The Great Moon Hoax — a penny paper invented life on the Moon and never apologized

In New York City in late August 1835, the penny daily The Sun ran a six-part series claiming that the astronomer Sir John Herschel, observing from the Cape of Good Hope, had discovered forests, oceans, herds of bison and beavers, and an intelligent race of winged “man-bats” living on the Moon. The reports were a complete fabrication. They were almost certainly written by a Sun reporter named Richard Adams Locke, falsely attributed to Herschel and to a fictitious “Dr. Andrew Grant,” and dressed up as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science — a real publication that had ceased to exist two years earlier. None of it was true, and within weeks New York knew it.

The series ran from Tuesday, August 25 to Monday, August 31, 1835, roughly 17,000 words across six installments, and it was an immediate sensation. The Sun boasted a circulation of 19,360 copies on August 28 and declared itself “the greatest of any daily paper in the world.” The hoax was exposed almost as fast as it spread: James Gordon Bennett’s rival New York Herald pointed out on August 31 that the cited journal had been defunct since 1833 and named Locke as the likely author. The Sun never printed a formal retraction.

What makes the case unusual among great deceptions is how little it cost anyone. Herschel, who knew nothing of it until later, was first amused and then irritated at having to field questions, but bore the imposture “with good grace.” Locke kept his job, eventually attached “Author of the Moon Hoax” to his byline, and confessed the whole thing as satire in an 1840 letter to the weekly New World. The paper paid no fine and faced no court. The Great Moon Hoax has survived as a founding episode of “fake news” precisely because it demonstrated, early and cleanly, that a sensational fabrication could sell papers, evaporate under scrutiny, and leave its perpetrators richer and unpunished.

The lasting interest of the story is less in the man-bats than in the mechanism. The hoax worked not because its readers were uniquely foolish but because it borrowed the costume of legitimate science at a moment when real astronomy was producing genuinely astonishing news and when a cheap, fast, profit-driven press had every incentive to print what sold.

The Berners Street Hoax — a one-guinea bet buried a London street in deliveries

In Westminster on 27 November 1810, the home of a Mrs Tottenham at 54 Berners Street was besieged for an entire day by chimney sweeps, coal carts, bakers carrying wedding cakes, fishmongers, undertakers with a coffin, and a procession of London’s grandees — none of whom she had summoned. The cause was a hoax: the writer and Regency wit Theodore Hook had spent roughly six weeks forging between one thousand and four thousand letters in Mrs Tottenham’s name, each ordering goods or requesting an audience at her address at a specified hour. It was not a misunderstanding or a coincidence. It was a deliberate, painstakingly scheduled deception, and the man behind it engineered it to win a one-guinea bet.

The wager, by most accounts struck with a friend (the architect Samuel Beazley is the name usually attached to it), was that Hook could make any house in London the most talked-about address in the city. He picked number 54 seemingly at random as he passed it. The forged letters were staggered through the day so that the callers would arrive in overlapping waves and never clear. From a rented room across the street, Hook and a companion watched the street fill with carts, carriages, and a swelling crowd of spectators until the parish constables blocked the road ends and the chaos finally subsided after dark.

What distinguishes the case from a simple prank is that it required no belief in anything marvellous — only the routine assumption that a written order is genuine. Each tradesman believed a single plausible letter. The hoax’s power came from aggregating thousands of those small, reasonable acts of trust into one paralysing convergence. Hook was suspected almost at once; a reward was offered and a search mounted, but no criminal charge was ever brought. He left London for the country for a few weeks until the noise died down, and never publicly admitted authorship until he wrote a thinly veiled confession into his 1836 novel Gilbert Gurney: “I am the man — I did it.”

The lasting interest is less in the spectacle than in the mechanism. The Berners Street hoax is an early demonstration that a forged instruction, mass-produced and addressed to people who have no reason to doubt it, can weaponise an entire city’s ordinary commerce against a single innocent household — at almost no cost to the perpetrator and with almost no risk of capture.