Science Friday: *Vespertilio-homo* on the moon

Back in August of 1835, the New York Sun newspaper announced a remarkable and historic scientific discovery.  A famous astronomer, John Herschel, son of the astronomer credited with discovering the planet Uranus, had observed life on the moon.

An account of this particular hoax appears in "Paper Moon" by Paul Maliszewski Wilson Quarterly Winter 2005.  References to it can be found various places online, though not Maliszewski's article.  For instance:

The Great Moon Hoax by Alex Boese, Museum of Hoaxes (2002)
Fooling the Masses: Astronomer Sees the Moon's Bat-men by Fred Fedler (1989)
The Moon Hoax by Donald Simanek (undated) has reproductions of some of the drawings illustrating the tale.
The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 by R.J. Brown, HistoryBuff.com

The moon had a number of interesting creatures on it, it seems: frolicking blue goats, bison, raindeer, minuature zebra, and much more.  Most interesting of all were the humanoid creatures observed at some length by Herschel's super-telescope:

These beings, who averaged four feet in height and had yellow faces and shocks of copper-colored hair on their heads, flew with the aid of long, thin, almost translucent wings, which they could fold neatly behind them. The scientists likened their wings to those of bats, and named the Lunarians Vespertilio-homo, Latin for man-bat. The man-bats' "attitude in walking," the Herschel team reported, "was both erect and dignified." They lived in pastoral bliss, spending "their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about on the summits of precipices." Locke lavished many words on the happiness of his creations. The man-bats, for example, whose beaut}' "appeared in our eyes scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters." lived without apparent strife. "The universal state of amity among all classes of lunar creatures, and the apparent absence of every carnivorous or ferocious species, gave us the most refined pleasure, and doubly endeared to us this lovely nocturnal companion of our larger, but less favored world."

But, it was all fake.  According to Maliszewski, it was the papers head writer Richard Locke who cooked up the story.  John Herschel was a real astronomer, one element that lent credibility to the hoax.  When Herschel himself finally heard about the hoax in South Africa, he seemed to be more amused than outraged by it.

This story was reportedly widely believed for a while, much like, say, Judith Miller's New York Times articles about WMDs in Iraq, to take a similar example from just a couple of years back.