Another press hoax…Or is it?

By Deacon Mike Manno

One of the towering figures of American journalism was The New York Sun, 1833-1950. The Sun, under the direction of Benjamin Day, was considered to have ushered in the era of the penny press, where newspapers, mostly broadsides at first, were sold for one cent, showing publishers that news was a commodity which could be bought and sold.

Just for reference, other notable editors of the era were James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and, perhaps the most famous of the group, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. The commercial expansion of the news business ultimately allowed newspapers to become weaned from their political sponsors, thus ending the era of the party press in which each publisher was subsidized by one political faction or another.

This, of course, resulted in circulation wars to increase the paper’s revenue. The early years of this era led to stiff competition between papers and the rise of independent commercial journalism. Which also led to some problematic reporting.

In August of 1836 Sun readers woke to the first of several articles announcing a startling new discovery: “Great Astronomical Discovery Lately Made by Sir John Herschel.” Sir John had established a facility at Feldhausen, South Africa, where his telescope would take advantage of the clearer air there and be able to see those portions of the southern sky not visible from the north. According to the news report, the discoveries were made by an “immense telescope on an entirely new principle.”

Sir John, a respected scientist in his own right, was the son of Sir William Herschel, another respected astronomer, who, along with his sister, Caroline, studied solar bodies and discovered the planets of Saturn and Uranus. Sir William, however, was convinced that all planets were inhabited with intelligent beings.

Sir William, by this time had been long deceased, but Sir John had made the discovery, reported the Sun, by use of the above referenced telescope which “has discovered planets in other solar systems; has obtained a distinct view of objects in the moon, fully equal to that which the unaided eye commands of terrestrial objects at the distance of 100 yards; has affirmatively settled the question this satellite be inhabited, and by what orders of beings.”

The readers’ interests were piqued as the series continued. Especially when the paper began to describe things that were seen through the telescope, such as “a strange amphibious creature of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach.” These descriptions were reportedly copied from a supplement of the Edinburgh Journal of Science.

This, naturally, stirred the competitive juices of rival editors who began to reprint the daily stories from the Sun. “Sir John has added a stock of knowledge to the present age that will immortalize his name,” one of the rival editors is quoted as saying.

The articles continued to tell of the topography of the moon’s surface, as well as the craters of the moon, huge amethyst crystals, waterways, plants, and other vegetation. Notable were such animals described as “goats, cranes, pelicans, bison with eye-flaps of skin to shield their eyes from the sun, and tailless beaver.”

As the series moved to a conclusion, the paper described the inhabitants of the moon: as unicorns and “furry, winged men and women, resembling bats, [who] could fly.”

The series ended with a report that the magnificent telescope that allowed man to actually see the surface of the moon in such great detail was destroyed by a freak accident that caused the suspension of the observations. Apparently the telescope was so powerful that the sun caused the telescope to burst into flames and burn.

Well, seemingly the world went crazy as the stories were re-published throughout the country, which took some heat off the current political question of the day: slavery. To follow up, a team of scientists from Yale, who could not find copies of the original Edinburgh Journal of Science articles in the Yale library, traveled to New York to examine the original reports that Sir John had filed and to make its own investigation.

The bubble soon burst when Richard Adams Locke, the author of the series, had one too many with a reporter from another paper and spilled the secret that he had made up the entire series. Word soon spread and other papers castigated the Sun whose readers never seemed too excited about the hoax and took it all in stride. In fact, the Sun’s circulation, which had started growing with the publication of the first installment, continued to grow.

The hoax did cause one piece of collateral damage. Edgar Allan Poe had started writing a fictional tale, “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” for the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe called Locke’s effort “the greatest hit in the way of sensation — of merely popular sensation — ever made by any similar fiction either in America or Europe.”

Poe left his own story unfinished.

At first even Sir John Herschel was amused by the hoax, saying that it was much more exciting than his real observations. However, over time he did express annoyance at repeated questions from people who believed the hoax was real.

The Sun went on to be one of the most distinguished newspapers of its era. And just as a footnote to the story, after the Civil War a man named Charles Dana acquired partial ownership of the Sun, and became its managing editor. One day in September of 1897 Dana received a letter to the editor from an eight-year-old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon.

In her letter she said that her dad told her she could believe anything that appeared in the Sun. Dana gave the letter to one of his veteran journalists, Francis Pharcellus Church, whose epic answer, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” stands as an epic of American journalism.

(You can reach Mike at: DeaconMike@q.com, and listen to him every Thursday morning on Faith On Trial at IowaCatholicRadio.com.)