DISCOVERIES IN THE MOON (1835) ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION

DISCOVERIES IN THE MOON (1835) – The full title of this work is Discoveries in the Moon Lately Made at the Cape of Good Hope by Sir John Herschel. Originally published as a series of “real” scientific articles in the newspaper the New York Sun, this hoax was the written-word equivalent of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast of a century later. The series of fraudulent articles caused a sensation and increased the newspaper’s circulation exponentially before the Sun revealed it was all a work of fiction.

Richard Adams Locke wrote the two-month series under the name Sir John Herschel, a supposed British astronomer who had constructed at the Cape of Good Hope a seven ton telescope with a lens twenty-four feet in diameter. “Sir John” wrote all about the many species of lunar animal life his enormous telescope had permitted him to observe.

The articles described the appearance and habits of moon-buffaloes with furry flaps for eyebrows, single-horned blue goats who ran at incredible speeds and spheroid amphibians who rolled in and out of the waters of a two hundred sixty-six mile wide lake.

Those animals and many other species supposedly lived amid thirty-eight species of trees and pyramidal mountains made of amethyst. The story concluded with Herschel’s discovery of four feet tall winged humanoids who traveled in flocks like birds and walked upright when on land. The beings had copper-colored hair on their heads and yellowish skin.

Ironically, even after the whole affair was revealed as a hoax it was praised for exciting the public’s interest in astronomy and other sciences.

FOR WASHINGTON IRVING’S 1809 depiction of an invasion from the moon click here:   https://glitternight.com/2014/05/05/ancient-science-fiction-the-men-of-the-moon-1809-by-washington-irving/ 

FOR MORE ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION CLICK HERE.