Hoaxes like Ponzi schemes or psychic healings aren't much fun; we have too much sympathy for those who endure losses to schemers. A good newspaper hoax, however, has all the charm of a harmless practical joke. It can promote humor even among those taken in, and can even improve our understanding of ourselves. It is possible that the best newspaper hoax ever was one from 1835, when many New Yorkers, astonished but not incredulous, learned that astronomers had spotted animals, plants, and men with wings going about their livings on the Moon. This rollicking, funny, and revealing story is now told in _The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth Century New York_ (Basic Books) by Matthew Goodman. The author has dug into mountains of yellowing newspapers and journals to tell the story that not only includes this particular hoax, but also the contemporary hoaxing of P. T. Barnum and of Edgar Allen Poe. He has also given us a lively picture of the world of the penny papers and their circulation wars.
Richard Adams Locke had been talented court reporter, and became editor of _The New York Sun_ in 1835. Locke had an interest in astronomy, but he was a freethinker who detested the way preachers of the time were misusing science by imagining distant worlds. Locke did some imagining himself. John Herschel had published his _Treatise on Astronomy_ to great acclaim, and was then working at the Cape of Good Hope, making observations for the southern hemisphere. So Locke came up with a fanciful, credible tale of Herschel's newest observations made by a super-powerful telescope, which, according to Locke, used the principle of the "hydro-oxygen microscope" to brighten the images from the lenses to produce pictures of unprecedented detail. That red blur on the Moon resolved itself into a field of poppies, and there were birds, biped beavers, unicorns, and best of all, the "Vespertilio-homo" or man-bats, who could be seen to be holding spirited conversations between themselves, and cavorting with their females in ways whose description _The Sun_ could not include, but which would, it assured readers, be scientifically addressed by Herschel's official reports. Herschel was far away and could not be reached for comment, of course. One of his friends eventually brought him a copy of the lunar stories, and Herschel laughed out loud at the audacity of the tale, but it proved to be less amusing to him as for years he was repeatedly asked about the man-bats. Horace Greeley himself admired the "unquestionable plausibility and verisimilitude" of the stories, and said that at least nine-tenths of those who read them took them to be real (although a far larger portion said they had known it was a hoax all along, once the hoax was discovered). Poe, himself a plagiarist from time to time, accused Locke of plagiarizing from him. P. T. Barnum, who at this time was profiting from his first great hoax, the supposedly 161-year-old former slave who nursed George Washington, admired the lunar humbug, whose scientific detail "... exacted the homage of belief from all but cross-grained and inexorable skeptics." Everyone in New York was talking about the man-bats, and they were a great success for _The Sun_ as well as an embarrassment for the other papers which could not cover the lunar happenings except to report on _The Sun_'s sensation. The rival papers said, once the hoax was exposed, that _The Sun_ would suffer not only shame but reduced circulation, but neither happened. There were comic theatrical presentations on lunar themes as well as a vast painted diorama to recreate the lunar landscape. Illustrations of the stories sold well. After the hoax was exposed, and New Yorkers had a good laugh at themselves, it was translated into different languages and caused sensation in foreign lands.
Goodman's history of the hoax benefits from controlled digressions that explain the atmosphere of the times: abolitionism, the chess automaton, (literal) duels between editors, hogs as urban garbage controls, and the sometimes bloody clashes of Whigs and Democrats. His themes of public credulousness and the clash between science and religion are great ones, but do not overpower a quirky, stranger-than-life tale of the time that Americans thought that the eternally fascinating question of life on other worlds had been authoritatively settled.
