– “writes in respect of a series of stories … often attributed to a plot hatched in our circulation department.” Being as fallible as the next


journalist, I am in no position to demand a


reverse ferret from any other hacks. And no ferret was reversed. As the quotation marks round ‘hoax’ confirmed, the editorial clearly meant, again, it was no such thing. The Sun was playing hardball: “Well, we say, let them laugh … One of the things a long newspaper life has taught us about corrections is that, obligatory as they may be when the truth is out, one doesn’t want to rush into them. For the moment, let us just say that we’re aware of the claim that there are no lunar man-bats, neither on the moon nor here. Rest assured that we’re looking into it.” The editorial concluded that a further quarter-century of research should sort things out. The moon mania provided much


entertainment. It was much sunnier than Orson Welles’s convincing radio broadcast about a Martian invasion in 1938. Based on The War of the Worlds by HGWells, this work of fiction caused so much terror among American listeners they had to be reassured it was not real. Or did it? To add to the confusion, the alleged mass panic has itself been declared a myth. However, the Sun’s hoax was a matter of


fascination not fear. The stunt contained its own autodestructive clues clearly intended to blow it up sooner or later. The Edinburgh Journal of Science, quoted as the source of Herschel’s lunar bombshells, no longer came out. Sir John’s absence on his researches in South Africa prevented him from instantly denying the whole farrago; he was amused by the affair but became rather tired of being quizzed. Suspicions were raised by the fact that The


New York Sun’s series was uncannily similar to a short story by Edgar Allan Poe about a balloonist who soars to the moon and back. A subtler objection was that the whole work could be read not as literal truth but as merely a satire on the work of one Rev Thomas Dick, a writer and scientist who had somehow worked out that the moon was home to four billion inhabitants, all created by the Christian God. The penny – or cent – finally dropped: the readers’ legs had been pulled and they had been blinded by pseudoscience. The Morning Herald denounced The Sun’s discovery as an astronomical fraud and it was followed by other papers, which, after initially recycling the tale, declared that they did not believe a word of it either. But what of the great telescope that would provide the evidence one way or the other? The Sun admitted that this 42,000x-magnification marvel was no more. So powerful were its lenses that the sun’s rays pouring through them had set fire to Herschel’s observatory. These things happen – or, as in this case, didn’t happen.


theJournalist | 19


Looking back to:


1835


TIME & LIFE PICTURES


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