Flying Men on the Moon--Greatest Fake News and Fraud Until the Current Chicanery

Although no illustrations accompanied the New York Sun stories of a civilization on the Moon, artists and publishers were quick to produce prints depicting the alleged flying humanoid residents and other wonders.

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 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.

                            Sir John Herschel and his fantastic apparatus before it allegedly ignited his observatory.

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 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 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 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. 

Edgar Allan Poe—Father of Multiple Popular Literature Genres

                             Edgar Allan Poe in rare daguerreotype.

He may be the most widely influential American writer ever.  He is certainly among the most widely read.  More than two hundred years after the birth of Edgar Allan Poe on January 19, 1809 he is easily the most widely read writer of the 19th Century, and not by just captive college students but by ordinary readers who continue to plunk down hard money for collections of his stories and poems.   

He is credited with inventing the modern detective story.  In The Murders in the Rue Morgue his hero, C. Auguste Dupin was a brilliant eccentric who undertook the investigation of the grisly and baffling murders of a woman and her daughter after reading newspaper account. He had a tenuous, testy relationship with the police but worked as an outsider. The story of his investigation was narrated by an unnamed friend and associate.  Dupin used keen powers of observation and deductive reasoning to unravel the case.  He also used crude forensic evidence—a hair found at the crime scene that proved to be nonhuman.  He revealed his final, shocking conclusion and then explained to the exasperated Prefect of Police his methodology in uncovering the truth.  This set the pattern for detectives like Sherlock Homes, Hercule Poirot, Nick and Nora Charles, and Spenser.  In recognition of Poe’s importance, the Mystery Writers of America named their annual prizes the Edgar Awards. 

Poe's stories like The Murders in the Rue Morgue have lent themselves to comic books and graphic novels.  Many of my generation first encountered him in Classics Illustrated comics like this.

Poe is even more famous for his horror stories.  These, too, were an innovative breakthrough that invented a genre.  His were not just tales of monsters or ghosts told around a campfire.  His horror was psychological, the creation of the human mind as in The Tell Tale Heart. 

And his work presaged and influenced the development of science fiction.  His famous hoax The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall, which he wrote for the Southern Messenger in 1835, fooled the people of New York City when he reprinted it in a newspaper in that city nearly a decade later.  It was about crossing the Atlantic in a balloon.   Several of his other stories also had elements of science fiction which were picked up by Jules Verne, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Burroughs among others. 

All of these are “only popular genres.”  You can almost hear the serious professors sneer the words, “not serious literature.”  But in creating these tales for the infant medium of the popular magazine, he also helped create the modern short story as a distinct form.  Now that magazines are disappearing and short stories only get printed obscure literary journals, the guardians of our culture revere the form and wring their hands at its tenuous survival. 

Poe is surrounded by images from his most famous work in this stunning illustration by Fransisco Francavilla.

And then there are the poems.  People who do not read poetry—almost everyone—know and love The Raven, Annabelle Lee, and The Bells.  America was awash with poets—many great ones—but no one was writing with such power, such lyricism, and such groundbreaking unconventionality.  Despite their strong rhythms and rhymes, they seem more modern and accessible than lofty sentiments by William Cullen Bryant or James Russell Lowell. 

Of course, Poe’s enduring popularity owes a great deal to his image as the tortured soul who married his teen age cousin and lost her to consumption, drowned his sorrows in brandy and perhaps opium, and died penniless in Baltimore after being found insensible in a saloon at the age of only 40.  Books, plays, and films have been made celebrating that persona. 

His physical image is as recognizable as any movie star.  Only a handful of photographs were taken in his life.  The most iconic, taken within a couple of years of his death, shows a handsome, if dissolute man, with dark flowing hair, high forehead, a neat mustache, intense dark eyes with bags below hinting at a night of excess before the sitting. It decorates posters, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and mouse pads. 

Just one of hundreds of items available graced with Poe's iconic visage.

How can heavy weights like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, or even handsome Nathaniel Hawthorne compete with that? 

Yet Moby Dick routinely tops lists of important books that no one reads, while even pimply-faced, basement dwelling, gamers of the supposed dumbest-generation-ever have read and loved Poe.  Oh, the injustice! 

Ironically, Poe may have even invented one form of prose that the literati worship—textual criticism.  Beginning with his tenure as editor of the Southern Messenger and continuing as he tried to cobble together a meager income as one of America’s first free-lance writers, he wrote hundreds of columns of literary criticism.  He was among the first, if not the first, to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work and to analyze symbolism.  He could also be very harsh and personal in his attacks on authors whose work offended him.  That included many members of the established, mostly the New England based elite.  He famously savaged Nathaniel Hawthorne among others.  Of course, when he was writing for a predominately Southern audience, this went over well.  It proved less popular as he placed pieces in New York, Philadelphia, and other Northern publications. 

One of the men he offended got his revenge.  Rufus Griswold was then a well-known writer, editor, and anthologist.  Poe ripped him a new one.  As soon as he got word of Poe’s death in Baltimore, Griswold rushed to be the first to print an obituary in New York.  He painted Poe as a maniac drunkard, practitioner of incest, and literary fraud.  He quickly followed up with a biography elaborating his charges.  The book sold well and cemented Poe’s public image. 

But if Griswold thought his character assassination piece would bury Poe’s reputation and work, he was mistaken.  Instead, the country grew more fascinated by him.  Posthumous sales of all his works soared.  Just like James Dean or Jim Morrison, it seems that even back then there was a taste for wild, romantic, talented, tragic bad boys who died young. 

The official Poe Museum web site argues that while Poe did drink and battled depression, Griswold’s characterization was a wild exaggeration.  Perhaps so.  It even says that his sordid and lonely death attributed at the time to “congestion of the brain” and long assumed to be caused by either alcohol poisoning or advanced cirrhosis of the liver, may have actually been caused by rabies.  Who knows? 

                                     Roses and brandy were left at Edgar Allan Poe's Baltimore grave for the 58th year in 2007.

But we do know that for many years a woman bundled in black and heavily veiled came annually to Poe’s grave and left roses and brandy.  It was an annual newspaper story for decades.   And every time it happened, libraries and books stores experienced a run on Poe. 

Anyway, here is a sample of what some of the excitement was about. 

Annabel Lee 

It was many and many a year ago,   In a kingdom by the sea,  That a maiden there lived whom you may know     By the name of Annabel Lee;  And this maiden she lived with no other thought     Than to love and be loved by me.     I was a child and she was a child,     In this kingdom by the sea:  But we loved with a love that was more than love—     I and my Annabel Lee;  With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven     Coveted her and me.     And this was the reason that, long ago,     In this kingdom by the sea,  A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling     My beautiful Annabel Lee;  So that her highborn kinsman came     And bore her away from me,  To shut her up in a sepulchre     In this kingdom by the sea.     The angels, not half so happy in heaven,     Went envying her and me—a  Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,     In this kingdom by the sea)  That the wind came out of the cloud by night,     Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.     But our love it was stronger by far than the love     Of those who were older than we—a     Of many far wiser than we—a  And neither the angels in heaven above,     Nor the demons down under the sea,  Can ever dissever my soul from the soul     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:     For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;  And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes     Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side  Of my darling--my darling--my life and my bride,     In her sepulchre there by the sea,     In her tomb by the sounding sea.   —Edgar Allan Poe