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Take it away, Ashley. Picture this. It's late August of 1835. And you're a New Yorker, and you open your newspaper, and you learn something. Out in this world.
That story says that life has been discovered on the moon. There was said to be strange lunar landscapes on the moon that had rivers and vegetation and these enormous crystals and animals unlike anything you've seen on Earth. It described bison like beasts. horned creatures that resemble unicorns. Tailless beavers that walked upright.
And the most sensational, maybe the creepiest one of them all, winged humanoids. The story appeared in a series of six articles in the New York Sun beginning on August 25th, 1835. And it quickly became one of the most famous newspaper hoaxes in American history. To understand why so many people paid attention, you really have to understand the culture of the moment. The New York Sun, which was founded in 1833, was one of the new penny press newspapers.
So it was cheap, lively, and it was aimed at more of a mass audience rather than publications that were focused on a few narrow elite. And it favored narrative drama and had this kind of Immediacy. Readers in the 1830s were also deeply interested in science, astronomy. and the possibility of life beyond Earth. And around the same time, P.
T. Barnum Is traveling around the country with his shows, and he is the prince of the humbug, right? And he's alive during this period, so I can't say whether or not B.G. Barnum read these stories, but if he did, he would have loved them. But he did in 1841, so not long, just like six years after these stories, he did open his first museum in New York, which was the ultimate display of creatures that didn't quite exist.
So it kind of plays onto the culture of the moment that New Yorkers who are reading a new kind of newspaper are so enthralled with this idea of a scientific phenomenon that was both real and supernatural in some respects. That they would eat this story up, and then they're not. Hurt by the fact that it's unreal, they embrace it when P.T. Barnum opens his museum. This was really a democratizing era.
You know, Andrew Jackson was in the White House at the time. You were beginning to see the falling away of a lot of the venerable traditions of the old world. Cartmen didn't doff their hats to their employers anymore. People called each other Mr. rather than sir.
Shaking hands instead of bowing, you know, became much more widely in use.
So, this really was a democratizing time. And I think part of the appeal of hoaxes. At that time, was that People were beginning to understand their own right of judgment, their own right of determining what was true and what was not true. And, you know, as Barnum said, when you pay your quarter and you get to the top of the stairs, you can decide what is true. and it became kind of an implicit competition.
between the hoaxer and the patron to see if he can fool them And if they were successfully fooled, They felt not cheated, they felt entertained.
So the timing of this article was perfect. The British astronomer Sir John Herschel, which was one of the most respected scientific figures in the world. Really was at this point in South Africa working with powerful telescopic equipment.
So it was that real expedition that the article used that ultimately gave a false story, that powerful anchor in reality that it desperately needed. The articles claim to be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, so you know. Can't get more serious than that. And it was attributed to a supposed associate of Herschel named Dr. Andrew Graham.
But there was a problem with this because Grant did not exist. and the journal had ceased publication years earlier. Still, the writing in the sun was crafted to sound scientific. It was mixed with technical language, observational detail, and the authority of Herschel's name. And one of the enduring reasons the story became so famous is that it did not merely suggest life on the moon.
It offered a new world, which was seemingly ordered. Populated and could be observed, according to them, through a telescope of unprecedented power.
So this spread well beyond New York, and it actually went international. These papers were really quite good in a lot of ways. They had very good, strong local coverage, which was something that had never been done before. Within about 15 or 20 years, you really see the end of the old line. Merchant newspapers, the sixpenny papers, had virtually disappeared by the 1850s.
This was a moment where a new kind of journalism, much more affordable, much faster, and kind of snappy. Took over from the old style of journalism. And it really only took about 15 years before the old style had disappeared entirely. According to the Library of Congress, By August 28th, the day the winged people appeared, Many readers decided, okay, this is a lot. And they started to back away.
And by August 29th, some newspapers were already calling it a hoax. And the big mystery at this point is who did it? There's some speculation that the likely author was Richard Adams Locke, who was a Cambridge educated journalist who worked for The Sun. Historians generally credit him with writing the series, though the paper did not immediately identify him publicly, which is not surprising because I don't know at that point if he wanted to lay any claim to those stories. There are others, though, and other accounts that the articles were possibly always intended as satire.
Aimed in part at popular speculative writing about extraterrestrial life. And especially the work of Reverend Thomas Dick, who had argued for heavily populated worlds beyond Earth.
So, this wasn't just a concept that happened in a vacuum. The sun had produced a story so artfully tuned to the scientific imagination of the moment that satire and journalism blurred together. There was another literary wrinkle in this story, which is just months earlier, Edgar Allan Poe had published a fictional tale involving a voyage to the moon presented in a pseudo factual way. Poe believed his idea had been borrowed and reworked for the sun's lunar sensation. Just under a month after all this happened, the sun admitted that the moon's stories were false.
But the fallout was surprisingly mild. Readers were generally amused, and the paper did not collapse under the embarrassment. In fact, the hoax helped prove something important about American mass media. Which is a newspaper could build enormous attention by combining authority, novelty, and narrative. And as we know today, that lesson would not be forgotten.
And that's why the great mood hoax still matters today. It wasn't just a prank. It was an early demonstration of the power of modern media. It showed how easily scientific authority could be borrowed. How eagerly the public would embrace that story, and how porous the boundary between fact and entertainment could become.
It's also revealed something more enduring. People do not just want information. They want a sense of wonder. In 1835, the New York Sun gave them wonder by the column inch, and for a few extraordinary days, Americans believed that the heavens had opened and that the news had arrived in the morning paper. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler.
And a special thanks to frequent contributor Ashley Lubinsky. She's the former co-host of Discovery Channel's Master of Arms, and she's also the co-founder of the University of Wyoming College of Law's Firearms Research Center. Always, we appreciate her input and her storytelling. My goodness, this is a great one. And by the way, it still goes on today, this marriage of fact and fantasy.
People didn't want just information in 1835. They want wonder. There's great interest in science and astrology and life on other planets.
Sound familiar? The story of the great moon hoax of 1835, fake news, before anybody knew what fake news was, here on Our American Stories. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years. And now it takes form in a new way.
The 2026 Semi-Quincentennial Coin and Metal Program from the United States Mint. It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semi-q. That's usmint.gov/slash S-E-M-I-Q.
This July 4th, come celebrate at America's Block Party, hosted by America 250. America's Block Party is a can't-miss 4th of July concert happening at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Experience music performances from major artists, patriotic tributes, and the kickoff to Giving Forth, helping to make July 4th the largest day of giving in American history. It's more than just fireworks. Learn more about this landmark celebration at America250.org.
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