The Moon Hoax
- Author: Richard Adams Locke
- Page count: 73
- Started on: 2025/11/17
- Finished on: 2025/11/18
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
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Also titled: The Moon Hoax or, A Discovery that the Moon Has a Vast Population of Human Beings.
This book reproduces a series of articles that were published in the newspaper The New York Sun in 1835, claiming that the eminent astronomer Sir John Herschel, using a gigantic new telescope at the Cape of Good Hope, had discovered life and civilization on the Moon. Despite it all being a fictional narrative, the book dives quite deep into the history of its characters, and then describes in detail what they purportedly observed on the moon through their giant telescope.
I found it important to read this mostly as a time-piece, as the initial half of the writing is rather dry and dated. Still… interesting to read 190 years later and realize what a stir this caused back in a time when it would’ve been impossible to quickly verify or dispel the hoax.
