GS Paper - III
The American newspaper The New York Sun published the first of six articles detailing unprecedented astronomical discoveries – most notably that life had been discovered on the moon.
In a period when great astronomical discoveries were being made, it would have passed for pioneering scientific research, if not for the sheer audacity and outrageousness of the claims made.
What did the articles claim?
ü The Sun’s news reports referred to new scholarly research authored by Sir John Herschel in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, a journal which incidentally ceased all publication months before the stories came out, and claimed he had built a telescope “of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle.”
ü His being the son of William Herschel, an eminent philosopher who had discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, added to his credibility.
ü The paper said, “The younger Herschel, at his observatory in the Southern Hemisphere, has already made the most extraordinary discoveries in every planet of our solar system; has discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon… has affirmatively settled the question whether this satellite be inhabited, and by what order of beings; has firmly established a new theory of cometary phenomena; and has solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy.”
ü The reports described how Herschel had reportedly sighted forests and plants with a few mammals such as miniature bison and beavers that stood upright, single-horned goats birds, and even unicorns.
ü The most outrageous of all the claims was the “sighting” of human beings with bat-like wings, which they designated Vespertilio-homo or man-bats. The newspaper also carried illustrations to reinforce these ideas.
ü The final installment described how the endeavour came to an untimely end as the telescopic lens caught fire from concentrated solar rays, disrupting all research.
How and why was this hoax conceived?
ü The New York Sun was a daily newspaper based in New York City, circulated between 1833 and 1950. Costing a penny, it had a wider readership than its costlier counterparts, which were targeted at the elites.
ü The New York Sun also popularised the use of newsboys announcing the headlines and hawking newspapers to sell on the street.
ü When publisher Richard Adam Locke joined The Sun, its readership had fallen to 8,000 copies a day. He used the opportunity to try to ridicule the increasing influence of religion in scientific discovery at the time, specifically the field of “religious astronomy”.
ü Locke was reportedly inspired by Reverend Thomas Dick, a British church minister who had estimated that the Solar System was home to over 21 trillion inhabitants, with the moon alone housing 4.2 billion of these.
