The Great Moon Hoax of 1835

On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun began printing six installments describing life on the moon, supposedly observed through a telescope by the astronomer Sir John Herschel. There were no bat-men and no sapphire temples. Reporter Richard Adams Locke had fabricated the entire series, complete with invented scientific journals and a fictional assistant, and readers across the country believed it. The story explores how a penny newspaper and a scientific craze combined to produce one of the most successful hoaxes in American journalism, and why the truth took days to catch up.Send me a text!Support the show