Poe's Moon Hoax: Too clever for its own good (Part 1)

Many people are familiar with the famous Moon Hoax of 1835: a series of six articles which ran in the New York Sun and purported to tell the story of some amazing lunar discoveries made by the famous (real-life) astronomer John Herschell. The articles describe an amazing variety of new lifeforms seen through a powerful telescope, including two-legged beavers and men with bat-like wings.

The Sun Moon Hoax employs a great many devices to make it seem real to the reader: it harnesses novel and relatively-incomprehensible science (astronomy) and technology (telescopes); it puts the tech in the context of well-documented prior efforts in the field, by describing in detail the history of optics and how it led to the creation of Herschell's extremely powerful telescope; it grounds the characters in the real-world by utilising Herschell and alluding multiple times to his education, awards and achievements; and it sticks in a nice "appeal to authority" by pretending to be a reprint of articles which appeared in the (real-world) Edinburgh Journal of Science  and a allusion to the "forty pages of illustrative and mathematical notes" which accompanied the original.



Day by day, the discoveries made by the intrepid Herschell and his devoted (and ficitional) assistant Dr. Andrew Grant grow more and more amazing, and the tone of the report more and more breathless. On the second day, they discover poppy-like flowers, basalt rocks, huge trees. On the third day, lifeforms are discovered: elk-like creatures, horned bears, and most amazingly, bipedal beavers, who carry their young in their arms. On the fourth day, upping the ante yet again, the scientists discover winged men:

They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of their shoulders to the calves of their legs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh color, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead. 

These creatures are christened "Vespertilio-homo, or man-bat". They are able to communicate with each other, and seem to have family groups. Their society seems to be very advance, for on the sixth day Herschell and Grant discover amazing buildings:

The very first object in this valley that appeared upon our canvass was a magnificent work of art. It was a temple — a fane of devotion, or of science, which, when consecrated to the Creator is devotion of the loftiest order; for it exhibits his attributes purely free from the masquerade, attire, and blasphemous caricature of controversial creeds, and has the seal and signature of his own hand to sanction its aspirations. It was an equitriangular temple, built of polished sapphire, or of some resplendent blue stone, which, like it, displayed a myriad points of golden light twinkling and scintillating in the sunbeams. 

The account concludes with a promise of further study and an entire book upon the topic, and there are some hints as to the future revelation of more amazing discoveries redacted from the original account. You can read the whole thing at the wonderful Museum of Hoaxes, here.

The articles reputedly raised the circulation of the newspaper, and weren't exposed as a hoax for several weeks (and even then the Sun never issued a retraction), The hoax is usually attributed to Richard Locke, a Sun reporter, but it's almost certain that he got the idea from a abortive attempt at a very similar hoax that ran two months before in the Southern Literary Messenger, entitled "Hans Pfall - A Tale". The author of that article was a young Baltimore writer called Edgar Allen Poe.

To be continued....