Moon Hoax
- Length
- 2 h 25 min
- Chapters
- 8
- Language
- English
- Genre
- Science Fiction
- First published
- 1859
This hoax, subtitled “A Discovery that the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings,” was originally serialized in 1835 in the New York Sun newspaper. It purported itself to be a true account that had been published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Sir John Herschel, a well-known astronomer at the time, was credited with authorship.
Herschel’s telescope, according to the story, was able to see man-bats and other animals, as well as a variety of geographical features, on the surface of the moon. The article was published at a time when newspapers were read as much for entertainment as for news. It was not uncovered as a hoax until weeks after its publication, and the paper never printed a retraction. - Summary by Verla Viera
Chapters
From LibriVox, read by volunteers and in the public domain. LibriVox page (opens librivox.org), the text (opens gutenberg.org), all files on the Internet Archive (opens archive.org).