How man-bats, unicorns and mini zebras were ‘discovered on the moon’

Man-bats, unicorns and beavers trotting around on two legs are just some of the things about 240,000 miles away from you right now.

Exactly 189 years ago, on August 25, 1835, the New York newspaper The Sun – said to be in the same league as The New York Times – ran the first of six daily stories claiming that life had been discovered on the moon.

Not lil green men, however. Think tail-less beavers who walk on two legs, ‘spherical ‘amphibians and teeny tiny zebras. And other slightly not as fantastical critters and plant life like single-horned goats, small reindeer and lush forests.

The six stories were all written by Dr Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of a top astronomer of the day who made the discoveries.

‘It is impossible to contemplate any great astronomical discovery without feelings closely allied to a sensation of awe,’ the first story began.

In, well, luminous detail, the article detailed the lush vegetation that covers our closest celestial neighbour, including trees like the ‘yews in English courtyards’.

Oceans, beaches, temples and ‘a lofty chain of obelisk-shaped, or very slender pyramids, standing in irregular groups’ littered the white lump of rock. Bison, meanwhile, roamed around with shades over their eyes to protect them from the extremes of light and dark.

These were all, according to the headline, ‘GREAT ASTRONOMICAL DISCOVERIES’ made by John Herschel, an English mathematician and astronomer.

Herschel had ‘affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what order of beings’ as well as apparently solve or correct ‘every leading problem of mathematical astronomy’.

All in a day’s work for Herschel, we guess. He made the discovery using an ‘immense telescope of an entirely new principle’, Grant wrote, which he hauled from New England to Capetown, South Africa.

The lens alone measured ’24 feet and seven tons in weight’, with the paper saying his findings were from a supplement in the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

In later articles that week, other creatures included goat-like animals with the personalities of playful kittens and long-beaked cranes were reported on.

And, of course, bat people. These winged humanoids were dubbed ‘Vespertilio-homo’ by Herschel, which in Latin roughly means ‘man-bat’.

‘They averaged four feet in height, were covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-coloured hair, and had wings composed of a thin membrane, without hair, lying snugly upon their backs, from the top of the shoulders to the calves of the legs,’ the fourth story said of the creatures.

‘The face, which was of a yellowish flesh colour, was a slight improvement upon that of the large orange outang, being more open and intelligent in its expression, and having a much greater expansion of forehead.’

‘They were of infinitely greater personal beauty and appeared in our eyes scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters,’ the final story added, with Grant stressing that the ’40 pages’ of illustrations and notes from Herschel couldn’t be published due to cost.

Sales of The Sun rose, well, astronomically. Papers not just in New York but across the US – and Europe – reprinted it.

The New York Times called Herschel’s findings ‘probable and possible’. One Italian publication even ran lithographs. Religious groups, meanwhile, got to work planning missionary trips to the moon to meet these angelic bat people.

Not just the press was obsessed with Herschel’s discoveries. A team of Yale University scientists flew from New Haven to New York to track down the Edinburgh Journal articles, the History Channel says.

The Sun, however, sent the academics on a wild goose chase between the printing and editorial teams. The academics later gave up.

If you haven’t already guessed, no, there are no bat people on the moon. Nor are there forests and valleys full of unicorns and bipedal beavers.

On September 16, 1835, the Sun admitted the articles had been a hoax. (Though never issued a retraction.)

While not quite an intentionally cruel prank on the paper’s part, the features’ real author, Richard Adams Locke, editor of The Sun, confessed years later they were meant to be satire, the Smithsonian Magazine reported. Locke had taken over the tabloid when sales were drooping, and his dupe appeared to be a rather intricate bid to boost sales.

Locke, however, ‘underestimated the gullibility of the public’, Kirsten van der Veen, of the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, told the magazine.

She explained that the late 19th century was ‘the time before we knew anything’, where eager readers leafed through newspapers to learn all about new-fangled scientific theories and inventions, such as the battery and the printing press.

So it’s no wonder the country was so gripped by the supposed extraterrestrial discovery.

But not everyone was convinced, even from the get-go. The real-life Herschel for one, who joked: ‘It is too bad my real discoveries here won’t be that exciting.’

‘I have been pestered from all quarters with that ridiculous hoax about the moon – in English, French, Italian, and German!’ he later added.

Edgar Allan Poe, the poet known for his violent, romantic and unwholesome poetry, felt the articles were a tad too whacky, even for him.

‘Not one person in ten discredited it,’ Poe recalled in 1846.

‘A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.