UFO Disinfo: Part One - Roswell, Maury Island, and Beyond.

Something fell from the skies into onto the desert in June of 1947. Roswell, New Mexico, rancher Mac Brazel and his son Vernon discovered its debris field, which according to them included “rubber strips, tinfoil, [and] a rather tough paper and sticks.” Later that month, Mac read about the “flying saucer” sighting by Kenneth Arnold above Washington state, the incident that really kicked off the modern UFO era. Thinking this debris might possibly be the remains of such a saucer, Mac stored it and contacted the sheriff, who in turn contacted the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at Roswell Army Air Field. In early June, the story hit the press when an official release from the Roswell Army Air Field stated that the “many rumors of flying discs became a reality” because the Bomb Group’s intelligence office had been “fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.” Flying saucer mania went wild again for a brief time, but before long, higher authorities retracted the “flying disc” press release and asserted that the debris had only been the remains of a fallen weather balloon equipped with a radar reflector. The conspiracy theories and grand myth about the Roswell Incident did not spring up immediately. Far from it, in fact, it seems that most accepted the retraction and thought little more of it for more than thirty years. In the 1980s, of course, UFOlogists, eagerly seeking evidence of government cover-ups, latched on to the Roswell report and made of it a grand affair, with not only recovered alien spacecraft but also recovered aliens. In the 1990s, the official US Air Force explanation emerged, and it did indeed indicate some cover-up, clarifying that the radar-reflecting weather balloon recovered was actually part of the secret and sensitive Project Mogul, an attempt to gather data on Soviet nuclear bomb tests with equipment carried aloft by weather balloons, a kind of early form of reconnaissance drone. This version of events seems to explain much: Mac Brazel’s description accords well with the debris a Project Mogul balloon would leave behind, and any secrecy surrounding the debris can easily be understood. In fact, there appears to be corroboration from records showing a Mogul balloon had been launched on June 4th from Alamogordo and subsequently lost. But even if this itself was a cover story, there is no shortage of other, terrestrial candidates for what might have crashed that the government would have wanted hushed up. It was near enough to the White Sands test range that any Top Secret experimental rocket or aircraft may have crashed in the Roswell desert. If that were the case, though, why would the government still be keeping it a secret today? An even more curious question is why on earth the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group, an elite squadron that was no stranger to keeping classified information secure, having dropped the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan in 1945, would issue a press release declaring that this was a downed flying saucer, thereby attracting attention to the crash rather than covering it up. Is it possible that the story had been purposely planted for some other reason besides the concealment of what crashed in the desert? There were significant fears among some in the military that Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers were some kind of advanced Soviet aircraft. Could the story have been intended to convince Soviets that we had captured one of their strange craft or that we had developed one of our own, or might it simply have been a lure for spies? One thing is for certain, this has become a definite pattern for the U.S. government: discouraging belief in UFOs with one wagging finger while they encourage UFOlogists to believe with another beckoning hand.

As I write this, I am still awaiting the release of the Pentagon UFO report that inspired me to tackle this topic. For some time, I have been curious about whether some other purpose is being served by the recent release of classified information about UFOs. In December of 2017, back when the New York Times reported on the existence of the Pentagon’s black-money funded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and spread leaked video of Naval UFO encounters all over the media, I could buy that the story was a genuine piece of investigative journalism, prompted by a whistleblower, revealing information the government had not wanted revealed. Yet last year, when the Pentagon officially acknowledged the authenticity of the leaked videos, and when the existence of their active UAP Task Force was revealed by being openly mentioned in a Senate committee report, I began to wonder if something else might not be going on. Now, after the Coronavirus relief package included a requirement that the Pentagon disclose what it knows about UFOs, I find myself even more suspicious. The Pentagon has already briefed the House Intelligence Committee, and we may never know if what they told Congress was significantly more than what they end up revealing publicly in the report due before the end of June. However, simple logic and familiarity with the government’s handling of the UFO topic in the past tells us that we should not take what they have to say at face value. Early in June, the Times published a leak of the forthcoming UAP report’s contents, indicating that it will offer no evidence that UFOs encountered in the last couple decades are extra-terrestrial or that they are not, but that it will disavow the notion that they represent classified American technology, suggesting that Russia or China may have outpaced us scientifically when it comes to hypersonic technology, developing aircraft or drones capable of greater acceleration and maneuverability, and even trans-medium capabilities, flying and then submerging into the ocean, all without any discernible exhaust plumes. The problem with this is that the U.S. government does not typically want to show its hand so blatantly to the rest of the world. How does it help our standing on the world’s stage, our image of military primacy, to announce to the world that we’ve fallen behind? How does it help us to learn more about a rival’s technology to indicate that we are actively investigating it? The Times article states that some elements of their report will remain classified, which they acknowledge will continue to fuel UFO conspiracy theories, but this begs the question, why is our utter befuddlement at this technology being declassified? Unless we are not so clueless when it comes to this technology as the Pentagon is making out. Unless, as we have seen time and time again in the history of the intelligence world’s disinformation games surrounding the topic of UFOs, they are merely manipulating public perceptions to sow doubt and confusion. I know some of you may be thinking, this sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense… how unlike this podcast! But my principal source is an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, which views the UFO phenomenon and the US government’s disinformation related to it through a critical and rationalist lens. I hope you’ll see by the end of this series that, when it comes to government disinformation for espionage and national security purposes, conspiracy is the name of the game, and despite some reliance on conspiracy theory, this serves as a far more rational explanation for UFOs than visitation by Little Grey Men.

Maj. Jesse A. Marcel holding pieces of foil lined material related to the Roswell incident. Courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas. - https://library.uta.edu/roswell/images

Certainly U.S. military intelligence did not invent the core elements of the UFO myth. Even before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, science-fiction was planting those seeds. In one 1946 issue, for example, the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories featured a piece on mysterious “circle-winged” aircraft appearing over San Francisco along with a horror story depicting alien abduction long before the first recorded claims of such experiences. And the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, would himself be drawn into the flying saucer excitement of 1947. Just days after Kenneth Arnold’s much publicized saucer sighting, Palmer received a letter from one Harold Dahl, a harbor patrolman in Washington State’s Puget Sound, which described his boat being buzzed by balloonish, doughnut-like UFOs near Maury Island. The account described how five of these craft were circling a sixth that appeared to be failing and about to crash before it ejected some molten rock material, some of which struck Dahl’s son, burning his arm, and killed his dog. According to his account, after Dahl told his harbor patrol superior about the incident, a mysterious man in a black suit came to see him and warned him against spreading the story, an early example of the “Men in Black” stories about government men or eerie human-like entities mimicking men that would often accompany UFO accounts in later years. Dahl disregarded this figure’s warning, though, and wrote to Palmer, enclosing a piece of the slag-like material released by his UFO. Palmer then contacted pilot Kenneth Arnold, the original saucer-sighter, who was familiar with Washington state, and offered him $200 to investigate the Maury Island Incident. Arnold himself was visited by some government types after his first sighting, although these identified themselves by name as Brown and Davidson, representatives of Army Air Force Intelligence, questioning Arnold about the aircraft he had seen over Mt. Rainier, as well as about the Maury Island Incident Ray Palmer had asked him to investigate. His interest piqued, Arnold flew out to Tacoma to begin his investigation, but he found Dahl rather dim-witted, and thought the material Dahl showed him, which supposedly had been dropped from a UFO, was regular old lava rock. But when Arnold met Dahl’s supposed “superior,” Fred Crisman, things began to get stranger.

Crisman was an altogether more suave and convincing figure, to whom Dahl deferred even though it wasn’t Crisman who had witnessed the flying doughnuts. Crisman spoke confidently to Arnold, asserting that these aircraft could not possibly have been American, and suggesting they might represent the development of captured Nazi technology. Kenneth Arnold began to get paranoid. He already thought it strange that his lodgings had been arranged for him anonymously, and after a journalist called him saying there had been a tip about his saucer investigation, he began to think his hotel room was bugged. He then called his Air Force Intelligence contact, Brown, who strangely refused to take his first call and called him back from a pay phone. Brown said he and Davidson would fly right out, and thereafter, Arnold received another phone call from a journalist saying he’d received another tip about an Air Force investigation. Arnold searched his room for listening devices but found none, leading him to suspect that perhaps, inexplicably, Brown and Davidson had been leaking info about the Maury Island investigation to the press. Counterintuitively, though, if these Air Force Intelligence agents wanted a saucer flap in the news, they arrived and insisted the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Dahl and Crisman. Taking the samples of UFO-discharged rocks, Brown and Davidson boarded a military plane bound for California, but the plane crashed, killing both Air Force Intelligence agents on August 1st, 1947, the very day that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thereafter, as a disturbed Kenneth Arnold wrestled with the notion that Brown and Davidson had been killed for their involvement with the Maury Island investigation, another Air Force representative arrived, one Major George Sander, who took Arnold out to an industrial smelting site near Maury Island, where piles of rocks identical to those Dahl had shown him could be found, making an effort to assure Arnold, once again, that the whole thing had been a hoax. But Arnold remained leery. According to him, he went back to Dahl’s house, but to his astonishment, he found it completely deserted: “there wasn’t a stick of furniture inside.” Deeply troubled, Arnold flew home, making only a brief a stop to refuel. Upon taking off again, though, his engine failed, necessitating an emergency landing that damaged his landing gear. Investigating after the fact, he said he discovered his fuel valve had been cut, leading him to suspect that he, perhaps like Brown and Davidson, had been a target of government assassination.

Newspaper headline reporting the plane crash that killed Brown and Davidson. Public Domain.

Certainly it can be argued that Arnold might have been imagining things. Was it so strange that a hotel room had been arranged for him? And is it such a mystery that the press had gotten wind of his UFO investigation? He was, after all, a very public figure since his own rather famous UFO encounter. And isn’t it possible that some elements of this story were exaggerated when Arnold wrote about them after the fact. For example, Kenneth Arnold claims to have had yet another UFO sighting during his flight to Tacoma to investigate Dahl’s claims, which during the Summer of Saucers in 1947 probably seemed reasonable, as it was suspected these mystery aircraft might become more and more commonplace, but in retrospect seems a bit hard to believe and smacks of embellishment. If Arnold took liberties with his story, perhaps we can disregard his claims of Dahl’s house being vacated, or of his own plane being sabotaged. What we cannot dismiss is the plane crash that killed Air Force Intelligence men and UFO investigators Brown and Davidson, as that is a matter of record. However, the engine fire that caused their B-25 to crash may indeed have been an accident. Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe in coincidence, though, so it is all too easy to presume that the crash was intentional and related to their investigation. Had Brown and Davidson gone rogue, leaking info to the press? And if so, would that have represented such a national security threat that the two had to be killed? Why not simply arrest them for treason if they were releasing classified information? One possible explanation is that these Air Force Intelligence men were believed to be Soviet moles. Less than a year earlier, the top secret Venona counter-intelligence project had uncovered through the decryption of some 3,000 messages the existence of Soviet moles embedded at every level of the U.S. government, even among presidential administrators and on the staff of the Manhattan Project, as well as in the Army Air Force. Considering this context, it’s feasible that Brown and Davidson’s seemingly odd insistence on communicating with Arnold via pay phone can be explained by their being spies looking for intel on America’s secret atomic aircraft. It may then also be suggested that the entire Maury Island sighting had been a honeypot, a false story planted as a lure meant to draw out Soviet moles intent on sniffing out secret U.S. technology, and that it worked. Supporting this notion is the surprising background of Fred Crisman, who formerly flew with the Army Air Force in the Pacific Theater and who didn’t actually seem to be Harold Dahl’s “superior” at all. Further rumor had it that Crisman had also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, before popping up at Maury Island, and his connections to the intelligence world would years later lead to his being named by District Attorney Jim Garrison as possibly being involved in JFK’s assassination. But of course, this is speculation. By the cold light of skepticism, Crisman was just a hoaxer, and Kenneth Arnold a storyteller with a taste for fame, and Brown and Davidson’s fiery death a tragic accident that had nothing to do with their investigation of the Maury Island Incident.

A month after the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Air Force Intelligence agents Brown and Davidson, General Nathan Twining penned an internal Air Force memo indicating that the flying saucer phenomenon was “real and not visionary,” but undermining the Roswell myth, he lamented a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crashed recovered exhibits.” Twining suggested two possibilities: that the saucers were a top-secret American project about which the newly formed Air Force was kept ignorant, or that they represented some advanced technology developed by a foreign nation. The fears that Soviets had reverse-engineered secret Nazi technology were palpable, prompting the launch of Project Sign, whose remit was to investigate the nature and origin of flying saucers. Based in Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the hope of the project was clearly to obtain some of this supposed flight technology for the U.S., for right there on base was the Air Technical Intelligence Center, America’s own apparatus for reverse-engineering captured German aircraft. The next year, Project Sign issued its report, Estimate of the Situation. Legend has it this report declared that saucer sightings did not match anything in the German blueprints they had, and that all evidence pointed to some non-human technology. But we don’t actually know what Project Sign’s report concluded, because its contents upset the Air Force Chief of Staff so much that he ordered all copies destroyed. In the early days of the summer of 1947, as the Air Force came to be an independent service branch of the armed forces, saucer panic may have seemed a boon, ensuring ample budget apportionment to the branch of the military tasked with protecting our skies. But after a year of being constantly bombarded by mistaken sightings, along with, we might assume, sightings of some of our own aircraft that we didn’t want people talking about, the U.S. Air Force had had enough of flying saucers and seemed to want to extricate themselves from the whole phenomenon. To this end, and perhaps partly as a backlash against the supposed Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis in Project Sign’s report, the Air Force launched a new UFO investigation, Project Grudge, this one operating under the assumption that flying saucers could not possibly be real, seeking to debunk all saucer sightings, and generating a public relations campaign intended to convince the world that flying saucers are nonsense. The fruit of their campaign, an article in the Saturday Evening Post, convincingly attributes all saucer sightings to Aviator’s Vertigo, balloons, and the reflection of light on clouds and aircraft canopies. The article went a long way toward laying the flying saucer excitement to bed.

Project Grudge's report of August 1949. Public Domain.

In December 1949, though, flying saucer mania returned. True, a popular magazine for men, featured an article by one Donald Keyhoe entitled “Flying Saucers Are Real,” in which it was alleged that flying saucers were indeed genuine aircraft, were alien in origin, and were being actively hushed up by the government. It is true that Keyhoe was a writer of pulp fiction, but his authority on this topic derived from his background as a Marine aviator, and he claimed to have reached his conclusions after interviewing numerous officials who had stonewalled his investigation. Thereafter, Commander Robert McLaughlin, Officer-in-charge of the Naval Unit at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo wrote a follow-up for True magazine detailing a saucer sighting by five Navy scientists while observing a weather balloon. These articles served to refute the Saturday Evening Post article and paint it as part of the cover-up. But might there be more to these competing articles than meets the eye? Mark Pilkington, author of my principal source Mirage Men, points out that in 1949, the Navy and the Air Force were locked in a bitter rivalry. Supporters of the newly formed Air Force had begun to spread the idea that the Navy was obsolete, as future wars would be won exclusively through strategic intercontinental bombing. When the new Secretary of State, himself a proponent of this idea of Air Force supremacy, cancelled a Navy supercarrier project in favor of an Air Force bomber project, it meant war. Officials in the Navy command structure struck back by leaking evidence that Air Force generals had dealt fraudulently with certain military contractors in building their bombers. The entire affair got so out of hand that House Armed Services Committee hearing had to be convened to squash their beef. Thus, later that year, when two Navy men stoked the flying saucer fires after the Air Force had expended so much energy to dampen them, it is perhaps not so great a leap to suggest that it was just another barrage in their internecine conflict rather than a genuine disclosure of UFO activity. But this remains, as with almost all aspects of this topic, conjecture.

We begin to see a pattern here. As at Roswell, we see different people or different forces, within the military pushing and pulling, denying the existence of flying saucers while simultaneously insisting on it. One further story illustrates this yet again, if it can be believed. In March 1950, the same month that True magazine ran its second piece on flying saucers, a mystery lecturer presented to science students at University of Denver about flying saucers landing near Aztec, New Mexico, not far from Roswell, and that the military found several dead extra-terrestrials within, which they had since been studying, along with their recovered craft. The Denver Post later outed the lecturer as an oil man named Silas Newton, and further investigation showed that Newton had gotten his information from a nutty Nazi sympathizer, Leo Gebauer, who despite his eccentricities had at one time worked for Air Research Company in Pheonix, Arizona. But rather than some state secrets to which Gebauer had become privy, the Aztec story turned out to have been taken from a hoax published in the Aztec Independent Review a couple years earlier. Nothing to see here… except that Silas Newton, in his personal journals, wrote about two men from a “highly secret US government entity” approaching him, informing him that they knew his story was a hoax but encouraging him to continue telling it nonetheless, promising to provide protection to both him and Gebauer if they did so. It’s easy to dismiss this as BS from a BS artist, but interestingly, two years after this, when Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for selling people mining gear they claimed was reverse-engineered from extra-terrestrial tech, their sentences were suspended. Had they finally called in a favor from the government men whose purposes their outrageous tales somehow served? And why were these shadowy figures, if they existed, so interested in the spreading of a flying saucer hoax among university students? Interestingly, Newton’s lecture concluded with a questionnaire to determine how believable these educated young people found the story. And there were further reports of follow-up surveys among the students conducted by none other than Air Force Intelligence. Having been foiled in their attempts to suppress flying saucer excitement, had the Air Force then decided to conduct some market research to see how they might use flying saucer tales to their own advantage?

Front page Denver Post story about fraudsters Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. Public Domain.

Interestingly, major elements of this story about the recovery of alien spacecraft and corpses in the desert at Aztec, although a known hoax, would decades later show up as part of the resurgent myth of the Roswell UFO crash. And promised proof of this story would be used as a carrot by Air Force Intelligence on numerous occasions, coaxing UFO investigators to inform on their fellow UFOlogists and convincing them to seed disinformation into the growing community of UFO investigators. Things were going to get a whole lot crazier from there, and people were going to be driven a whole lot crazier, as you will see in the continuation of this series on UFO Disinfo. In the meanwhile, I await the release of the Pentagon UFO report with bated breath, certain that nothing of real interest will be contained therein and at the same time hopeful there may be something of interest to our topic. However, as I further unravel the Gordian knot of US counter-intelligence and perception management that has been all bound up with UFO sightings from the very beginning, I begin to doubt that this is anything more than stagecraft. Some in the upper echelons of the American intelligence and security apparatus seem to have concluded that it may benefit us to acknowledge recent sightings (and only the recent ones) and to admit or feign ignorance about them. And come to think of it in those terms, this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The only real difference seems to be that, because of advances in technology, it’s no longer possible to blame these sightings on vertigo and optical illusion.

Further Reading

Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse, 2010.

The Beautiful Corpse of Helen Jewett

The New York City police force did not come to be until 1844, after a surge in population and poverty resulted in a significant increase in vice and crime. Before that, the city had employed a corps of 80 civilian patrolmen, the Nightwatch, who stood sentry on street corners every evening. One early Sunday morning in April, 1836, two of these watchmen, Dennis Brink and George Noble, had the final few quiet hours of their shift in lower Manhattan shattered by a sudden alarm being raised from a nearby brothel on Thomas Street. “Fire!” cried a woman from its doorway, prompting Brink and Noble to investigate. The woman, one Rosina Townsend, madam of the establishment, led the watchmen to the room of one resident, a prostitute named Helen Jewett, who was found murdered in her bed, three deep and bloody wounds on her head, and her bedclothes still smoldering from a fire that had presumably been set to conceal the crime. Brink and Noble questioned the madam and the other ladies in residence at the brothel. They discovered that the last visitor Helen Jewett had seen was a young regular of Jewett’s who went by the name Frank Rivers at the brothel. The madam indicated that she had seen Rivers in Jewett’s room late Saturday evening and did not believe he had left, and that shortly before discovering the fire in Jewett’s room, she had been awakened when someone left the house by its back door. Investigating the yard, the watchmen discovered a hatchet, and in an adjacent yard, they found a discarded cloak with a fringe that witnesses insisted belonged to the young man Frank Rivers. After some further investigation, the watchmen learned that Rivers’s real name was Richard Robinson, the 19-year-old son of a landed Connecticut state legislator. Robinson had been living in a boardinghouse and clerking for a local mercantile establishment. When it was suggested that the hatchet the watchmen had discovered belonged to the store where Robinson clerked, the watchmen determined to track down their young suspect and haul him back to the scene of the crime. The watchmen found Robinson still asleep; Robinson’s roommate, James Tew, answered and confirmed that he and Robinson had visited the brothel the night before, though Tew had departed earlier than his roommate. Rousing Robinson from his sleep, the watchmen accompanied the young men back to the Thomas Street brothel and confronted them with the crime. In their estimation, Richard Robinson was all too composed when receiving the news, denying his guilt in the murder but also not appearing surprised or upset. As was the custom at the time, a coroner’s jury was convened, composed of numerous random people who who happened to be present to weigh the facts as they were known and determine on the spot whether anyone should be accused. The jury declared that the deceased had come to her end by the hand of Richard Robinson, and the youth was immediately taken to jail to await a trial that would turn out to be one of the most notorious and sensational in American history.

In my last post, I mentioned in passing that James Gordon Bennett, the enterprising editor of the New York Herald penny paper, made something of a name for himself with his sensational coverage of the infamous Robinson-Jewett murder trial, actually pioneering the printing of extra editions in his zeal to publish more and more material about this scandalous crime. While this crime might not be so well known today, it was the most notorious criminal case of its time, perhaps only rivaled by the trial of Levi Weeks for the murder of Elma Sands, which I focused an episode on some years ago. In my discussion of Levi Weeks’s murder trial, I presented the notion of that trial and the many popular narrative accounts of its court proceedings representing the dawn of the popular true crime genre in America. If that is so, then this case, less than 40 years later, which was even more heavily written and read about, not just in published court records as in the Weeks trial but also in the cheap penny papers that were then becoming more and more popular, represents the full realization of the public’s thirst for salacious tales of sex and murder. This case has been written about in much detail in intersectional studies of gender and class in early 19th century America, and it has been picked apart as a seminal moment in the history of American journalism. But in these academic analyses, the tragic narratives of the victim and the accused and the newspaperman for whom the case became an obsession tend to get lost. Therefore, in retelling this legendary historical true crime tale, I hope to better emphasize the real human stories at its center as I further explore the mystery of this unsolved crime. And at the core of this mystery is a forgotten woman, remembered to posterity by an alias, which newspapers at the time didn’t even print correctly. The Helen Jewett of public imagination was the creation of an infatuated newspaperman, a fictional character constructed more to sell newspapers than to provide any real insight into the life taken that spring night.

James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, who turned the Helen Jewett murder into a sensational press phenomenon. Public Domain image.

The sensational news coverage of the Helen Jewett murder began the very next morning, when James Gordon Bennett, the editor of the penny paper the New York Herald gained entrance to Jewett’s room and viewed her body. With him was an artist who would create lithographs of the scene for his newspaper, but the first-person account Bennett afterward wrote and published describing what he saw in her room gave a rather more vivid impression than could any illustration. It should be said that Bennett was something of an odd character, rather a joke to many in New York City. He had formerly been the editor of a partisan newspaper but had broken away to start a penny paper because he chafed under the editorial constraints of political subsidization and wanted independence. However, in order to break into the penny paper field, he found he could not focus on the kind of credible banking and political news on which he wanted to report, for the readers of the new penny papers wanted reports on robberies and murders. Nevertheless, he tried to have it both ways, reporting on crime as well as on Wall Street and printing political attacks on the editors of rival newspapers. These takedown pieces, criticizing the political affiliations and views of competitors, led to a series of physical assaults, when newspaper editors he had criticized actually beat him with their canes in the middle of Wall Street. It got to the point that one rival penny paper declared Bennett to be “[c]ommon flogging property.” It was at this low point in his career and life that Bennett entered Helen Jewett’s room and seemed to see in her some reflection of himself. He saw her expensive clothing and jewelry, so out of place in her brothel room, and he understood she was a high-priced prostitute who made a successful living. He saw that she was literate, with editions of several periodicals and volumes of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron on her shelves, and even a portrait of Byron upon her wall. To Bennett, she may have seemed like someone who was struggling for upward mobility in the rigid class structure of New York, much like himself, and also like him, she had been struck down for her audacity in trying to make something of herself. One volume among her books especially seemed to confirm this characterization: Flowers of Loveliness by Lady Blessington, about the author’s rise from a poor background and promiscuous lifestyle to become a countess through marriage to a nobleman. When the watchman at the scene removed the covering and showed her body to Bennett, he became oddly smitten. In his editorial, he made of it a strange Gothic scene, like a scene from a story by Edgar Allan Poe, in which he found her “beautiful female corpse” strikingly attractive. “’My God!’” he claims to have cried out. “’How like a statue! I can scarcely conceive that form to be a corpse.’” Three times in the article he compares her body to a polished marble statue, claiming he was “lost in admiration of this extraordinary sight.” The description seems less than forthright. It makes no mention of the blood from her wounds and describes the damage by the fire as providing only a bronzing effect to one side of this otherwise white marble sculpture. Whether or not his description was accurate or his reaction to the sight genuine, Bennett’s coverage of the murder resulted in a great increase in sales for his newspaper. Bennett’s tasteless exhibition of Jewett’s beautiful corpse turned out to be his path to success, and he had no intention of letting it go.

During the ensuing months before the trial began in June, Bennett published article after article about Jewett’s murder, and other papers, seeing his success, followed suit, although sometimes taking an alternative view of the crime. While Bennett would go on to raise a variety of alternative suspects to Robinson, even endorsing a widespread conspiracy theory that Robinson had been framed in order to protect the real killer, a more wealthy and powerful client of Jewett, other papers tended to favor Robinson’s guilt. While Bennett portrayed Jewett as a glamorous figure of great beauty who had often been seen on New York streets in her silk green dress and fine jewelry, others suggested she was actually rather ugly and overweight. Bennett portrayed her as a confident and intelligent young woman who had rejected a domestic life in favor of freedom both financial and sexual, but others described her as a depraved and manipulative harlot who had rejected morality and paid the price. One thing that most coverage agreed upon, though, was that Helen Jewett, whom many newspapers called Ellen through some error, had previously been on a more traditional path in life, with more socially acceptable opportunities, but had been seduced away into a life of vice, making the story of her murder a powerful cautionary tale. Among the numerous versions of her life appearing in newspapers and afterward in pamphlets sold on the streets, some sense of her true biography can be discerned. One version had it that her real name was Maria Benson, an orphan of Boston with a kind guardian who had sent her away to a boarding school where a lustful merchant’s son had taken her innocence. Rather than bring shame to her guardian, she left for New York, hoping to find work, but was taken advantage of again by a man who ended up installing her in a brothel. This story, though, turns out to have been a lie that Helen herself invented a couple years before her murder and told in court to elicit sympathy when pressing charges against a young man who had assaulted her. Nevertheless, there appear to have been some element of truth in it. Alternative accounts also tell us she was orphaned and raised in the family of a guardian before her unfortunate seduction while away at boarding school, but rather than being from Boston, she was from Maine, and her guardian was a Judge named Western. One of these accounts suggest her seducer had actually drugged her to take her innocence, and that she ran away to Boston thinking herself too befouled to remain a part of Judge Western’s family, though the good judge was said to have searched for her. Another claims she was engaged to be married, but when her betrothed left town, a young rake forged letters claiming her fiancée had died and, under the pretense of accompanying her to some distant family, abducted her, took her innocence, and left her in a brothel. In yet another version, she was not trafficked as a prostitute but rather sought out the vocation herself with enthusiasm and succeeded in establishing herself among a clientele of young men from wealthy families who became enamored of not only her beauty but also her wit and intelligence.

A salacious depiction of Jewett’s exposed body in her burned bed. Public Domain image.

So obsessed with her was Bennett that it was he who ended up discovering the closest thing to the truth about Helen Jewett. Through one of her confidants, he learned that she was named Dorcas Dorrance, and she was from Augusta, Maine, where her parents had died when she was a baby. She had indeed been raised by a Judge Western like a sister to his daughters, and was thus well-educated. When she was sixteen, while on a trip to visit some distant family, she fell in love with a young bank cashier and gave up her innocence in a moment of passion. After the Judge’s family learned she had lost her virginity, she left in shame and became a prostitute, first in Portland, then Boston, and finally in New York. Bennett’s account was widely reprinted, and as it spread, so too did a rumor that the young man who took Helen’s, or rather Dorcas’s, virginity was actually one of Judge Western’s sons. This finally caused the true judge, Chief Justice Nathan Weston of the Maine State Supreme Court, to issue a statement, declaring he was the Judge Western of newspaper reports, and that his family had been slandered. Helen Jewett’s true name was Dorcas Doyen, he said, and after her mother died, he had not adopted her but rather taken her on as a servant, for her own father was a drunk. She had not been seduced, said Chief Justice Weston, but had chosen herself at age 17 to pursue a life of vice. But even this revelation does not make for a certain understanding of Jewett’s character, for others have suggested the judge chose to impugn her character in order to save face for his own family. It turns out that in 1830, the same year that the judge said Dorcas left them, one of his daughters discovered that her husband had been having an affair, a discovery that would later be used as grounds for their divorce. Was it possible that young Jewett’s seducer had been a son of the judge after all, a son-in-law? Had she been forced out of the household and driven into a life of prostitution at the insistence of the judge’s daughter, or by the judge himself, holding her to blame for the son-in-law’s infidelity? Or had she in fact seduced the husband of her employer’s daughter? What we find is that Helen Jewett, sometimes called Ellen Jewett, formerly alias Maria Benson, once an orphan named Dorcas Dorrance, or rather Dorcas Doyen, could be made into whatever the public wanted her to be: a hapless victim of male depravity, an intelligent woman who liberated herself from society’s expectations, or a wanton seductress who met an unsurprisingly grisly end as a result of the vicious life she had chosen. In this way, Helen Jewett became more legend than woman, and as typically happens with legends, she was scorned by many and revered by some.

The attention of the penny press to the Robinson-Jewett case and the crafting of a legendary Helen Jewett resulted in an early form of street demonstration and a kind of protest movement. Every day, crowds gathered at Bellevue jail, where Robinson was held, and at the Thomas Street brothel where Helen had been murdered and where, according to one of Bennett’s reports, her ghost could sometimes be glimpsed in a window. These crowds were divided into two groups, which could be discerned by their attire. Those who revered Jewett and wanted to see justice for her murder began wearing white fur hats with ribbons of black crepe, a style of headwear that came to be called a “Helen Jewett mourner.” Meanwhile, the young working-class men who believed Robinson was innocent and that, as Bennett’s Herald was known to suggest, the authorities were engaged in covering up for some more privileged and wealthy murderer, wore another style of hat called Robinson caps, as well as cloaks with a fringe like that which was being used as evidence against the young man they believed was innocent. Both of these were largely gangs of young men, just the sort that were blamed by moral reform societies, many of them female societies, for the kind of vice and violence that was corrupting the city and had led to the crime. In those years, many teen boys were sent to live without supervision in cities while they learned the ins and outs of some business as a clerk, just as young Richard Robinson had been. These numerous young men were often blamed for the vice and disorder in the city, whereas young women, who typically lived under supervision, were not. However, it was not just young men who were influenced by the story of Helen Jewett. Her story had been so sensationalized, her lifestyle so glorified as an alternative to domestic pursuits and factory work, that there were reports of girls running away from home at 15 years old and attempting to enter brothels, believing it was their ticket to a “fancy life.” In fact, so venerated had Helen Jewett become among some women that when her partially burned bedstead was finally hauled out of the Thomas Street brothel and left at the curb for junk, a mob of young women fell upon it, prizing away pieces of it to carry with them as if it were the True Cross.

A depiction of a guilty Robinson fleeing the scene of the murder. Public Domain image.

The wearers of Robinson caps and cloaks showed themselves to be a true menace, proving the moral reform societies right about the dangers of lawless young men running amok in the city. While some ministers in the city preaching about the evils of prostitution suggested that Robinson had performed a public service by ridding the world of Jewett, the young Robinson-supporters on the street took that awful sentiment further and acted on it. During the months before the trial, violent assaults by young clerks on prostitutes and other young women increased sharply, and afterward, numerous copycat crimes were perpetrated, perhaps by young men who wanted to be like Robinson or who hoped to convince the public that he had been innocent all along, since the real killer was still out there murdering. To that end, an anonymous letter taking credit for the crime was sent to Bennett, who promptly published it in the Herald. According to this letter, the murderer was another young clerk who had been rejected by Jewett and made an enemy of Robinson, giving him motive both to murder her and frame him. Rival newspapers accused Bennett of forging the letter, which may have been the case, but Robinson supporters were writing letters a lot those days. They sent letters, for example, to Rosina Townsend, the brothel madam, threatening harm to her if she testified, for they believed she had been paid off by the conspiracy to frame Robinson. And they certainly weren’t all talk, either. They broke up a meeting of the New York Moral Reform Society that was convened to discuss the Robinson-Jewett case by throwing stones at the women who had gathered there. And on May 24th, a mob of several hundred young Robinson supporters attacked a group of prostitutes as they left the courthouse in an attempt to intimidate them so that they would not testify at trial. Even during the trial itself, young clerks wearing Robinson cloaks and caps filled the courtroom, making lewd comments about prostitutes who approached the bar to testify, booing and hissing any witnesses against Robinson, and cheering for any testimony that helped to exonerate him. It seems altogether to have been a circus of a trial, resulting in Richard Robinson’s acquittal. However, this disturbance by his rowdy young supporters was not the only reason that Robinson would be acquitted.

The case against Robinson was circumstantial. The madam, Rosina Townsend, testified that Robinson had arrived at the brothel before 9pm, and the roommate, James Tew, testified that he had returned home before 1am. To my mind, there is a problem with this timeline, though, since the fire was discovered by Townsend around 3am, and it had not consumed much of Jewett’s bed or done much damage to her corpse, suggesting it had only recently been set. If Robinson had indeed set the fire before returning home at 1am, it would have had to be a very slow smoldering one not to be detected for two whole hours. However, this does not seem to have been Robinson’s line of defense. Rather, his attorney concentrated on establishing a more ironclad but apparently bogus alibi. They were able to get a respected store owner, one Mr. Furlong, to swear that Robinson had been at his store downtown at around 10:30pm, which if true would disprove the testimony of the brothel madam that he was in Helen Jewett’s room at that time. In truth, Mr. Furlong’s testimony not only contradicted Rosina Townsend’s testimony but also the statements of James Tew to the nightwatchmen the morning after the murder, when he said they had indeed visited the brothel together the night before. However, the judge instructed the jury to base their decision on the fact that either Mr. Furlong or Ms. Townsend were lying and implored them to consider the reputation of each witness in their decision. As a result, the jury predictably chose to believe the upstanding store owner over the brothel madam and took only 15 minutes to acquit Robinson. After the trial, though, one Mr. Wilson published a letter swearing that he had been present in Furlong’s store that Saturday night when Robinson was present, and it had not been any later than 8pm, which made it no alibi at all since the timing would no longer contradict Madame Townsend’s testimony. So Robinson was acquitted on what appears to have been dubious testimony, and thus was believed by many to have gotten away with the murder.

A depiction of Robinson looming over Jewett with the murder weapon. Public Domain image.

The fact is, though, that even without this false alibi on which Robinson’s lawyer had staked his fate, the case against Robinson was weak. The motive attributed to him was borne out of nothing but public rumor that Robinson was engaged to marry and had murdered Jewett because she had threatened to expose their relationship to embarrass him. Other, better corroborated rumors of how Robinson explained the entire scenario to close friends casts the entire affair in a different light. Robinson supposedly told confidants that he had resolved to stop visiting her, but Jewett, who had become enamored of him, begged him to visit her at least once more, on that Saturday, to which he agreed. A couple of days before their final assignation, Robinson had been working at the store where he clerked, opening boxes with the hatchet in question, which he remarked to a porter at the time was too dull to cut. He took the blunted hatchet with him, keeping it inside his cloak, meaning to have it sharpened that Saturday night, and on the way, he stopped at the brothel to keep his date with Helen Jewett. According to this story attributed to Robinson, he stayed with Helen until it was too late to get the hatchet sharpened. Helen begged him to come back for one more visit, pointing out a tear in his cloak that she said she could mend for him. Eventually, he acquiesced, leaving the cloak with her and the hatchet as well so that he would not have to carry it home and back again. Of course, this elaborate story, which his lawyer never had him tell in court and which appeared in a letter of uncertain authorship, could merely be a complex lie to allay the suspicions of those closest to him, if it were written by him at all, but according to a later New York Times article about the case, the porter at his store confirmed that he had indeed taken the hatchet to have it sharpened. Still, this may have been Robinson’s cover story for getting his hands on a weapon with which he could do away with Helen Jewett, but Robinson’s character and demeanor were a constant testament to his innocence. According to the nightwatchmen, he was emotionless upon seeing her body, yes, but also according to them, he appeared entirely unworried and when they came to his apartment that morning, appeared to have been sleeping soundly, coming with them without any apparent anxiety, seemingly entirely ignorant of the crime for which later that morning he would be arrested. Moreover, for the rest of his life, he consistently contended his innocence, even coming back to New York some twenty years after the trial and visiting the lawyer who had gotten him acquitted in order to reaffirm to his former counsel that he had indeed been innocent, though he said he did not expect to change the attorney’s opinion of him, whatever it might be. I’m no abnormal psychologist, but this doesn’t strike me as the behavior of a killer who narrowly escaped justice but rather as the behavior of an innocent man whose name had been permanently and unfairly maligned.

So the question must inevitably be addressed: if not Robinson, who had killed Helen Jewett and why? I won’t entertain the conspiracy theories that James Gordon Bennett printed about police coverups and witnesses being paid off to pin the crime on Robinson in order to protect another patron of Jewett’s, but I will consider the notion that Jewett received another visitor after Robinson had departed, a visitor of whose arrival Madame Townsend was perhaps not aware. As it turns out, another young clerk had also been investigated in the early morning hours after Jewett’s corpse had been discovered. This young man, whose false name at the brothel was Bill Easy, was the son of a Massachusetts judge. His name was George Marston, and he had a standing appointment with Helen Jewett on Saturday nights. However, it appears that Jewett had spurned him that Saturday night in favor of receiving Richard Robinson, whom she had begged to come see her on a night when perhaps they did not usually rendezvous, if his story was to be believed. Learning that Robinson had been the last to see her, the investigators Brink and Noble had focused on him, but what of Bill Easy? Is it not possible he had been angered by Jewett’s refusal to keep their appointment, that he may have come to see her later that evening, found in her room a cloak and hatchet belonging to a rival for her affections, and then committed the crime in a fit of jealous rage? It certainly seems feasible, and perhaps if more time had been spent looking into George Marston, aka Bill Easy, as a suspect, we would know better how believable it is. But the evidence at the scene led the watchmen to Robinson, perhaps purposely.

Another depiction of the murderer leaving Jewett’s bed ablaze. Public Domain image.

If we are to consider the possibility of a frame job, the suspect Rosina Townsend, madam of the brothel, comes better into focus. Bennett sometimes cast suspicion on Townsend in the New York Herald, suggesting Jewett owed her money. Putting aside the logic of murdering someone who owes you money and therefore never getting your money, and ignoring the lack of motive for framing Robinson beyond simply throwing suspicion away from herself, there is some reason to suspect Madame Townsend. According to her testimony, she woke around 3am and noticed light emanating from her back parlor, where she found a lamp near the back door, which was open. Recognizing the lamp as one of a pair kept in the adjoining rooms of Helen Jewett and another prostitute, Maria Stevens, she closed the door and went upstairs to return the lamp. Maria’s door was locked, so she tried Helen’s and found the room full of smoke, whereupon she shut the door, pounded on Maria’s door to rouse her, and went to the street door to call for help, her cries summoning the nightwatchmen Brink and Noble. However, according to the New-York Daily Times, she told the first watchman to arrive that there was “a girl murdered up stairs,” even though later her story was that she had only opened the door and seen the smoke inside. It was also she who led the watchmen to the back yard, she who pointed out the hatchet to investigators, and she who first looked over the fence and spied the discarded cloak. If there was any person on the scene trying to make sure Robinson was framed for the crime, the brothel madam certainly fits the bill.

Lastly, there is the other prostitute whose room adjoined Helen Jewett’s, Maria Stevens. It must be remembered that, according to Townsend, a lamp belonging either to Helen or Maria was found by the open back door, prompting Townsend to go up to their rooms. It is unclear whether Maria’s lamp was still in her room, or whether Helen’s was missing from hers, or whether this was ever investigated. It is somewhat suspicious, perhaps, that upon seeing the smoke in Helen’s room, when Madame Townsend knocked on Maria Stevens’s door, she apparently emerged immediately, as if she were not actually sleeping at all. According to the New York Times, Maria Stevens even had something of a motive. Richard Robinson had been a regular visitor of Maria’s before the enchanting Helen Jewett had arrived. According to this narrative, Richard Robinson was just an all-around heartbreaker, causing Maria Stevens to fall in love with him before he spurned her for Jewett and captured her heart as well. By this telling, Maria Stevens crept into Helen’s room late at night, butchered her where she lay with Robinson’s blunt hatchet, set her bed on fire, and then crept by lamplight downstairs to discard Robinson’s things in the back yard. Granted, it seems odd to then return back upstairs in the dark without the lamp and lie in wait next door to the fire she had set, hoping someone would notice the blaze and wake her. Then again, perhaps she did not start the fire until after she had gone downstairs to toss the hatchet and cloak. Either way, though, the end of Maria’s story does indeed make her a strong suspect. While Richard Robinson moved to Texas and became a successful business owner, and Rosina Townsend closed the brothel and retired to a small village near Albany for a quiet life with a carpenter husband and an active role in her local church, Maria Stevens committed suicide two weeks before the Robinson-Jewett murder trial began.

A depiction of Helen Jewett’s beauty published after she had become a legend in the public imagination. Public Domain image.

Among all these twisting intrigues and competing theories floats the apparition of Helen Jewett, looking down on all the ruckus in the New York City streets just as her ghost was said to peer from the brothel windows on the crowds below. And she remains to us today no less spectral than to the rowdy crowds that gathered in the summer of 1836 in their Jewett mourners and Robinson caps. She was variously idolized as a heroine, scorned as a Jezebel, and mourned as a martyr, but who was she really? The newspapers that mythologized her weren’t writing about the real her. They competed with each other to uncover her birth name, but they couldn’t even be bothered to get her chosen name right, calling her Ellen instead of what records show she called herself, Helen. We do know she was young, around 23 at the time of her murder. We know she had gone from living in the home of a Supreme Court Judge in Augusta, Maine, to living in a brothel in New York City. And we know that she had not only inspired desire in numerous young clerks working in the city, but also that she aroused a violent anger, for during the trial, the prosecution revealed the existence of some letters to Helen Jewett that explicitly threatened to murder her. The prosecutor failed to prove the handwriting was Robinson’s, and so was forbidden to read the letters aloud to the jury, but this fact paints a further picture of Helen Jewett’s life. Of modest birth, she had had a taste of comfort and wealth. Thereafter finding herself on the street, and whether forced into it or seeking it out, she saw a path up from the gutter through the sex trade. She navigated the class structures of New York City society by leveraging her body and exploiting the lust of unsupervised young men with money in their pockets, but along the way, she made enemies, perhaps because she inspired jealousy in those who wanted to keep her from rising above their level, or in those who resented her freedom and wanted her all to themselves. But now I am speculating, much as Bennet and other newspaper editors did in 1836. The beautiful corpse of Helen Jewett still seems to stir the imagination 185 years later. 

Further Reading

Anthony, David. “The Helen Jewett Panic: Tabloids, Men, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum New York.” American Literature, vol. 69, no. 3, 1997, pp. 487–514. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2928212.

Cohen, Patricia Cline. “The Helen Jewett Murder: Violence, Gender, and Sexual Licentiousness in Antebellum America.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 3, 1990, pp. 374–389. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4316044.

“The Ellen Jewett Tragedy: Death of Richard P. Robinson—Reminiscences of the Ellen Jewett Murder.” The New-York Daily Times, vol. 4, no. 1231, 29 Aug. 1855, p. 1. The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/1855/08/29/archives/the-ellen-jewett-tragedy-death-of-richard-p-robinsonromints-the.html.

Unfit to Print; or A History of Bad News: the Party Press, Penny Papers, and Yellow Journalism

The epithet “fake news” is a curious thing. In its truest sense, it refers to media hoaxes, false stories formatted to look like they originated from legitimate news sources that are then widely spread online. These media hoaxes can best be compared to the hoaxes of 19th century- newspapers that I have previously spoken about in great detail. Many of these online news hoaxes, like the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon Hoax and the New York Zoo Hoax, are perpetrated in order to earn the hoaxer money. In the 19th-century press, this was achieved through increased circulation, but online news hoaxes earn money through clicks and ad revenue. They are also comparable to the many fake news stories by Joseph Mulhatton which I have written about in that they may be small in scale and anonymous and could be perpetrated just for a laugh. But the online news hoaxes of today may also be used as disinformation and propaganda by a foreign power or political campaigns. Still, this too may not be so very different from newspaper practices in the past. The thing is that this term, “fake news,” has often been lobbed at reputable, legacy news organizations simply because their news coverage is inconvenient or unflattering. It is a mark of the post-truth era that politicians can have their corruption exposed by investigative journalists but can save face simply by calling the news reports “fake.” Meanwhile, some of the most outrageously false and dangerous news reporting doesn’t typically get called “fake news.” I am thinking here of the various platforms of Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media empire. Murdoch’s sensational publications in the UK are not called “fake news,” but rather tabloids, and here in America, they masquerade as a “fair and balanced” alternative to the “mainstream media” that they try to undermine by calling fake. Their stock in trade is projection and gaslighting. They are pissing on their viewer’s mouths and telling them it’s drinking water, while screaming that they cannot trust what comes out of their tap. As I write this, Fox News host Tucker Carlson has been actively discouraging COVID vaccination with blatantly false claims about widespread deaths being attributed to them. Fox News pundits Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo, and Lou Dobbs were instrumental in spreading baseless election fraud conspiracy claims that incited insurrection and murder on January 6th. And it’s not limited to the sensational cable news channel. During the election, the Murdoch-owned New York Post was instrumental in promoting the false October Surprise story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, citing only Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani as their sources. While conservative personalities decry “biased journalism” as “fake news,” they prop up the most biased and fake journalistic outlets active today. Ironically, though, all complaints about bias and fake news, whether in the mainstream media or in alternative media, seems implicitly nostalgic, looking back mournfully on some vague former time when the press is supposed to have been a paragon of fairness and objectivity. But did that lost golden age of journalistic integrity exist? And can the history of American journalism put the exploits of Murdoch’s News Corp in context?

In order to trace the evolution of the news industry, we must first understand its beginnings. The origins of newspapers can be found in England, in the 17th century, when wealthy country gentlemen who wished to stay informed as to the goings-on at the royal court were obliged to hire correspondents who would write them letters with the latest gossip. These were correspondents in the oldest sense of the term, in that they corresponded with their employers through the Royal Mail service, sending “news-letters.” Here in America, our first news service evolved from this tradition in the very early 18th century, with the Boston News-Letter. These gossip publications were typically published by a postmaster and consumed right there in the post office, the hub of each village’s communication with the world. By the time that newsletters began to be circulated here in the U.S., though, they began to evolve back in England. The news that people wanted was political, coming out of parliament, which convened secretly, so that only certain invited visitors could observe the proceedings in the “Stranger’s Gallery.” Some visitors saw an opportunity and would write reports from memory of what was said and done, or would even furtively try to take down notes while in attendance. Gradually, these political news-letters moved from simply reporting parliamentary gossip and began publishing opinions. Formerly, political opinions were printed and disseminated as broadsides and pamphlets, but that role was taken over by newspaper editors in the early 18th century, and from there, it did not take long for newspapers to become the mouth-pieces of certain political parties. This is the dawn of the “party press” age of journalism, both in England and America, when newspapers reported facts and opinions with a view toward benefiting the image of a certain political party and winning readers to that party’s side. And which party a newspaper supported was not dependent on the editor’s view. Rather, politicians and parties subsidized newspapers, making them official organs. One misconception about news publications today and a principal criticism of the “mainstream media,” is that it is a cardinal sin for a journalist to express an opinion or take a side, but opinion has been a major element journalism going all the way back to its beginnings. In later years, it’s true, ideas of journalistic integrity demanded that editorial opinion be clearly labeled and separated from “news,” but even so, some leaning toward and favoring of a certain viewpoint even in reportage has always been acceptable and even encouraged. It’s what is called “editorial direction,” and it is a major draw for a paper. If one doesn’t like a paper’s views, one can find another paper that better suits them. In fact, when we talk about “freedom of the press,” it is precisely the freedom to express opinions that is protected, not the freedom to report facts.

First issue of the Boston News-Letter, regarded as the first continuously published newspaper in British North America. Published April 24, 1704. Public Domain.

Perhaps Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp represent a return to the age of the party press. Interestingly, his newspaper, The New York Post, started out as an organ of the Federalist Party, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton after the election of Thomas Jefferson, about which I spoke a great deal in more than one episode last autumn. Hamilton wanted a mouth-piece to compete with Thomas Jefferson’s National Intelligencer, which had begun publication the year before. And it should be said that the party press era was not entirely negative. Indeed, partisan journalism has been credited by James Baughman of the Center for Journalism Ethics with greatly increasing democratic participation and voter turnout, and with 2020’s spike in voter participation, we may be seeing the same effect today. But let me qualify. In the party press era, as today, newspapers colored the facts, gave one-sided versions of events, and ignored or chose not to emphasize stories that made political rivals look good. This is certainly something that we observe today, on both sides, even if more so on one side than the other. That kind of bias is one thing, but making up the news, misrepresenting or inventing events, or purposely misreporting in order to make one party look good or another party look bad is something else entirely. One egregious example of such manufacturing of the news during the party press era occurred when Samuel Johnson, reporting on parliamentary proceedings for Cave’s magazine, apparently made up an entire speech that he wasn’t present in the Stranger’s Gallery to hear, basing his remarks on a second-hand description of the speech. This is certainly deceptive, but the fact that Johnson was widely praised for his seeming neutrality, despite Johnson himself confessing that he always did what he could to make the Whigs look bad in his reporting, demonstrates that the kind of brazenly false news leveraged as propaganda that we see today may not have shown up until later. Here in America, in the 19th century, the party press gave us lurid personal scandals, like the competing newspaper coverage of Andrew Jackson’s marriage—some characterizing him as having seduced a wife away from her husband and marrying her before her divorce was final, and others depicting him as an innocent victim of character assassination, asserting her marriage had been abusive and that Jackson did not know the divorce was not yet final—but these are instances of gossip that are hard to characterize as purposeful disinformation. I struggle to find instances of outright deception in the party press era, so let us move on.

In 1833, a new age of journalism commenced with the so-called Penny Press era, when Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun. What made the Sun and other penny papers different was its price, first of all—one cent compared to the 6 cents that most other papers cost—but also its intended audience. Using the steam press, they were able to mass produce the paper cheaply, which meant, in order to make money, they needed the masses to take up reading the news, many of whom were not interested in the politics peddled by partisan papers. So they changed their approach, writing shorter, more easily digestible pieces using simpler language, and focusing on practical and relevant news over politics, as well as on more human stories. In this way, penny papers appealed to the common folk and immigrants, or as Day put it, “mechanics and the masses generally.” With this wider readership also came better advertising revenue, and thus the business model of newspapers would be changed forever, relying more on wide circulation than on political subsidization for profit. And of course, the Penny Press era gave us the first dramatic examples of really fake news, the Great Moon Hoax and the Balloon-Hoax, which I have previously discussed in some detail. It is tempting to suggest, then, that whenever there is a sea change in the accessibility of news and the medium by which it is delivered, fake news flourishes. It began with the Penny Press, and continued with the advent of radio broadcast and Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds, and then reached its height with the Internet, the ultimate democratization of information access.

Samuel Johnson, an early manufacturer of partisan news. Public Domain.

But that would be an oversimplification. First of all, as I recently discussed, the fake news related to the War of the Worlds broadcast was not on the radio but rather in the papers, which exaggerated the panic it had caused. And furthermore, the era of the penny press also led us to the highest ideals of journalistic integrity. This was the era in which the independent press emerged. Benjamin Day’s rival, James Gordon Bennett, expressed these ideals clearly when he founded his competing penny paper, the New York Herald: “We shall support no party—be the agent of no faction or coterie, and we care nothing for any election, or any candidate from president down to constable.” It was a declaration of the press as an autonomous and objective force that could act as a check on political power. The Herald itself may not have lived up to the ideals Bennett espoused. It would go on to engage in the very kind of hoaxing it criticized the Sun for perpetrating, like their New York Zoo hoax about escaped animals, and it would by no means remain carefully neutral in politics, in fact favoring the nativist, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party. And as a penny paper, their coverage tended to the sensational, especially in the scandalous Robinson-Jewett case, a notorious sex and murder scandal, during which Bennett was the first to issue extra editions. But Bennett pioneered journalistic practices like reportage based on the observations of correspondents and interviews. His paper was one of the first to uncover local corruption, as well, a practice of investigative journalism that would go on to inspire some of the greatest work of the independent press in the 19th century, when the New York Times’ coverage of Boss Tweed became instrumental in taking down the Tammany Hall political machine in the 1870s. The development of the penny press is therefore clearly related to the development of both news hoaxes and to our highest journalistic standards. Still, the kind of hoaxes and sensationalism that came out of the penny press was not the kind of disinformation and propaganda we see from partisan news outlets today. Perhaps, then, we can find a forerunner of this kind of fake news in the so-called “yellow press.”

In many ways, the era of Yellow Journalism also evolved from the practices of the Penny Press and independent journalism. What Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the two eventual magnates of the yellow press, had learned from their predecessors was that news was best told as a “story.” They took to heart what James Gordon Bennett once asserted, that the purpose of news “is not to instruct but to startle and amuse.” For Pulitzer, in his St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and later in his New York paper, the World, this meant investigative watchdog journalism such as what the independent press had pioneered in the 19th century. Pulitzer likewise crusaded against corruption, but often as a way of courting poor immigrant readers, for example focusing on exposing conditions in the tenements where these prospective readers lived. Since his crusading was in some cases a matter of business, Pulitzer has been credited with inventing muckraking, the kind of journalism that seeks to cause outrage and scandal even when it may not be warranted. On the other hand, William Randolph Hearst, who got his start in San Francisco with his paper the Examiner, courted female readers with human interest stories and a certain brand of muckraking story that came to be known as a “sob story.” It began with rumors of a poorly managed hospital. The paper chose a female cub reporter to investigate, which she did by pretending to faint on the street in order to be admitted. This reporter, Winifred Black, wrote a story about women’s treatment in the hospital that was said to have made women sob with every line, earning her the nickname “sob sister,” and launching her career as a muckraker with a dedicated audience of women readers. Other newspapers even tried to recreate this success, building whole teams, or “sob squads,” to churn out similar stories. These two newspaper empires, that of Pulitzer and that of Hearst, with their comparable approaches to muckraking and sensational reporting may have come closest to the kind of political engineering that we see from Rupert Murdoch and News Corp today, for they are widely credited with having led the U.S. into war with Spain. But how accurate is that characterization?

Hearst’s self-congratulatory newspaper coverage of his own jailbreak exploit in Cuba. Public Domain.

Since the mid-19th century, there had been more than one armed rebellion in Cuba against their Spanish colonial rulers. In 1895, rumblings of revolution began again, organized by Cuban exiles in the U.S. and Latin America and commenced as a series of simultaneous uprisings against colonial authority. In the U.S., Pulitzer’s and Hearst’s newspapers favored the cause of the rebels and vilified the Spanish. Hearst especially seems to have put the entire weight of his editorial influence into convincing the American public that they should cheer on the rebels, and eventually, that the U.S. must itself become involved. Hearst’s motivations are a matter of some dispute. Humanitarian concern and democratic ideals may indeed have played a substantial role, making the yellow press’s focus on the rebellion less selfish and unsavory than it is typically portrayed. But it is clear that Hearst, even then, had political ambitions, and to be seen as bolstering the cause of democracy would certainly burnish his reputation. Then there is the distinct possibility that he believed war with Spain would be good for business. Indeed, it would turn out to be a massive boon to his newspapers’ circulation, so perhaps, as has been his usual characterization, Hearst did after all have his eye on the bottom line, though it was more likely a combination of these motivations. But Hearst’s desire for the U.S. to go to war with Spain and his willingness to foment it by manipulating public opinion has certainly been exaggerated, to the point that it has become a myth. The favorite anecdote of those who promote this view is that Hearst sent an illustrator to Cuba in January 1897, and when the illustrator wrote him saying, “There is no trouble here. There will be no war,” Hearst replied, “You furnish the pictures. I’ll furnish the war.” However, media historian W. Joseph Campbell has proven through meticulous research that this exchange never took place. First of all, there is no evidence for the existence of these telegrams, and the anecdote first appeared in a memoir by a correspondent of Hearst’s who was not involved at all and was actually in Europe at the time, who used the anecdote not to disparage the yellow press, but to praise their foresight. Second, in 1897, there was already war in Cuba, and that was Hearst’s whole reason for sending the illustrator there. Moreover, Hearst’s editorial position in January of 1897 was that the rebels would succeed in throwing off the colonial yoke; his campaign for U.S. military intervention would not begin for some time. While this exchange is certainly a myth, though, it should not be thought that Hearst did not overstep in his newspaper coverage of the situation in Cuba.

Since the “sob story” had served him so well, Hearst cast about searching for the story of a mistreated woman. Such a story would appeal emotionally to both female readers who imagined what they would do if they ever found themselves in such distress and to male readers who fancied themselves chivalrous. He found just the story he needed in Evangelina Cosío Y Cisneros. This 18-year-old woman had visited the Isle of Pines in Cuba with some companions in 1896, intending to visit with her father, a rebel who was confined to the island. According to later accounts, a Spanish colonel one night came to her room and made unwanted sexual advances on her, but her companions came to her aid upon hearing her cries. Pulling the rapist off of her, they tied him to a chair, but a patrol of other Spanish officers happened upon the scene and arrested them. Evangelina Cisneros was charged with luring the colonel into a trap and thrown into a jail for prostitutes. Hearst’s flagship paper, the New York Journal-American, turned Cisneros into a paragon of feminine purity who was being brutalized, kept among fallen women, and regularly subjected to abuse. She became in his newspaper columns a symbol of all the innocent Cuban women that the Spanish were ravishing and debasing, making of the rebels who fought to protect these damsels in distress heroes firmly planted on the moral high ground. In fact, there is evidence that Cisneros was more of a pants-wearing, cigar-chomping rebel herself, and that she may in fact have been enacting some rebel plan at the time of her arrest, but otherwise, much of Hearst’s portrayal of her situation seems accurate. This “Flower of Cuba,” as the Hearst papers called her, was to be shipped overseas to a Spanish penal colony in North Africa. But Hearst had other plans. In one of the most astonishing instances of manufacturing the news in American history, he sent a rough-and-tumble correspondent, Karl Decker, to Havana to break her out of jail, and they succeeded. Exactly how this daring escape was effected remains unclear—there are stories of a file being smuggled in to her, or drugged bonbons that she used to put her cellmates to sleep. Regardless of how it was accomplished, we know that she was successfully sprung from the jail, hidden, and then put secretly aboard a ship back to America, where Hearst had her paraded around the country to tell Americans about the cruelties of the Spanish in Cuba. Rather than causing a scandal over the legality of such an unsanctioned action overseas or the role of the press in making news, Hearst’s exploit was widely praised, of course in Hearst’s papers but in others as well. Pulitzer, though, was quick to suggest that the jailbreak was a hoax, insisting that the Spanish authorities must have allowed it to happen, and this has been an enduring characterization of the affair. However, W. Joseph Campbell has uncovered through an examination of contemporary diplomatic correspondence that certain U.S. diplomats were involved with the jailbreak, and that they faced considerable risks in being involved. Moreover, the Spanish authorities ordered a search for Cisneros after her disappearance, showing that they had not winked at her escape. So while some myths certainly surround the level of involvement of the yellow press in Cuba in 1897, this was not one of them. William Randolph Hearst did indeed orchestrate the liberation of a Cuban prisoner of war.  

While the “Cisneros Affair” certainly galvanized the American public to espouse the cause of the Cuban rebels, it was another dramatic event that is usually identified as the tipping point for American military intervention in the Cuban War of Independence. This event is not disputed as a myth, but it has turned out to be an enduring mystery. In January of 1898, U.S. President William McKinley had the battleship USS Maine anchored in Havana Harbor as a demonstration of US power and determination to protect U.S. citizens in the war-torn country. On February 15th, while the crew slept in their quarters on the forward end of the vessel, an explosion occurred. There had been 354 men aboard the ship, and 266 of them perished in the explosion and the resulting fires as the ship sank into the harbor. Hearst’s Journal and Pulitzer’s World both put this tragedy on the front page every day afterward, of course, asserting that the explosion had been an attack, an act of war. Hearst even offered a $50,000 reward for evidence of who was responsible. The U.S. Navy wasted no time in launching an inquiry, which determined within a month that an underwater mine had detonated, in turn igniting the ship’s forward magazine. However, some of the experts consulted in the inquiry came to a different conclusion, suggesting instead that coal in the bunker adjacent to the magazine had spontaneously combusted. This scenario would have been more consistent with the findings of a Spanish inquiry, which argued that it is unusual for a ship’s munitions to explode when it is sunk by an underwater mine. Moreover, a spout of water would typically be seen when a mine detonates, and dead fish would afterward be found, neither of which was the case in Havana Harbor that evening. Numerous investigations have failed to resolve this mystery. Perhaps the Spanish inquiry’s conclusions are less than trustworthy because they surely were seeking to absolve themselves. And there is just as little evidence for an internal explosion as there is for an external one. In fact, the spontaneous combustion of coal appears to be just as uncommon as a ship’s magazine detonating after being struck by a mine. But none of this mattered to the yellow press, which ignored the Spanish inquiry and the dissenting expert opinions and declared to the world that the Spanish had murdered U.S. navy men in a brazen act of war. In less than a month, Congress declared war, and many an American sailor was heard to repeat the headlines of the yellow press in their war cries: “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!”

Hearst’s inflammatory newspaper coverage of the USS Maine explosion. Public Domain.

In considering the yellow press as a possible precursor of today’s disinformation outlets, we must reconsider what we presume to be true about yellow journalism. Historians have shown the “I’ll furnish the war” quote to have been a myth, so the truth about the complex myriad of factors that led to U.S. involvement in the Cuban War of Independence has likely been obscured by this appealing fiction. It is not as though the American public would not have learned of the events without the yellow press or would not otherwise have come to favor U.S. involvement. There were other, more respectable newspapers also reporting on the Cuban rebellion then, just as today there are many more scrupulous news outlets that consumers of Rupert Murdoch’s brand of news could seek out instead. And yellow journalism and public opinion alone did not sway President McKinley to pursue war. There had been jingoists in Congress pushing the same war agenda every step of the way. In the same way, today, Fox News and conservative media generally may not be inventing the talking points and leading this disinformation war so much as following the lead of the GOP, recognizing their niche market and continually pursuing their audience down whatever fringe path they’ve been led. Notwithstanding these parallels, though, I still find no examples from the history of American journalism that match the brazen manipulation, the invention of false narratives, the shameless promotion of disinformation regardless of potential public harms that we see in the media produced by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, especially Fox News Channel. They seem to represent the worst of every era, seemingly beholden to a political party as in the party press era, trading in oversimplified sensationalism in order to appeal to the everyman as in the penny paper era, and willing to manufacture news as in the age of yellow journalism. But Hearst and his empire were not really anything like Murdoch and News Corp. First of all, Hearst was driven by political ambitions, trying to parlay his newspaper platform into a Democratic presidential nomination. Murdoch appears to be motivated by the pursuit of wealth and a sinister ideology. Hearst envisioned a kind of “journalism of action” that would engage in democratic and humanitarian activism, certainly for the purposes of self-promotion but never seeking to do harm. But just this year, Fox News has been promoting conspiracy theories that encouraged the overturning of a free and fair election and engaging in anti-vaxxer science denial that will result in lost lives; they are attacking democracy and public health. To me, this seems like a new and unprecedented form of flawed journalism. We find ourselves in the era of the propaganda press. And what’s truly scary is that Fox News and the other outlets within Murdoch’s News Corp are no longer even the worst offenders, having shown clear signs of tempering their rhetoric in at least some of their programs—typically the ones that they would have a hard time claiming are for entertainment purposes only. Disinformation purveyors have grown in the last couple decades, with NewsMax, Breitbart, and One America News Network becoming the worst offenders. But credible news reporting and reliable outlets remain, the most impartial and conscientious being Associated Press and Reuters reportage. As for major legacy newspapers and other big cable news channels, yes, bias and the favoring of viewpoints is present, as it always has been. American consumers of news need to stop expecting anything different, learn to read laterally across platforms for a wider variety of editorial slants, and concentrate, most importantly, on rooting out barefaced propaganda.

Further Reading

Borch, Fred L., and Robert F. Dorr. "Maine's sinking still a mystery, 110 years later." Navy Times, sec. Transitions, 21 Jan. 2008, p. 36. NewsBank: Access World News – Historical and Current, infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/document-view?p=WORLDNEWS&docref=news/11E7C6BBE345B960.

Campbell, W. Joseph. “‘I’ll Furnish the War: The Making of a Media Myth.” Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism, University of California Press, 2010, pp. 9-25.

———. “Not a Hoax: New Evidence in the New York Journal’s Rescue of Evangelina Cisneros.” American Journalism, vol. 19, no. 4, 2002, pp. 67-94. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/nothoax.htm.

———. “Not Likely Sent: the Remington-Hearst ‘Telegrams.’” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 2, 2000, pp. 405-422. W. Joseph Campbell, PhD, fs2.american.edu/wjc/www/documents/Article_NotLikelySent.pdf.

———. “William Randolph Hearst: Mythical Media Bogeyman.” BBC News, 14 Aug. 2011, www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-14512411

Lowry, Elizabeth. “The Flower of Cuba: Rhetoric, Representation, and Circulation at the Outbreak of the Spanish-American War.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 32, no. 2, 2013, pp. 174–190. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42003444.

Park, Robert E. “The Natural History of the Newspaper.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 29, no. 3, 1923, pp. 273–289. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2764232.

Pérez, Louis A. “The Meaning of the Maine: Causation and the Historiography of the Spanish-American War.” Pacific Historical Review, vol. 58, no. 3, 1989, pp. 293–322. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3640268.

Taylor, WIlliam. “USS Maine Explosion.” Disasters and Tragic Events: An Encyclopedia of Catastrophes in American History [2 Volumes], vol. 1, 2014, pp. 164-166. ABC-CLIO, 2014. EBSCOhost, search-ebscohost-com.ezproxy.deltacollege.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=781660&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!

While I have written a full-length second part to Hidden Bodies, my history of astronomical discovery, delving further into the blind alleys and paths to discovery that astrophysical science has taken, from aether to dark matter, that episode is reserved for patrons, so in lieu of its transcript, I present a blog post for a patron exclusive that I released to podcast listeners instead.

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While in Hidden Bodies, I focused on wrong ideas about the solar system, in this post, I want to tell the related stories of some famous hoaxes about extraterrestrial life which themselves are surrounded by misconceptions and myths. We’ll begin with a story that has to do with the son of astronomer William Herschel. If you recall, William Herschel was a vocal proponent of the idea that the Moon, Mars, and even the Sun, were inhabited by intelligent life. I spoke briefly about Herschel’s beliefs about the inhabitation of the Sun, and in more detail about the observations he believed demonstrated that Mars was populated. Before all that, though, and much closer to home, he claimed in 1776 to have spotted large swathes of vegetation on the lunar surface that he believed to be cultivated, leading him to search the Moon for towns. The circular marks on the Moon that today we know to be craters he believed were villages, cities, and even vast metropolises. What makes Herschel’s claims even more interesting is the fact that, about 60 years later in 1935, his son John Herschel was famously credited for actually seeing in great detail the vegetable and animal life on the moon in what is considered to be one of the greatest hoaxes of all time.

On August 21st, 1835, the cheap “penny press” newspaper The New York Sun printed what it said was a reprint of an article that had originally appeared in the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The article discussed William’s son John Herschel—a famed astronomer in his own right—his gargantuan telescope in South Africa, and the amazing discoveries he had recently made. The article made claims that, though seemingly plausible, were completely untrue. John Herschel had indeed built a large telescope in the Cape of Good Hope, but it did not sport a 7-ton lens capable of 42,000 times magnification, and with it he certainly did not spy planets in other solar systems, which as we know from the last episode mankind was unable to detect until the 1990s. The biggest bombshell of the article, that Herschel had confirmed the existence of life on the Moon, was not emphasized, despite its enormous implications, and thus the first article in this series attracted little attention. It was not until the second piece, five days later, that readers began to take notice. Through his telescope, the paper claimed, Herschel had observed that the Moon’s surface was covered with dark red flowers and populated with strange animal life, such as horned goats and bison-like beasts that moved in herds, all of which had a distinctive appendage that crossed the forehead from ear to ear, not to mention a bizarre globular amphibian that rolled along the beaches. In the third installment of the series said to have been printed in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, it was revealed that intelligent life existed on the Moon, in the form of beaver-like creatures that went about on two feet, carrying their babies in their arms and living in huts from which issued smoke, indicating they had mastered fire. Finally, in the fourth piece, the observation of some winged humanoids, which Herschel supposedly named Vespertilio-homo, or man-bats, was described. Apparently, these beings spoke to each other intelligently and lived in elaborate structures. Finally, some blatantly racist notions cropped up in the account, as it was described that these dark-colored man-bats looked only slightly more intelligent than orangutans and tended to engage in public copulation, but that there existed another group of man-bats of a lighter color that was described as superior and more beautiful and like unto angels. According to these articles, the lunar beings had constructed gigantic geometrical structures, perhaps as a way to signal us Earthlings.

Portrait of a man-bat (Vespertilio-homo). Public Domain.

After the second article in this series appeared, circulation of the Sun newspaper began to increase, and many other penny papers began to republish their pieces. Many appear to have believed the story entirely. There are accounts of Christian organizations planning how best to convert the man-bats to Christianity, and humanitarian societies convening meetings to discuss how they might provide aid to the lunar needy. It would be weeks before the articles’ sources could be checked, when it was discovered that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had actually shut down about two years before the articles were said to have been published by them. A rival paper then accused the Sun’s editor, Richard Locke, a descendant of English philosopher John Locke, of having written the pieces himself in order to attract readers with sensationalism. Locke and the Sun never retracted the story, even as recently as 2010, when they playfully wrote that they were “looking into” claims that there are no lunar man-bats. The paper’s response seems to suggest that only a fool would have taken the pieces seriously, a stance which accords well with an alternative interpretation of the so-called Great Moon Hoax as actually being a satire penned by Locke that had not been widely understood at the time of its publication. And there is support for this interpretation. According to this version of events, Locke had written the pieces in order to satirize Scottish astronomer and “Christian Philosopher” Thomas Dick, as well as other proponents of so-called Natural Theology, which looked to astronomy and physics for proof of the existence of God. Dr. Dick and others, having learned that even a drop of water can be observed microscopically to be teeming with life, reasoned that the universe must likewise be crawling with life forms. Dr. Dick even put forth an estimation of the universe’s population, suggesting it was probably around 22 trillion, that the Moon itself must have about 4.2 billion inhabitants, and that we should build huge geometrical glyphs in order to send them a message. Supposedly, on the eve of publishing his articles, Richard Locke told friends that if it were taken seriously or scorned as a hoax, then his satire had failed. In the end, it may never be known whether he had only taken inspiration from Dr. Dick in a scheme to increase newspaper circulation, or if he truly meant it as a trenchant criticism of Dr. Dick and his ilk and simply accepted the derision he later received as penance for having failed in his literary endeavor.

Dr. Dick, the “Christian Philosopher” and “Natural Theologist” whose ideas about extra-terrestrial life Richard Locke may have been satirizing in his moon hoax. Public Domain.

Today, though, it is not the Great Moon Hoax that takes the title of the greatest media hoax of all time, nor is it the Balloon Hoax written by Edgar Allen Poe for the same newspaper some years later. Rather, that title usually goes to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds radio broadcast on the night before Halloween 1938, another hoax related to William Herschel, who had so popularized the notion of a Martian civilization that he inspired H. G. Wells to write the novel that Orson Welles was adapting. The reason this incident is usually credited as the biggest media hoax is because of the mass panic that it supposedly elicited, but of course, a hoax is typically a purposeful act. Orson Welles, who appeared before news reporters a day later to insist that he found it baffling how anyone could have mistaken his radio drama for a genuine news broadcast, certainly does not seem to have intended to cause a panic, even though in later years, he certainly seems to have relished the notoriety it had earned him. The content of the broadcast was designed to create some verisimilitude, with an orchestral performance being interrupted by dramatized news bulletins that described the launch of spacecraft seen on Mars and their landing in a rural area, followed by their attacks, wielding poison gases and heat rays, until finally New York had been obliterated. In Welles’s defense, the broadcast was introduced as radio theatre, and since entire episode transpired within the program’s hour-long runtime, any rational or intelligent person should have surmised that the story was unfolding a little too quickly. There was simply no way that the Martians made their trip millions of miles and decimated American military forces all within a half an hour. The fact that the program announced the declaration of martial law alone should have tipped off listeners, as the wheels of government simply don’t move that fast. And the fact that the Martian invaders supposedly fell victim to germs before the hour was over also beggared belief, as that’s quite a fast onset for the common cold. But the seemingly credible explanation is that listeners tuned in late and didn’t listen to the entire broadcast before panicking, running out into the streets, and choking the roadways in their attempts to flee. The stories are many, almost all from newspapers that appeared the next day. After listening to the broadcast, terror seized millions, most fled their homes with their families, causing accidents and deaths in the stampede to reach some place of safety. Some chose to stay where they were, but attempted suicide, preferring death by their own hands to being cooked alive by alien heat rays. But how accurate is this characterization of the panic that ensued.

A sample of the sensational newspaper headlines in the days ensuing the War of the Worlds broadcast.

Most accounts come from newspapers, as I said, or from a 1940 Princeton psychological study, The Invasion from Mars: A Study in the Psychology of Panic. However, as media critic and historian W. Joseph Campbell writes in his book Getting It Wrong, most sociologists now agree that this Princeton study was foundationally flawed. It relied only on interviews with 135 people, all known to have been frightened by the program, which simply cannot prove the kind of widespread alarm and panicked flights that it claimed to prove. So we must look to the newspapers themselves. Likewise, each newspaper that covered the kerfuffle the morning after tended to claim that thousands in their area had fled their homes or choked up telephone lines with panicked calls, but only mentioned one or two vague anecdotal examples. There is an important distinction to be made between real evidence and anecdotal evidence here. Offering one or two or even dozens of anecdotes never proves that something is common or widespread. It only ever proves that it happened once, or twice, or a dozen times, depending on how many anecdotes are offered. Campbell, who examined the coverage of 36 major newspapers, observed that the anecdotes provided to support their claims about mass panic were typically lacking in detail. Moreover, what their examples demonstrated in a lot of cases was not that people were misconstruing the broadcast for a genuine news bulletin, but rather that rumor-mongers who had heard second- or third-hand that some calamity was transpiring were running around town getting people riled up without having ever listened to a moment of the broadcast. Perhaps the only real evidence of a large-scale reaction to the program were the reports of phone lines being backed up with increased traffic, in many cases with calls to local newspapers and police stations in order to ascertain what was happening. But of course, this is not a panic reaction. Rather, if you had misconstrued the nature of a radio program or heard someone shouting about alien invasion and the end of the world, calling a newspaper or a police station to confirm that, in fact, it was a false alarm would actually be the most calm and rational thing to do.

The press dressing down Orson Welles the day after his radio broadcast. Public domain.

So how do we explain this sensationalized version of the events following the War of the Worlds broadcast, which has since become ingrained in our culture as a lasting myth? One explanation is that the broadcast happened in the evening, and newspapers went to print in the morning, leaving them little time to do any in-depth collection of reports and evidence. In fact, on such a timeline, when major newsworthy events seemed to be transpiring, papers tended to rely on the wire service. It’s clear that many of the newspapers who covered the supposed panic over the radio broadcast were simply reprinting claims that had come over the wire, often word for word. It was essentially the same phenomenon as seems to have transpired, on a smaller scale than the newspapers claimed, the night before. It was a contagion of false alarm. Some scattered misunderstanding of the broadcast was spread as a rumor by people acting as Paul Reveres, as Campbell puts it. In the same way, Associated Press round-ups of some anecdotes that suggested sweeping panic were spread like a rumor themselves, until the broad and uniform newspaper coverage appeared to prove that mass terror had swept the country the night before, when in fact, there is no strong evidence that it did. Additionally, the fact that newspapers considered radio to be a rival medium for news consumption prompted the newspapers to latch onto the story and embellish it, especially with editorials following the initial coverage, chiding radio and suggesting that any medium that could create such panic using sensationalism may need to face strict censorship in the near future. Ironically, though, it appears that it was the newspapers themselves that were engaging in sensationalism and stirring up something of a moral panic about the trustworthiness of their competitor.

Further Reading

Campbell, W. Joseph. Getting It Wrong: Ten of the Greatest Misreported Stories in American Journalism. University of California Press, 2010.

Vida, István Kornél. “The ‘Great Moon Hoax’ of 1835.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), vol. 18, no. 1/2, 2012, pp. 431–441. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43488485. Accessed 14 May 2021.

Hidden Bodies: A Brief and Incomplete History of Astronomical Discovery

It is not certain when Aristotle wrote his book On the Heavens, but it is thought to have been written sometime around 350 BCE. In it, he addresses the debates on cosmogony of his day, for example asserting the weakness of the argument of flat-earthers. As I’ve discussed before, the view of the Earth as spherical was common, even popular, all the way back then, and championed by Aristotle. However, in laying out his model of the universe, he favored a geocentric cosmology, viewing Earth as the center of the universe, an immutable and eternal constant with other planets, the Sun, and the stars revolving around it, and beyond the stars, a spiritual plane that he called the Sphere of the Prime Mover. Even then, though, there were alternative views. As Aristotle notes, the Pythagorean philosopher Philolaus believed that the Earth revolved around a Central Fire. However, this Central Fire was not the Sun, in his view, which he said also revolved around the center with the Earth, and he further believed that on the other side of this Central Fire at the universe’s center was an Antichthon, or Counter-Earth, a strange idea that survived long enough to become the fodder of sci-fi. Modern astronomers have even been obliged to disprove the existence of such a phantom planet, which would be detectable because of its gravitational influence on other planetary bodies. But Philolaus’s model influenced Aristarchus, who saw the Central Fire as being one and the same as the Sun, building a heliocentric model of the universe and even suggesting that the stars were themselves other suns. But Aristarchus’s model was often rejected in favor of the Aristotelian geocentric model, thereafter developed by Hipparchus of Nicaea and Ptolemy of Alexandria, who tweaked the model to suggest that each heavenly body, in its orbit of Earth, also moved in an epicycle, or a small circle, performing little loop-de-loops as it revolved around us. The heliocentric view of the universe would not rise again, as it were, until the 16th century, when Polish monk Nicolaus Copernicus’s On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres set forth a model of the universe that the Church rejected. Then in 1610, when Galileo recognized that the planetary bodies he’d been observing were moons orbiting Jupiter, not revolving around Earth, the geocentric model of the universe was in its death throes. However, this new model still held that we were very close to the center of the universe: our sun, Sol. This notion would not be shattered until the 20th century, when head of the Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley, placed our solar system in the boondocks of the Milky Way galaxy. Still, the Milky Way, it was thought, even by Shapley, was the only galaxy there was. Until Edwin Hubble showed that there were other galaxies beyond ours, proving it to Shapley in what Shapley described as a “letter that destroyed my universe.” Thus goes the march of scientific progress. When we believe we understand something, our illusions are obliterated by the next discovery. Today, we have the multiverse theory to suggest that our universe may not even be the only one, making our existence feel more and more insignificant.

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In my recent blog post, covering the history of immunological science and the development of vaccine technology, as well as in a patron bonus on germ theory, I found it interesting to explore both the hits and misses of scientific progress. It illustrates well the scientific principle that only through experimentation, collection of evidence, observation and comparison can truth be established. We see in the history of science the concept that, as Isaac Newton once wrote, each generation stands on the shoulders of giants, building upon what has already been proven and disproving what has not in order to achieve a more perfect understanding of our world and universe. I find this gratifying because of how very different it often seems from historiology. Don’t get me wrong. Professional historians work tirelessly to revise and perfect our understanding of the past. The term “revisionist history” in fact has unfairly developed a negative connotation, when in reality, every professional historian engages in measured and evidence-supported revision. But since history is often viewed as static and unchanging, our evolving understanding of it often takes a long time to catch up. Textbooks continue to disseminate oversimplified narratives rife with myths and misconceptions. That, of course, is the bread and butter of this blog. Take, for example, Copernicus and Galileo, about whom there remain a wealth of myths that even scientists like Carl Sagan were known to repeat. The first is the Demotion Myth, the idea that the heliocentric model represented a demotion of the Earth’s place in the universe. Actually, according to medieval and early modern beliefs, in which the center was the worst place to be, like the center of Dante’s model of hell, moving Earth away from the center was in reality something of a promotion according to contemporary philosophy. Further myths claim that Copernicus waited until his deathbed to publish his heliocentric model, but that was more of a coincidence. Likewise, many myths surround Galileo, from apocryphal experiments atop the Leaning Tower of Pisa wrongfully attributed to him, to erroneously crediting him with the invention of the telescope, the thermometer, and the scientific method. Folklore tells us Galileo was excommunicated, convicted of heresy, and immured in a dungeon. In fact, he was put on trial, but in reality it was for breach of an agreement with the Holy Office. As the Pope had endorsed his work, Galileo had agreed not to present the Copernican model as proven fact, but rather to discuss the pros and cons of all cosmological models. Pope Urban VIII was actually sympathetic to the Copernican model, but when Galileo broke his agreement and presented it as fact, it put the Pope in an awkward situation. Far from being tossed in a dungeon, though, Galileo was sentenced to live in a 5-room suite in the Palace of the Holy Office, was able to receive guests and, records show, could come and go at great liberty, if not as he pleased. These myths make it clear that, while the science to which they contributed was built upon and furthered, the history of their lives was muddled and misrepresented. So let us retire, this once, from the benighted realm of Historical Blindness, and bask in the light of empirical science, specifically the luminous realm of astronomy, where wrong ideas have also abounded, but have almost universally been overcome by reason.

Saturn depicted by Galileo (top), Huygens (middle), and Cassini (bottom). Image credit: RM Chapple

One of Galileo’s wrong ideas had to do with Saturn. In 1610, he was the first to observe this planet using a telescope, and he saw what appeared to be a triple planet, or a large planet with two moons on either side. However, two years later, he observed that these moons had disappeared, and two years after that, seeing that they appeared to have returned, he speculated that they were some kind of arms. But the shape of Saturn would baffle astronomers for a long time, sometimes appearing as three bodies and sometimes as an egg on its side. Some fifty years after Galileo first spied it, Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch astronomer, discovered Saturn’s moon Titan using a telescope superior to Galileo’s and in the process, he observed these arms of Saturn, which appeared to pierce it through its center, making it look something like a spinning top, but then vanishing with time. It was Huygens who hypothesized that these arms were a ring around the planet that when viewed edge-on appeared to be arms, or moons with inferior optics, and became impossible to discern from other angles. Huygens’s ring theory was not widely accepted at first, but other astronomers came around to his way of thinking, coming to believe that Saturn had a ring around it… a solid ring, for if it were not entirely solid, how could it possibly hold together as the planet spun? A hint came 15 years later, when Giovanni Domenico Cassini observed a gap in the ring. This gap proved it was not some giant ring of stone, all of a piece, so the mystery deepened. How did the isolated masses within the ring remain in place? Perhaps it was gaseous or composed of fluid? Not until the mid-19th century did James Clerk Maxwell demonstrate through equations that none of these possibilities would have been stable. Thus it was discovered that Saturn’s ring was composed of small unconnected particles. Almost forty years later, in 1895, James Keeler would further our understanding, observing that there were actually multiple rings of Saturn, and the innermost did not move at the same speed as did the outermost. So the history of astronomical discovery shows us that even when we see something with our naked eye, what we are seeing may not be entirely apparent.

Such was the case with Mars when William Herschel studied it with one of his homemade telescopes during the late 18th century. He made some important discoveries during his study, having to do with the rotation and axial tilt of the red planet. He also observed that the white spots on Mars’s poles, observed by both Cassini and Huygens and hypothesized earlier that century to be polar ice caps, changed size according to the season. This confirmation that ice existed on Mars helped to fuel Herschel’s speculation that the planet was inhabited. Herschel tended to vocally believe that all planets were inhabited, envisioning the moon as being akin to the English countryside, and even suggesting that the Sun supported life… not on its scorching surface, of course, but in some cooler underground realm, like a reverse Hollow Earth theory in which it is somehow hotter on the surface and more temperate within. Thus it’s no surprise that when Herschel viewed and mapped Mars in 1783, he asserted that all the visibly darker areas were oceans and declared the planet capable of supporting life, encouraging the perennial belief in Martians. With the 19th century construction of more and more advanced observatories, further mapping of Mars was accomplished, starting in 1877 by Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli in Milan. It was he who named these supposed Martian continents and seas, giving them mythological names. Schiaparelli also observed something surprising. There appeared to be a network of pale lines in certain regions, which Schiaparelli called canali. When this news reached the English speaking world, his work was translated, and it was discovered that there were “canals” on Mars. At the time, canals were something of an engineering wonder, and the recent completion of the Suez Canal had been touted as a great accomplishment of mankind. So when the English speaking world heard “canal,” they thought massive artificial waterways, which would mean intelligent and industrious Martians. In reality, Schiaparelli’s word canali had been mistranslated. A more accurate translation would have been “channels,” a word less suggestive of engineering. But it was too late. The Martians were out of the bag. American astronomer Percival Lowell mapped what he saw as a network of canals with “oases” at certain intersections, speculating that the drying of the Martians’ planet had forced them to draw water from their polar ice caps. But again, what they had spied through their telescopes was not as clear as they believed. These features could be glimpsed only briefly and occasionally through Earth’s shimmering and shifting atmosphere, and as it turned out, they were an optical illusion. The lighter and darker regions were not oceans and continents, but rather what are called albedo features. Rather than bodies of water, or vegetation, as was an alternative theory, they didn’t correspond to topographical features at all and were likely just areas where wind had swept away the pale surface dust to reveal the darker ground beneath. As for the canali, they were an artifact of the human eye, creating phantom lines between briefly visible features, and the suggestion of infrastructure introduced by the English mistranslation added a psychological element, such that astronomers were looking for lines, expecting to find them, and staring until they saw them, making Mars something like the Magic Eye posters of the 1990s.

Martian canals depicted by Percival Lowell. Public Domain.

While sometimes astronomers were looking right at something and unable to discern what it was, or believed it was something it was not because of what others had told suggested, other times they searched and searched for something that wasn’t even there, again because some had insisted it would be there. The enduring search for a “phantom planet” is the perfect example of this. In the early 18th century, astronomers began to hypothesize about the regularity in distance between the planets in our solar system, concluding in 1772 with Bode’s Law, a formula for predicting the distance between planets that it was hoped would make the discovery of new planets possible. And indeed, it did. In 1781, William Herschel spotted Uranus, which he believed to be a comet, but of course it wasn’t. What it was was the 7th planet from the sun, right where Bode’s Law said it would be. After that, Johann Bode, one of the originators of the law, urged astronomers to search for another planet between Mars and Jupiter, as there was a gap there indicating the presence of another planet. This hypothetical planet was the subject of much interest at the turn of the century, and a group of astronomers who fancied themselves the Celestial Police devoted themselves to finding it. A discovery of a heavenly body in that slot between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter was made the next year, but not by one of the Celestial Police. One Giueseppe Piazzi discovered a heavenly body that he dubbed Ceres, and it was thought the predicted planet had been found. However, the next year, Heinrich Olbers discovered another body with about the same orbit: Pallas. After that came Juno and Vesta, and it became clear that numerous objects were in orbit there. Thus the asteroid belt was discovered, and a theory emerged that it represented the remains of a larger planet that had once orbited there where Bode’s Law had predicted a planet would be found. This “lost planet” was named Phaeton in an 1823 pamphlet by Johann Gottlieb Radlof, a German schoolteacher who took this theory and used it as a catastrophist explanation of certain myths and biblical incidents. In this way he was something of a predecessor of Immanuel Velikovsky, the catastrophist to whom I devoted an entire episode in my Chronological Revision Chronicles. But as usual, despite such pseudoscience, science marches on. Ceres and others of the largest asteroids in the belt are today considered dwarf planets at most, and the belt is believed to be material that simply never accreted into a planet because it was too perturbed by Jupiter’s gravitational influence.

Nearly a hundred years after the formation of the Celestial Police and the search for the lost planet, astronomers found themselves again all aflutter in search of a theorized planet, this one between Mercury and the Sun. It all started in 1810, when French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier constructed a model of Mercury’s orbit of the Sun according to Newtonian laws. When he had a chance to verify his model by observing Mercury’s transit, or its crossing of the disk of the Sun, however, it failed to confirm his model. It appeared there was some excess value observed in its perihelion precession for which Le Verrier simply could not account. Le Verrier’s solution was that there must be another small planet between Mercury and the Sun that was affecting Mercury’s orbit. He called this theoretical planet Vulcan, not in some prescient anticipation of Star Trek but, of course, after a Roman fire god, from whose name we also derive the word “volcano.” It wasn’t long before he received some confirmation of his theory in the form of an amateur astronomer’s claim to have spotted this previously unseen planet crossing the Sun. Despite the fact that another astronomer expressed doubt owing to the fact that he had been observing the sun at the same moment and had seen nothing of the sort, Le Verrier accepted the account as evidence in favor of his theory, and the amateur astronomer was lauded for his sighting. Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that afterward, many amateur astronomers began to come forward claiming without any corroborative evidence that they too had observed Vulcan in years past. What Le Verrier needed, though, were sightings of the planet in transit that were confirmed by more than one astronomer. Since a solar eclipse would provide the best conditions for such a sighting, the total solar eclipse of 1878 served as their best opportunity to confirm the existence of Vulcan. Astronomers from all over converged by rail on the American West, gathering at the summit of Pike’s Peak in Colorado or overrunning the small town of Separation, Wyoming, places that just happened to lie on the eclipse’s path of totality, where the shadow of the moon would sweep over the country. Respected astronomers at these different locations did indeed sight something they believed to be an intra-mercurial planet, and not just one, but two! Excitement built that not only Vulcan but also another unknown planet had been discovered. Unfortunately, none of their coordinates matched, and the idea that four new planets had been discovered between Mercury and the Sun simply beggared belief. So the search continued, especially during eclipses, until, in 1915, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity satisfactorily explained the excess precession of Mercury, which meant there was no longer any reason to believe that Vulcan existed. Now, it is thought that many of the objects supposedly spied in transit were sunspots or perhaps artifacts of telescopic optics that had been damaged, like Icarus, when pointed too close to the Sun.

Astronomers gather in Separation, Wyoming, in 1878 to observe a solar eclipse in hopes of confirming the existence of the planet Vulcan. Image courtesy of the Carbon County Museum.

Despite this difficulty in sighting even our closest planetary neighbors, humanity has long held the conviction that the number of planets in the cosmos was innumerable. Greek Philosopher Epicurus told Herodotus that “the universe is boundless both in the number of the bodies and in the extent of the void” and that “there are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours.” But for much of human history the only things that could be spied beyond our immediate solar system were luminous bodies: stars. The very fact that planets do not emit light made it essentially impossible to see any so-called exoplanets beyond our solar system. Planets, of course, only reflect light, but when searching for planets that orbit other stars, the great distance and the faintness of their reflected light in comparison to the brightness of their stars’ light make them hidden bodies out there in the void. In fact, hard as it may seem to believe, we did not have any evidence for the existence of planets outside of our own solar system until the 20th century. Astronomer Peter Van De Kamp had begun to hypothesize that planets outside our solar system could be detected by their gravitational effect on the movement of the stars they orbited. His first couple of identifications resulted in hypothetical planets that seemed far too large to be planets, but in 1963, he detected a wobble in the movement of Barnard’s Star, 36 trillion miles from us, and thus the belief in extrasolar planets, and possibly planets that can support life, was bolstered. Currently, the existence of more than 4,000 exoplanets has been confirmed, but surprisingly, Van De Kamp’s discoveries are not among them. As it turns out, all of the star wobbles that Van De Kamp took as evidence for the presence of a planet were actually caused by adjustments to the optics of his telescope. The first real evidence for the existence exoplanets didn’t actually arrive until the early 1990s, a fact which I find astonishing.

Despite the evidence for the corruption of Van De Kamp’s calculations favoring a planet orbiting Barnard’s Star having appeared decades earlier, as recently as 2013 astronomers were still seeking to definitively rule out their existence, which they appear to have finally done. This is the strength and power of science. It takes nothing for granted. Although the existence of oceans and canals on Mars has been ruled out, the existence of water on the red planet remains a topic of much study. In 2011, high resolution images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter showed dark streaks on some slopes indicating seasonal water flow over the surface of the planet, and just last year, radar data from the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft detected possible underground lakes. And while the Phaeton theory that the asteroid belt is the remains of a destroyed planet is only supported by fringe pseudoscientists like Zecharia Sitchin, ideas about phantom planet and other hidden bodies within our solar system continue to be entertained. The notion of a planet Vulcan is mostly extinct, but some astronomers still suggest that intramercurial objects, which they call vulcanoids, could still exist and help to explain the various mysterious sightings in the 19th century. There is even some support for an unseen “Planet X,” but since Pluto has been demoted to a mere dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, it is typically referred to as Planet 9 these days. Indeed, the only credible theory for the existence of another planet within our solar system places it in the same neighborhood, for the unusual orbits of the objects in the Kuiper Belt have led astronomers to hypothesize that the presence of a large body hidden far beyond Pluto may account for it. So, in astronomy and science generally, as in history, it is unwise to suggest too soon that the truth has been entirely settled.

Further Reading

Bakker, Frederick A. “The End of Epicurean Infinity: Critical Reflections on the Epicurean Infinite Universe.” Space, Imagination and the Cosmos from Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, edited by Bakker F., Bellis D., Palmerino C., Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 48, Springer, 2018, pp. 41-67. SpringerLink, link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-02765-0_3.

Baron, David. “The American Eclipse of 1878 and the Scientists Who Raced West to See It.” Mental Floss, 28 July 2017, www.mentalfloss.com/article/503114/american-eclipse-1878-and-scientists-who-raced-west-see-it.

Bartusiak, Marcia. Dispatches from Planet 3: Thirty-Two (Brief) Tales on the Solar System, the Milky Way, and Beyond. Yale University Press, 2018.

Basalla, George. Civilized Life in the Universe : Scientists on Intelligent Extraterrestrials. Oxford University Press, 2006. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/civilizedlifeinu0000basa/page/n3/mode/2up.

Choi, Jieun, et al. “Precise Doppler Monitoring of Barnard's Star.” The Astrophysical Journal, vol. 764, no. 2, 31 Jan. 2013, pp. 131-142. IOPScience, iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/764/2/131.

Matson, John. “50 Years Ago an Astronomer Discovered the First Unambiguous Exoplanet (or So He Thought).” Scientific American, 30 May 2013, blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/50-years-ago-an-astronomer-discovered-the-first-unambiguous-exoplanet-or-so-he-thought/.

O’Callaghan, Jonathan. “Water on Mars: Discovery of Three Buried Lakes Intrigues Scientists.” Nature, 28 Sep. 2020, www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02751-1.

Sant, Joseph. “The Copernican Myths.” Scientus.org, 2019, www.scientus.org/Copernicus-Myths.html.

---. “The Galileo Myths.” Scientus.org, 2020. www.scientus.org/Galileo-Myths.html.