This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

The moon and space exploration are magnets for fake news. But 1835 launched the most

imaginative moon hoax of the mall. You to tell another story for our American stories is

regular contributor Ashley Lubinsky. Take it away, Ashley. Picture this. It's late August of 1835, and you're a New Yorker, and you open your newspaper,

and you learn something out of this world. That story says that life has been discovered on the

moon. There was said to be strange lunar landscapes on the moon

that had rivers and vegetation

and these enormous crystals and animals

unlike anything you've seen on Earth.

It described bison-like beasts,

horned creatures that resemble unicorns, tailless beavers that walked upright,

and the most sensational, maybe the creepiest one of them all, winged humanoids. The story appeared

in a series of six articles in the New York Sun, beginning on August 25, 1835. And it quickly

became one of the most famous newspaper hoaxes in American history. To understand why so

many people paid attention, you really have to understand the culture of the moment. The New York Sun, which was founded in 1833, was one of the new Penny Press newspapers.

So it was cheap, lively, and it was aimed at more of a mass audience

rather than publications that were focused on a few narrow elite.

And it favored narrative drama and had this kind of immediacy.

Readers in the 1830s were also deeply interested in science, astronomy,

and the possibility of life beyond Earth.

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