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.

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. — 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.

Extra! Extra! Extra-Terrestrial Hoaxes!

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