The Great Moon Hoax: Bat-Men, Blue Unicorns, and the Newspaper That Fooled New York — 1835

In August of 1835, a New York newspaper called The Sun published a story claiming that the British astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a powerful new telescope in South Africa, had discovered life on the moon. Not signs of habitability. Life. Lush forests, rushing rivers, herds of blue unicorns, bipedal beavers who carried their young under their arms, and a race of winged humanoids — bat-men — who lived in communities, built temples, and appeared to practice agriculture.

The story ran across six articles over two weeks, cited a real astronomer, and deployed the vocabulary of nineteenth-century science with enough precision to sound credible. The New York Times called the discoveries probable. Religious groups began planning missionary expeditions. The Sun’s circulation shot from eight thousand to nearly twenty thousand copies a day, making it briefly the most widely read newspaper in the world. Every word of it was fabricated.

Host Shawn Spainhour takes you into the full story: the cutthroat world of the penny press, the reporter who wrote it, the city that believed it, and the specific question the Great Moon Hoax has never stopped raising, when we want something to be true badly enough, how hard do we actually look to see if it isn’t?

If you love history, true crime, or storytelling — or if you’re just looking for something to listen to on a long drive or drift off to sleep — this one is for you.

Strange Epochs is a weekly narrative history podcast hosted by Shawn Spainhour. Each episode takes one strange, true, documented moment from somewhere in the long span of human history and sits with it, slow, atmospheric, and built for deep listening. New episodes every Tuesday. If this is your first episode, there are fifteen more waiting for you.

Sources:

• Wikipedia contributors. Great Moon Hoax. Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2024.
• Goodman, Matthew. The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York. Basic Books, 2008.
• Locke, Richard Adams. Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel. The Sun, New York, August 25 through September 16, 1835.
• Britannica editors. Great Moon Hoax. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2026.
• History.com editors. The Great Moon Hoax is published in the New York Sun. A and E Television Networks, 2025.
• The Saturday Evening Post. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835. August 26, 2020.
• The Conversation. Batmen and Unicorns: Inside the Original Moon Hoax. 2021.
• EarthSky. The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Would you have believed it? August 25, 2023.
• MIT Deepfakes and Media. The Great Moon Hoax as an early example of viral misinformation. 2023.