Grove Koger
August 25 is the anniversary of the day in 1835 when the world first learned of an astounding astronomical breakthrough. As the New York Sun reported in a wordy front-page article—“Great Astronomical Discoveries / Lately Made / by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D. F. R.S. &c. / at the Cape of Good Hope”— the astronomer had used an extraordinarily advanced telescope 24 feet in diameter to discover … life on the moon! The article itself, the first of a series, was said to be a reprint from the presumably eminent Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The Sun had actually laid the groundwork for its series a few days before, on August 21, when it reported, on its second page, that the editors of the Edinburgh Courant had learned that Sir John, then visiting Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, had “made some astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.” Thus the Sun’s readers had been primed for the forthcoming news, albeit in a fairly sober manner that, ironically enough, lent credence to the astonishing revelations that followed.
The second article went into some detail, describing how Herschel had spotted what appeared to be plants on the lunar surface, along with what were, unmistakably, animals! Among the latter category was a “strange amphibious creature” that, being spherical, “rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach.”
The third article explained that Herschel had also identified more than three dozen kinds of trees and nine species of mammals, the latter category including—and here was, perhaps, a suggestion that the series was not entirely on the up-and-up—bipedal beavers!!!
The article for day four, August 28, announced that Herschel had also seen what he called “vespertilio-homos,” or man-bats—creatures covered with “short and glossy copper-colored hair” and possessing “wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs.” (Vespertilio, by the way, is a genus of bats in the family Vespertilionidae. Really.) The faces of these bizarre creatures, averred the writer, were a “slight improvement upon that of the large orang outang.” Not content to leave his description at that, he added, without further detail, that some of the amusements of these man-bats “would but ill comport with our terrestrial notions of decorum.”
We can assume that such tantalizing tidbits were guaranteed to keep the readers of the Sun reading, but, sadly enough, the remaining two articles were a bit underwhelming. It seems that Herschel had seen a temple built of polished sapphire, along with more highly developed vespertilio-homos “of a larger stature than those examples he had observed earlier, less dark in color, and in every respect an improved variety of the race.” (Our second image, from a version of the series reprinted in Naples, Italy, would seem to match this description.) Remarkably enough, the creatures seemed to live in a “universal state of amity”—surely one of the most astonishing of Locke’s claims.
In any case, the series had done what it was presumably supposed to do. Subscriptions to the Sun jumped, and the paper went on to print the series as a pamphlet that sold some 60,000 copies within a short time. It also commissioned the firm of Norris & Baker to print lithographs based on the series’ revelations. In time, the New York Herald identified the series as an “ingenious hoax” and its author as British-born journalist Richard Adams Locke (seen above in a portrait by Augustus Robin). Subsequently, Locke began adding the credit to his byline and, a bit later still, wrote a long letter detailing his exploit for the New York weekly New World. When Herschel himself eventually learned of the affair, he was said to be amused, at least initially …
I’m fascinated by hoaxes, by the various ways in which (with our conscious or more often unconscious cooperation) they erect alternate realities with such ease. I think we can agree that reality could use a good tweaking, but the events of recent years have taken the edge off my enjoyment—and probably yours too. No matter how darkly absurd the hoax is, the hoaxees don’t get the joke. And that’s not funny.
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World Enough 