rev. Thomas Dick a/k/a The Christian Philosopher who claimed
that the whole Solar System was
populated by humanoid beings including over 400 million supposedly residing on
the Moon. Even men as sophisticated as Ralph Waldo Emerson fell under the
spell of Dick’s claims.
It
was, after all the dawn of the era of great hoaxes. Phineas
T. Barnum was just getting his career
off of the ground exhibiting an elderly Black
woman as allegedly George
Washington’s nurse.
The real astronomer was not amused. |
Several
weeks after the publication of the series, denials
by Herschel were printed in other
newspapers exposing the hoax. But The Sun never retracted the story
or issued an apology for running it.
The author of the series has never been positively
identified, however most scholars of the period are fairly certain it was Cambridge
educated Sun reporter Richard A.
Locke. He never admitted to being
responsible. Some other names have been
floated as possible accomplices, or perhaps sources for Locke, but these have
also turned out to be dead ends.
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