The Craziest Belief in American History: Mormons, Moon Quakers, and the Hoax That Fooled Everyone

The Craziest Belief in American History: Mormons, Moon Quakers, and the Hoax That Fooled Everyone

Blog/DarkNews

The Craziest Belief in American History: Mormons, Moon Quakers, and the Hoax That Fooled Everyone

The story of how early Mormon leaders allegedly believed six-foot-tall Quakers were living on the moon is stranger, funnier, and more complicated than the memes suggest — and it involves a newspaper hoax, bat-men, a German professor who saw cities on the lunar surface, and a game of telephone spanning four decades.

There’s a particular kind of discovery that happens when you start digging into religious history looking for the weird stuff. You find it — that part’s basically guaranteed. What catches you off guard is realizing the weird stuff is somehow even weirder than you expected, and it’s wrapped in so many layers of context that it becomes simultaneously more understandable and more absurd the deeper you go.

The claim that early Mormons believed Quakers lived on the moon is one of those stories. It sounds like something invented by anti-religious internet trolls around 2007, the kind of thing someone would make up to win an argument at Thanksgiving dinner. It has that too-perfect quality of being both very specific and completely ridiculous. And yet, there it sits in the historical record: a description of lunar inhabitants who stood about six feet tall, dressed in a style resembling Quaker fashion, and lived to be nearly a thousand years old.

These weren’t just any space Quakers, mind you. They were allegedly described with the specificity of someone who had received a divine vision of their fashion choices. Uniform height. Consistent wardrobe. Lifespans that would make Methuselah jealous. The details are so oddly precise that you have to wonder where they came from and how seriously anyone actually took them.

To make sense of any of this, we need to talk about bat-men, a newspaper hoax that fooled Yale professors, a German urologist who saw cities on the lunar surface, and the general state of astronomical knowledge in the 1830s. The story sprawls across continents and decades, and by the time we’re done, the moon Quakers will actually be the least strange part of it.

EVERYONE WAS A MOON TRUTHER IN 1835

Before we get too smug about anyone believing in moon people, we should probably acknowledge something uncomfortable: this wasn’t exactly a fringe position in the early nineteenth century. Believing the moon was inhabited wasn’t like believing in Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster today. It was closer to believing in black holes before we had pictures of them — speculative, sure, but not obviously crazy given what people knew at the time.

William Herschel is a good example of how mainstream this thinking was. Herschel discovered Uranus. He’s generally considered one of the greatest astronomers in history. His telescopes were the best in the world. The Royal Society gave him the Copley Medal and made him a Fellow. King George III appointed him as the royal astronomer. This was not some guy ranting on a street corner. This was the most respected astronomer of his generation.

And William Herschel spent considerable time searching for evidence of life on the moon. He also believed the sun was inhabited. Not metaphorically. Literally. He thought beings lived on the sun.

Herschel didn’t just mention this casually at dinner parties, either. He presented his views formally to Britain’s Royal Society in 1795, in a paper titled “On the Nature and Construction of the Sun and Fixed Stars.” This paper appeared in the prestigious Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London — about as serious a scientific venue as existed at the time. In it, Herschel argued that the sun “appears to be nothing else than a very eminent, large, and lucid planet, evidently the first, or in strictness of speaking, the only primary one of our system.”

His theory went like this: the sun was surrounded by a hot, glowing atmosphere, and the dark sunspots that astronomers could observe were actually “holes” in that atmosphere. These holes provided a view of the cool, solid surface below. And that surface, he proposed, was inhabited “by beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe.”

Beings whose organs are adapted to the peculiar circumstances of that vast globe. That’s how Herschel described solar aliens in a paper read before the Royal Society. Nobody laughed him out of the room. This was considered a reasonable scientific hypothesis.

In letters to friends, Herschel went even further with his ideas about the moon. He described how he believed the craters of the moon were actually Lunarian cities and dwellings, laid out like Roman circuses. He wrote: “As upon the Earth several Alterations have been, and are daily, made of a size sufficient to be seen by the inhabitants of the Moon, such as building Towns, cutting canals for Navigation, making turnpike roads &c: may we not expect something of a similar Nature on the Moon?”

He was asking, essentially, if we can see our own construction projects from far away, why wouldn’t moon people have construction projects we could see too? The logic has a certain internal consistency, even if the premise is completely wrong.

The broader idea behind all this was called the “plurality of worlds” theory, and it was wildly popular among both scientists and theologians throughout the early 1800s. The reasoning went something like this: if God was infinite and wise, why would He create just one inhabited world? That would be wasteful. God doesn’t waste things. Therefore, all the celestial bodies must be inhabited. QED.

Reverend Thomas Dick took this logic and ran with it further than anyone else. Dick was a Scottish minister and amateur astronomer who became one of the most-read science writers on both sides of the Atlantic. His books sold phenomenally well in Britain and America. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a fan. The intellectual elite of both nations read his work and nodded along as he explained how God’s infinite wisdom demanded infinite populations across infinite worlds.

Dick calculated that the solar system contained exactly 21,891,974,404,480 inhabitants. Not roughly twenty-one trillion. Exactly twenty-one trillion, eight hundred ninety-one billion, nine hundred seventy-four million, four hundred four thousand, four hundred eighty. The man was precise about his complete fabrication, you have to give him that.

His methodology was creative, if completely unmoored from reality. He multiplied planetary surface areas by England’s population density. That’s it. That was the whole calculation. Take the square mileage of, say, Saturn, multiply it by how many people lived per square mile in England, and you’ve got Saturn’s population. The math works perfectly as long as you ignore literally every other variable — like whether those planets have breathable atmospheres, or liquid water, or temperatures compatible with life, or anything remotely resembling habitable conditions.

By Dick’s calculations, the moon alone contained 4.2 billion inhabitants. For context, that would have given the moon roughly twice the population of China at the time. Four billion people, all quietly living their lunar lives without anyone on Earth ever noticing them doing anything. Not a single smoke signal. Not one visible city. Just 4.2 billion very discreet moon residents going about their business.

The intellectual elite of the era read this and thought it sounded reasonable. It made a certain kind of sense if you squinted at it sideways and didn’t ask too many follow-up questions. And most people, apparently, didn’t ask follow-up questions.

THE GERMAN UROLOGIST WHO SAW CITIES ON THE MOON

If Thomas Dick provided the philosophical framework for believing in lunar inhabitants, Franz von Paula Gruithuisen provided the visual evidence. Or at least, what passed for visual evidence in 1822.

Gruithuisen’s background is worth pausing on because it’s genuinely strange. He was a Bavarian physician who specialized in urology and lithotripsy — that’s the removal of bladder stones, if you’re wondering. Before his astronomical adventures, he had served as a military surgeon in the Austrian army starting in 1788. He developed innovative techniques for removing bladder stones that served as models for subsequent medical devices. His contributions to urology were legitimate and respected.

Then he pivoted to astronomy. This kind of career trajectory makes you wonder about the state of professional boundaries in nineteenth-century Germany. One day you’re developing new methods for extracting stones from people’s bladders, the next day you’re announcing you’ve discovered cities on the moon. Life was apparently more flexible back then.

In the early hours of July 12, 1822, Gruithuisen pointed his small refracting telescope at the moon and saw something that changed his life. Near the Schröter crater, in the rough terrain to the north, he observed what appeared to be walls, roads, fortifications, and a city. An actual city, on the moon, visible through his telescope.

He named it “Wallwerk,” which is German for “rampart” or “fortification.” The name suggests he was thinking in military terms, seeing defensive structures rather than just buildings. He spent the next two years documenting his discovery, making repeated observations, sketching what he saw, building his case.

In 1824, Gruithuisen published a paper with what might be the least subtle title in the history of scientific literature: “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings.” The paper included illustrations of what he believed were the structures of an advanced lunar civilization — including a giant triangular feature he interpreted as a “star-shaped temple.”

He also claimed to have observed various shades of color on the lunar surface, which he correlated with climate and vegetation zones. Lines and geometrical shapes indicated, to his eye, the existence of walls, roads, and cities. He was building an entire theory of lunar civilization from shadows and ridges visible through a small telescope.

What Gruithuisen had actually observed was a series of somewhat linear ridges with a fishbone-like pattern. These were natural geological formations that, when viewed through his small refracting telescope under the right lighting conditions, could be perceived as resembling buildings with streets running between them. It’s the same phenomenon that makes people see faces in clouds or Jesus on toast — pattern recognition gone haywire, the human brain finding meaning in randomness.

Other astronomers with better equipment pointed this out almost immediately. The astronomer T.W. Webb later examined the same region and described it as “a curious specimen of parallelism, but so coarse as to carry upon the face of it its natural origin, and it can hardly be called a difficult object.” Translation: it’s obviously just rocks, and not even particularly ambiguous rocks.

Gruithuisen was undeterred by the criticism. He went on to suggest that the ashen light sometimes visible on Venus was caused by “festivals of fire given by the Venusians.” That’s right — the faint glow occasionally observed on Venus was, in Gruithuisen’s view, evidence of Venusian fire festivals. Presumably very large fire festivals, given that they were visible from Earth.

Contemporary astronomers — even those generally sympathetic to the idea of extraterrestrial life, like Gauss, von Littrow, and Olbers — found his conclusions risible. Being mocked by your peers didn’t slow Gruithuisen down, though. He kept observing, kept publishing, kept believing.

The strange part is that despite his enthusiastic promotion of extraterrestrial civilizations and Venusian fire parties, Gruithuisen became a professor of astronomy at the University of Munich in 1826. This happened two years after he published his lunar city paper. He was, after all, also right about some things. His theory that lunar craters were formed by meteorite impacts rather than volcanic activity was actually a significant scientific contribution — one that wouldn’t be widely accepted for another century. So he got the crater thing right while getting the city thing spectacularly wrong.

A crater on the moon now bears his name, which seems like either a tribute or a cosmic joke depending on your perspective. So does a lunar mountain range — Mons Gruithuisen Delta and Mons Gruithuisen Gamma. The Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi mentioned Gruithuisen and his lunar theories in his “Small Moral Works,” in a piece called “Dialogue between the Earth and the Moon.” Jules Verne referenced him in “From the Earth to the Moon.” Gruithuisen achieved cultural penetration even if he never achieved scientific credibility on the extraterrestrial stuff.

The point of all this is important for understanding what comes later: when Joseph Smith or his associates allegedly discussed lunar inhabitants in the 1830s, they weren’t operating in some isolated bubble of religious delusion. They were participating in what passed for mainstream scientific speculation at the time. A professor of astronomy at a major German university was publishing papers about lunar cities and getting away with it. The most celebrated astronomer in British history believed the sun was inhabited and had presented this view to the Royal Society without being laughed out of the building. The best-selling popular science writer in America had calculated the exact number of aliens in the solar system down to the last individual, and people bought his books by the thousands.

The moon being inhabited wasn’t a weird belief in the 1830s. It was practically conventional wisdom.

THE PENNY PRESS: HOW A ONE-CENT NEWSPAPER CHANGED EVERYTHING

To understand the Great Moon Hoax, you first need to understand the revolution in American media that made it possible. That revolution had a name: the penny press.

On September 3, 1833, a twenty-three-year-old printer named Benjamin Henry Day launched a newspaper called the New York Sun. The paper’s slogan was “It Shines for All,” which sounds generic until you understand what Day was actually doing. He was selling his newspaper for one cent.

One cent doesn’t sound revolutionary today, but in 1833, other newspapers cost six cents. That’s not a small difference — it’s a factor of six. The expensive papers catered to merchants, politicians, and the elite. They were filled with stale foreign news, ship schedules, wholesale product prices, and political essays. They assumed their readers were wealthy, educated, and interested in commerce and governance. They were serious papers for serious people.

Day had something completely different in mind. He was desperate when he started the Sun. His printing business was failing, and he needed a way to generate revenue fast. He’d heard about London’s “penny papers” and decided to try the concept in New York. The risk was substantial — nobody had ever made a penny paper work in America. Several had tried and failed.

Day’s innovation wasn’t just the price, though. He changed how newspapers were made and distributed. Using a steam-powered press, he could produce thousands of copies per hour. By 1840, four thousand copies of the Sun could be printed per hour. By 1851, the Sun’s steam-powered presses were turning out eighteen thousand copies per hour. This kind of volume meant each copy could be sold cheaply and still turn a profit through advertising revenue.

More importantly, Day invented a new distribution system. Instead of selling subscriptions like the fancy papers, he sold copies to newsboys in lots of a hundred. These newsboys — often young children — would then hawk the papers on street corners, shouting headlines at passersby. If you’ve ever seen an old movie where a kid yells “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” — that started with Benjamin Day and the New York Sun.

Some critics at the time charged that Day was leading these young boys “into lives of vice and degradation” by having them work as street vendors. The papers sold anyway. The public apparently cared more about cheap news than about the moral welfare of newsboys.

The Sun changed what counted as news in America. Day emphasized the human side of stories — crime, sensation, tragedy, and humor. He hired a reporter named George Wisner to cover the police courts, creating the first police beat in American journalism. Before Wisner, newspapers didn’t really report on crime in any systematic way. After Wisner, crime became a newspaper staple. The Sun even published the first newspaper account of a suicide, marking the first time an ordinary person’s death was considered newsworthy. Prior to the penny press, you had to be important for your death to make the papers.

By 1836, the Sun had a circulation of approximately thirty thousand copies daily — far beyond anything previously achieved in American journalism. Day had created something genuinely new: a newspaper for the masses, funded by advertising rather than subscriptions, driven by sensation rather than sober analysis. He had also, perhaps inadvertently, created the perfect vehicle for the greatest hoax in American journalism history.

THE GREAT MOON HOAX: SATIRE THAT WENT TERRIBLY RIGHT

In the summer of 1835, Benjamin Day met a reporter named Richard Adams Locke. Locke claimed to have been educated at Cambridge, which was a lie, but he could write with a combination of scientific-sounding authority and narrative flair that Day found irresistible.

Locke had arrived in America from England in 1832. His background was interesting in a way that should have raised suspicions. Before emigrating, he had started two literary ventures in London — a publication called the Republican and another called the Cornucopia. Both had failed. He was a skilled writer with a track record of unsuccessful ventures, looking for his next opportunity.

When Day met him, Locke was working for another penny paper, covering a sensational trial. His writing was good enough that Day hired him away at a salary of twelve dollars a week. That wasn’t much money even then, but it was enough to secure Locke’s services. The two men — desperate publisher and ambitious writer — would go on to change American journalism, though not in the way either of them probably intended.

On August 21, 1835, a small teaser notice appeared on the second page of the Sun. The notice was supposedly reprinted from a Scottish publication called the Edinburgh Courant. It announced that Sir John Herschel — son of the famous William Herschel and a legitimate astronomer in his own right — had made “astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description, by means of an immense telescope of an entirely new principle.”

Sir John Herschel was a real person, and he really was conducting astronomical observations at the time. He had arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, on January 18, 1834, to catalog stars of the southern hemisphere. This was public knowledge. What the Sun’s readers didn’t know was that Herschel was on the other side of the world and wouldn’t hear about anything published in New York for months. By the time he could respond, the hoax would be ancient history.

Four days after the teaser, on August 25, the full series began. Over the course of six days, the Sun published what would become known as the Great Moon Hoax — approximately seventeen thousand words describing the discovery of life on the moon in elaborate, scientific-sounding detail.

The telescope described in the articles was a marvel of fictional engineering. According to the story, the lens measured twenty-four feet in diameter and weighed nearly seven tons. Its magnifying power was forty-two thousand times — roughly six times larger than anything that had ever actually been constructed. The telescope was supposedly connected to something called a “hydro-oxygen microscope” that could project images onto a canvas screen, eliminating the dimming effects of high magnification.

None of this was remotely possible with 1835 technology. A twenty-four-foot lens was pure fantasy. The “hydro-oxygen microscope” didn’t exist. The technical specifications were impressive-sounding gibberish designed to fool people who didn’t know enough about optics to recognize nonsense when they saw it. And most people didn’t know enough about optics.

The choice of Herschel as the supposed discoverer was clever on multiple levels. First, his father William had genuinely believed in lunar life, so the son’s “discoveries” seemed like a natural continuation of family interest. Second, John Herschel really was in South Africa with a large telescope, which added plausibility. Third, he was far enough away that he couldn’t issue any denials until long after the sensation had peaked. Fourth, he was respected enough to be credible but not so universally known that his writing style would be immediately recognizable as fake.

The series claimed to be reprinted from a “Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science.” This sounded respectable to educated Americans who probably didn’t realize that the Edinburgh Journal of Science had actually ceased publication in 1833. The journal literally didn’t exist anymore. It couldn’t have published anything in 1835 because it had been defunct for two years. But how many people check these things? Almost nobody, as it turned out.

THE LUNAR MENAGERIE

The lunar tour began in the second article with a description of basaltic rock formations “profusely covered with a dark red flower.” Locke started small — just plants, nothing too dramatic. Having established that the moon contained vegetable life, the narrative moved to the obvious next question: what about animals?

The answer came quickly and escalated rapidly.

First came herds of brown quadrupeds similar to bison, wandering through lunar forests. Then a goat “of a bluish lead color” with a single horn. The articles didn’t use the word “unicorn” — that would have sounded too fantastical. A bluish goat with one horn, though, that sounded scientific. The careful avoidance of mythological terminology was part of what made the hoax effective. Everything was described in the dry language of natural history even when the content was completely absurd.

Then came “a strange amphibious creature, of a spherical form, which rolled with great velocity across the pebbly beach.” A spherical amphibious creature that rolled. The image defies easy visualization. How does something spherical roll with velocity across a pebbly surface? Pebbles would presumably interrupt the rolling. The readers of 1835 apparently didn’t ask such questions, or if they did, they kept the doubts to themselves.

By the third installment, the fictional Dr. Andrew Grant — Herschel’s equally fictional companion and the supposed author of the reports — had catalogued the variety of lunar life observed. The numbers were specific because specific numbers sound credible: thirty-eight types of trees, twice that number of plants, nine species of mammals, and five varieties of egg-laying animals. He described oval-shaped mountains, extinct volcanoes, and an island with cliffs studded with sapphires.

The highlight of day three was the discovery of the first sign of intelligent life on the moon. Not intelligent in the human sense — not yet — but intelligent enough to be remarkable. The bipedal beaver had arrived.

These weren’t ordinary beavers by any measure. They walked upright on two legs and had no tails. They lived in rudimentary huts and carried their young in their arms “the way humans swaddle their infants.” Most impressively, they had apparently mastered fire. The articles described their homes as “toasty” — a word that implies not just warmth but coziness, domesticity, comfort.

Two-legged, fire-wielding beavers building cozy houses and raising families on the moon. That’s where the story was at by day three, and people were believing every word of it.

Day four brought the bat-men.

The articles described “large winged creatures, wholly unlike any kind of birds” that were “certainly like human beings.” Their bodies were covered in “short and glossy copper-colored hair” except for their faces, which were “of a yellowish flesh color.” Their wings were semi-transparent membranes stretched over straight radii, “similar in structure to those of the bat,” lying snugly upon their backs when not in use.

Locke gave these creatures a scientific name: Vespertilio-homo. The word “Vespertilio” comes from the Latin for evening or dusk — it’s the genus name for certain bats. “Homo” means man. So the name translates roughly to “evening-man” or “bat-man.” Locke invented Batman about a century before DC Comics got around to it.

The Vespertilio-homo were observed engaged in conversation, indicating human-level intelligence. They inhabited a valley that the expedition supposedly dubbed the “Ruby Colosseum” due to what appeared to be massive amethyst crystals lining the terrain. The bat-people seemingly lived in a state of perfect harmony, spending their time “eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about upon the summits of precipices.”

They ate fruit, though in “a rather uncouth manner.” This detail is weirdly endearing. The bat-men weren’t perfect — they had bad table manners. It’s the kind of specific, slightly unflattering observation that makes fiction feel true. A hoaxer trying too hard would have made the lunar beings flawless. Locke made them sloppy eaters.

Day five introduced religion, or at least the appearance of it. The articles described an apparently abandoned temple built of polished sapphire, with a sphere on its top surrounded by flames. Anticipating that some readers might find bat-men building sapphire temples incredible, Dr. Grant offered reassurance. A forthcoming volume, he claimed, would provide certificates from “several Episcopal, Wesleyan, and other ministers, who, in the month of March last, were permitted, under stipulation of temporary secrecy, to visit the observatory, and become eye-witnesses of the wonders which they were requested to attest.”

Ministers had verified the bat-men. Religious authorities had seen the evidence and signed off on it. What more proof could skeptical readers possibly need?

Dr. Grant was careful to note that observers “ought not make baseless speculations about the nature of their temples or ceremonial buildings.” This is a masterful touch — four days into a story about fire-wielding beavers and bat-winged humanoids building sapphire temples on the moon, the narrator suddenly gets cautious about speculation. We can report what we’ve seen, Grant seemed to be saying, but we mustn’t jump to conclusions.

Day six brought the grand finale: a larger, improved variety of bat-people living near the temple, physically superior to the first group observed. The series concluded with a convenient accident. Herschel’s telescope had been left in an unfavorable position overnight, absorbed the sun’s rays, and set the observatory ablaze. No further observations would be possible.

The timing of this fictional disaster was perfect from a narrative standpoint. Locke had taken readers as far as he could without straining credulity beyond repair. The bat-men had been discovered, their temples documented, their fruit-eating habits observed. What more was there to say? Rather than push his luck with increasingly elaborate claims, Locke closed the door. A fire destroyed the equipment. The greatest scientific discoveries in human history had been cut tragically short.

The excuse was also unfalsifiable. No one could demand to see more observations if the telescope was destroyed. The story had a built-in explanation for why it couldn’t continue.

THE FALLOUT: EVERYONE BELIEVED IT

The public response was immediate, overwhelming, and — from a modern perspective — almost incomprehensible.

Papers throughout the nation reprinted the Sun’s articles. The Sun claimed its circulation soared from approximately eight thousand copies daily to 19,360 — making it, the paper boasted, the most widely read newspaper in the world. Whether this specific number was accurate or slightly exaggerated, the hoax certainly moved papers. People wanted to read about bat-men.

The demand was so intense that the Sun published the entire series as a pamphlet in September 1835. According to William Gowans, who later reprinted the story, the Sun printed sixty thousand copies of this pamphlet. Every single copy sold in less than a month. The pamphlet was subsequently translated into French, German, and Italian, spreading bat-men across Europe. International readers were apparently just as credulous as American ones.

Other newspapers accepted the story completely uncritically. The New York Times — or rather, a publication that would eventually become part of the Times — declared Herschel’s discoveries “probable and possible.” The New Yorker, which was a different publication from the modern magazine of the same name, called the series “the promulgation of discoveries that creates a new era in astronomy and science generally.”

Papers competed to reprint the series, each one lending it further credibility through repetition. The more outlets that ran the story, the more legitimate it seemed. Why would all these newspapers publish something that wasn’t true?

A committee of scientists from Yale University traveled to New York specifically to examine the original Edinburgh Journal articles. Yale professors made the trip from New Haven to New York to see the source documents for a story about bat-men and fire-wielding beavers. They wanted to verify the evidence.

Sun employees led the Yale delegation on elaborate wild goose chases through the city. The original documents were at the printing office. No, wait, they were at the editorial department. Actually, they might be at this other location. The professors were passed from one department to another, always being told the materials they sought were somewhere else. They eventually returned to New Haven without ever realizing they’d been hoaxed.

William Griggs, who was a Yale student at the time, later wrote about the atmosphere on campus during the hoax: “Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati — students and professors, doctors in divinity and law — and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith.”

Unexampled avidity and implicit faith. The educated elite of one of America’s most prestigious universities was eagerly awaiting each day’s mail to learn more about lunar bat-men. They believed it completely.

Religious groups began making plans for missionary work on the moon. This detail deserves its own moment of reflection. Within less than a week of reading about bat-men building temples on the lunar surface, American Christians were strategizing about how to convert them. The discovery hadn’t even been verified — the Yale professors were still being led around New York on their pointless search — and missionaries were already thinking about how to bring the Gospel to the Vespertilio-homo.

The speed at which people moved from “this might be true” to “we need to save their souls” is genuinely remarkable. Faith, apparently, works fast when presented with new opportunities for expansion.

Edgar Allan Poe watched all of this unfold with what can only be described as complicated feelings. Two months earlier, Poe had published his own moon story in the Southern Literary Messenger. It was called “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” and it described a voyage to the moon in a balloon. Hans Pfaall lives among lunar beings for five years before sending one back to Earth with his account.

Poe’s story had been too obviously satirical, too literary. Readers recognized it as fiction almost immediately. The Southern Literary Messenger was known for publishing fiction, after all. Poe had made the mistake of signaling that his moon story wasn’t meant to be taken seriously.

Now Locke’s hoax was achieving the sensation Poe’s work had failed to generate. The Sun presented its bat-men as news, not fiction, and people swallowed it whole. Poe was not pleased.

In a letter to his benefactor J.P. Kennedy, Poe complained bitterly: “from many little incidents & apparently trivial remarks in those Discoveries I am convinced that the idea was stolen from myself.” He suspected plagiarism. He considered Locke a rival who had succeeded by stealing his concept and executing it better.

Later, after his irritation cooled somewhat, Poe came to appreciate what Locke had accomplished. He praised “the exquisite vraisemblance of the narration” — the lifelike quality of the fiction, the way it mimicked the conventions of real scientific reporting. He acknowledged “the genius of Mr. Locke” in crafting a hoax that fooled so many educated people.

The two writers eventually developed a professional relationship. In 1844, Poe published his own hoax in the Sun — “The Balloon-Hoax,” about an imagined Atlantic crossing by hot-air balloon. Locke was his editor. The newspaper had to retract it two days later when readers started asking pointed questions.

“Not one person in ten discredited it,” Poe wrote about the Moon Hoax. “A grave professor of mathematics in a Virginian college told me seriously that he had no doubt of the truth of the whole affair!”

A math professor. Serious doubt. Not one person in ten.

THE UNMASKING

The hoax began to unravel almost immediately, though most people didn’t notice or didn’t want to notice.

Timing played an interesting role in how long the hoax survived unchallenged. The New York Herald’s office had coincidentally burned down in early August 1835. The paper didn’t resume publication until August 31 — the exact day the Moon Hoax series concluded. This meant there was no prominent competitor in a position to challenge the story during its entire six-day run. The Herald was the kind of paper that would have investigated the claims, demanded to see source documents, contacted Herschel. But the Herald wasn’t publishing.

Whether this timing was incredibly lucky for Locke or incredibly unlucky for truth is hard to say. It might have been pure coincidence. It might have been that Locke knew the Herald was out of commission and chose his moment accordingly. Either way, the result was the same: six days of unchallenged bat-man coverage.

When the Herald returned to publication, its proprietor James Gordon Bennett immediately smelled fraud. Bennett was one of the most colorful figures in American journalism — a rival penny press pioneer who would soon make the Herald the Sun’s chief competitor. He knew how newspapers worked. He knew what real scientific news looked like. And he knew the Moon Hoax wasn’t it.

Bennett published “The Astronomical Hoax Explained,” identifying Locke as the author and pointing out a devastating fact: the Edinburgh Journal of Science, the supposed source of the articles, had ceased publication in 1833. The journal didn’t exist anymore. It couldn’t have published anything in 1835 because there was no Edinburgh Journal of Science in 1835. The source document was physically impossible.

Bennett’s revelation should have ended the debate immediately. A newspaper can’t reprint articles from a journal that doesn’t exist. The whole premise of the series collapsed the moment you checked this one basic fact. But checking facts requires wanting to check facts, and most readers didn’t want to. They had emotionally committed to bat-men. They liked bat-men. They didn’t want bat-men to be fake.

Bennett’s exposé was largely ignored.

John Herschel, the real astronomer whose name had been borrowed for the hoax, was initially amused when news finally reached him in South Africa months later. He found it an innocent bit of comedy, noting that his own real observations could never be as exciting as fictional discoveries of lunar civilizations. Bat-men were more interesting than the star catalogs he was actually compiling.

He later became annoyed when he had to keep answering questions from people who believed the hoax was serious. Scientists have enough trouble explaining real discoveries without having to repeatedly clarify that they did not, in fact, discover bat-men. Herschel spent years dealing with this.

The Sun never printed a formal retraction. On September 16, 1835, the paper admitted the articles were fabricated, but they never really apologized, never explained in detail what was real and what was fiction, never returned anyone’s money for the pamphlets. Why would they? From the Sun’s perspective, people had gotten exactly what they paid for: entertainment. If readers chose to believe the entertainment was news, that was their business.

Locke himself didn’t publicly admit authorship until 1840, when he confirmed it in a letter to the weekly paper New World. By then, he had left the Sun, started a new penny paper called the New Era with a partner named Joseph Price, and attempted to duplicate his success with another fabrication.

The second hoax was called “The Lost Manuscript of Mungo Park.” It was a fake account of adventures by the Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who had died in Africa in 1806. Locke apparently thought that if fake astronomy worked, fake exploration might work too.

This time, the public wasn’t fooled. They knew Locke now. They knew what he did. The New Era failed. Locke became an editorial writer for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, then took a job in the New York Custom House. His career in journalism was effectively over.

Locke died on Staten Island on February 16, 1871, at the age of seventy. His obituary ran on the front page of the Sun, the paper where he’d achieved his greatest success. The obituary called the Moon Hoax “the most successful scientific joke ever published, which originally appeared in The Sun. The story was told with a minuteness of detail and dexterous use of technical phrases that not only imposed upon the ordinary reader, but deceived and puzzled men of science to an astonishing degree.”

Locke had always maintained that the hoax was intended as satire — a way of mocking Thomas Dick and the plurality of worlds believers, of showing “how science can be and is influenced by the thoughts of religion.” If that was truly his intention, it backfired spectacularly. People didn’t recognize the satire. They didn’t laugh at the absurdity. They just believed in bat-men.

WHERE THE MORMONS COME IN

The Painesville Telegraph was a newspaper serving the area around Kirtland, Ohio. Kirtland was where Joseph Smith and the early Mormon church had established their headquarters in the 1830s. The Telegraph reprinted the Great Moon Hoax articles, which means news of lunar bat-men and fire-wielding beavers arrived directly on Mormon doorsteps.

This context matters enormously for understanding anything that came later. The Mormons weren’t just hearing vague rumors about moon inhabitants passed along through gossip. They were reading specific, detailed accounts in their local newspaper, presented as breaking scientific news from one of the most respected astronomers in the world. If you lived in Kirtland in late August 1835, the Great Moon Hoax wasn’t obviously fake. It wasn’t coming from a disreputable tabloid known for making things up. It was being treated as legitimate discovery by papers across the country, believed by Yale professors, and discussed seriously in educated circles everywhere.

This was also a period of tremendous spiritual and organizational growth for the early church. The Kirtland years, roughly 1831 to 1838, saw the construction of the Kirtland Temple, the establishment of various church institutions, and ongoing theological development. The church was growing rapidly, attracting converts from diverse backgrounds. Questions about the nature of the universe, the purpose of other worlds, and the extent of God’s creation were topics of active discussion.

Early Mormon theology had already committed to the idea of inhabited worlds before the Moon Hoax even happened. Revelations from 1830 and 1832, later compiled in the Doctrine and Covenants, stated “that by him and through him and of him the worlds are and were created, and the inhabitants thereof are begotten sons and daughters unto God.” The doctrine established that there were multiple inhabited worlds. The popular science of the day — from Thomas Dick’s calculations to William Herschel’s observations to the apparent discoveries in the New York Sun — suggested the moon was almost certainly one of those worlds.

Mormon theology and contemporary “science” were pointing in the same direction. The moon had people on it. Everyone respectable seemed to agree.

The Great Moon Hoax has been covered previously on Weird Darkness in the episode “The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: When New York Believed in Bat-Men.”

THE QUAKER CONNECTION: THE SURPRISINGLY SPECIFIC DETAILS

The bat-men in Locke’s hoax weren’t dressed like Quakers. They were naked winged creatures with copper-colored hair who built temples and ate fruit sloppily. The specific claim about lunar Quakers — the six-foot-tall, modestly dressed, millennium-living inhabitants — traces to a completely different source: a man named Oliver Boardman Huntington.

Huntington was born on October 14, 1823, in Watertown, Jefferson County, New York. His family background is important for understanding how he ended up in a position to make claims about Joseph Smith’s teachings. His father, William Huntington, was a religious man who had come to believe that the true church of God was not present on the earth. He was searching for something, spiritually speaking.

In 1832, the Huntington family was introduced to the Book of Mormon. William immediately believed it. He didn’t need time to think it over, didn’t need to pray about it for months. He read it, believed it, and started sharing it with his neighbors. The family had found what William had been looking for.

In 1835, Oliver’s parents and two of his siblings were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The following year, the family moved to Kirtland, Ohio, to be closer to the church’s headquarters. Thirteen-year-old Oliver was baptized there by Hyrum Smith, Joseph Smith’s brother and one of the church’s most prominent leaders.

During the troubles at Kirtland — and there were many troubles, including financial disasters, apostasy, and mob violence — the Huntington house served as a hiding place for church leaders, including Joseph Smith Sr. The house also stored the Egyptian mummies that Joseph Smith had obtained, the same artifacts that would become associated with the Book of Abraham. Young Oliver was present for some of the most significant and controversial events in early church history.

When Joseph and Hyrum Smith were killed at Carthage Jail in 1844, Oliver Huntington was deeply affected. He stayed with the Smith family for a time after the martyrdom, doing odd jobs and boarding with them. He later obtained a cane made from wood of the box used to transport Joseph Smith’s body from Carthage back to Nauvoo. That’s how close he was to the central events and figures of early Mormonism.

Huntington was ordained an Elder in 1843 and went on to serve missions in Ohio, Indiana, New York, Kentucky, and eventually England in 1846. He was part of the pioneer migration to Utah and spent his later years working as a farmer, schoolteacher, miner, and beekeeper in Springville, Utah. He remained active in the church until his death in 1907.

In 1881 — forty-four years after the alleged statement about moon inhabitants — Huntington wrote in his journal:

“Inhabitants of the Moon are more of a uniform size than the inhabitants of the Earth, being about 6 feet in height. They dress very much like the Quaker Style and are quite general in Style, or the one fashion of dress. They live to be very old; coming generally, near a thousand years. This is the description of them as given by Joseph the Seer, and he could ‘See’ whatever he asked the Father in the name of Jesus to see.”

A month later, Huntington added that he’d obtained this information from Philo Dibble, who claimed to have heard it directly from Joseph Smith around 1837.

Then in 1892, Huntington published essentially the same account in the Young Woman’s Journal, an official LDS periodical. The moon Quakers had made it into print, in a church publication, described as teachings from the founder of the religion.

PHILO DIBBLE: THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

To evaluate the moon Quakers claim, we need to look carefully at the man who supposedly passed the information to Huntington: Philo Dibble.

Dibble was born June 6, 1806, in Peru, Massachusetts. His early life was difficult. His father died when Philo was about ten years old, leaving his mother with nine children to raise. Philo and his older brother Philander were taken in by Captain Apollos Phelps of Suffield, Connecticut, who raised them until they came of age. Dibble later wrote that Phelps “was a good man, and taught us good principles, and treated us as though we were his own sons.”

In 1828, at age twenty-two, Dibble married Celia Kent. Because his wife had property in Ohio, the couple sold their Connecticut possessions and moved west, settling about five miles from Kirtland.

In October 1830, Dibble encountered something unusual. He was standing at his gate one morning when two men drove up in a two-horse wagon and asked him to come with them. On the way, one of them asked if he had heard the news: four men had come to Kirtland with a golden Bible, and one of them had seen an angel.

The men telling Dibble this story laughed and ridiculed the idea. Dibble did not laugh. “I did not feel inclined to make light of such a subject,” he later wrote. “I made no reply, but thought that if angels had administered to the children of men again I was glad of it.”

A few days later, Dibble met the Mormon missionaries — Oliver Cowdery, Ziba Peterson, Peter Whitmer Jr., and Parley P. Pratt. He spent all day with them, became convinced of their sincerity, and was baptized by Parley P. Pratt on October 16, 1830. This was several months before Joseph Smith even arrived in Kirtland. Dibble was among the earliest converts in the area.

His subsequent life reads like an adventure novel.

After moving to Missouri in 1832, Dibble was shot in the stomach during a mob attack on the Whitmer Settlement on November 1, 1833. The bullet lodged in his back. He bled internally, his bowels swelled, and everyone expected him to die. According to his own account and the accounts of others present, he received a blessing from Newel Knight, after which “a purifying fire penetrated his whole system.” He discharged several quarts of blood and corruption, along with one of the balls that had wounded him. The other bullet remained under the skin of his back for the rest of his life, never removed.

Dibble lived another sixty-two years after being shot in the stomach and left for dead. Whether you attribute this to miraculous healing or extraordinary luck or both, it’s remarkable.

After the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum Smith in 1844, Dibble took custody of the death masks that George Cannon had cast of the two brothers. He kept these masks for over forty years, eventually traveling with them as part of a mural gallery depicting scenes from church history. This gallery was a kind of early Mormon traveling museum.

The gallery itself came from a dream. In the dream, Joseph Smith appeared to Dibble with a rolled-up sheet of paper. Dibble interpreted this as a canvas on which scenes of church history should be painted. When he shared the dream with Brigham Young, the church leader encouraged the project and gave him two dollars to buy the first canvas. From that two-dollar investment, Dibble built his traveling museum.

Dibble died on June 7, 1895, at the age of eighty-nine, in Springville, Utah — the same town where Oliver Huntington would die twelve years later.

So was Philo Dibble a credible witness? In terms of his proximity to Joseph Smith and his dedication to the church, absolutely. He had been there from nearly the beginning. He had survived being shot in the stomach. He had kept the prophet’s death mask for forty years. He had created a traveling museum of church history. This was not some peripheral figure making things up for attention.

The problem is that Oliver Huntington doesn’t claim to have heard the moon Quakers story directly from Joseph Smith. He says he heard it from Philo Dibble, who supposedly heard it from Joseph Smith, approximately forty years before Huntington wrote it down.

THE TELEPHONE GAME THAT LASTED FOUR DECADES

What we have here is what historians call a “thirdhand account with significant temporal distance.” What everyone else calls it is “the telephone game spanning four decades.”

Anyone who’s played telephone at a party knows how badly information degrades over the course of thirty seconds and a dozen people. Details change. Names get swapped. Numbers drift. The message that comes out at the end barely resembles what went in at the beginning. Now imagine playing telephone over forty years instead of thirty seconds, with only two people in the chain instead of twelve, but with those two people having plenty of time to embellish, misremember, and conflate separate conversations into a single narrative.

Forty years is a lot of time for details to drift, especially details as specific as “they dress like Quakers” and “they live to be a thousand years old.”

There are also documented problems with Huntington’s other claims about the same period. He stated that Joseph Smith’s father gave him a patriarchal blessing in Kirtland in 1837 promising that he would preach the gospel to the inhabitants of the moon. When researchers examined the actual records, they found that the blessing was given in 1836, not 1837. They also found that it was given by Huntington’s own father, William Huntington, not by Joseph Smith Sr. as Huntington had claimed.

The confusion between “Joseph Smith’s father” and “my own father” is significant. These are not easy to mix up. Yet Huntington, writing decades later, apparently did mix them up. He misremembered who gave him the blessing, when the blessing was given, and what kind of blessing it was.

The actual recorded blessing text reads: “I lay my hands on thee and bless thee with a father’s blessing… thou shalt have power with God even to translate thyself to Heaven, and preach to the inhabitants of the moon or planets, if it shall be expedient, if thou art faithful all these blessings will be given thee.”

This is admittedly still promising someone they might preach to moon people. The lunar missionary element isn’t invented. But it’s a conditional promise given by his own father, not Joseph Smith’s father, and it’s been misremembered and misattributed for over fifty years before being written down. The blessing also includes the phrase “if it shall be expedient,” which suggests even the person giving the blessing wasn’t entirely committed to the idea that moon preaching was definitely going to happen.

In his 1892 article, Huntington himself acknowledged uncertainty about what the blessing meant. He wrote that the promise “evidently alludes to a time when I will not be cumbered with this unwieldy tabernacle.” In other words, he thought he’d preach on the moon after death, in some spiritual form, not by literally traveling there in his physical body. This is a significant modification of the claim, suggesting even Huntington wasn’t sure how literally to take it.

WHAT THE SOURCES ACTUALLY SAY VERSUS WHAT THE INTERNET THINKS THEY SAY

At this point, it’s worth clearly separating the documented claims from the internet meme version of the story.

What the sources actually say: Oliver Huntington, writing decades after Joseph Smith’s death, claimed that Philo Dibble told him that Joseph Smith described moon inhabitants as six-foot-tall, Quaker-dressed, thousand-year-lived beings. This is a thirdhand account with no contemporary documentation from Smith himself or from anyone who worked directly with him during his lifetime.

What the internet thinks the sources say: Joseph Smith received a divine revelation that the moon was inhabited by Quakers, and this was official church doctrine that every early Mormon believed and taught.

The gap between these two versions is significant. There are no contemporary records that mention lunar Quakers. Nothing from Joseph Smith’s own writings. Nothing from his scribes. Nothing from church documents during his lifetime. The entire claim rests on one man’s memory of another man’s memory of something allegedly said forty years earlier.

Does this mean Joseph Smith never speculated about the moon being inhabited? Not necessarily. Given the cultural context — the Great Moon Hoax appearing in local papers, Thomas Dick’s best-selling books, William Herschel’s scientific authority, Franz von Paula Gruithuisen’s published papers about lunar cities — it would have been stranger if Smith hadn’t thought about it at least occasionally. The idea of inhabited worlds was in the air. Everyone was thinking about it. Casual speculation at a dinner table would have been completely normal.

But casual speculation at dinner and official prophetic revelation are different categories. One is a person sharing thoughts about an interesting topic. The other is divine truth communicated through a prophet. The sources don’t clearly establish which category the moon Quakers fall into, if they were ever mentioned at all.

The strongest evidence for Mormon beliefs about lunar inhabitants isn’t actually the Quaker description. It’s the patriarchal blessings that promised people they would preach on the moon. Those blessings are documented. They happened. Multiple early church members received blessings containing references to lunar missionary work.

Lorenzo Snow, who would later become President of the LDS Church, received a blessing in 1836 that included this passage: “Thou shalt have power to translate thyself from one planet to another — power to go to the moon if thou shalt desire it.”

That’s harder to explain away than one guy’s forty-year-old memory of someone else’s statement. It’s written down in contemporary records. It was given by a church leader in an official capacity. It specifically mentions traveling to the moon.

THE BIGGER PICTURE: EVERYONE’S MOON WAS INHABITED

Defenders of early Mormon leaders make a genuinely fair point: if Joseph Smith did speculate about lunar inhabitants, he wasn’t alone among religious figures of his era. He wasn’t even unusual.

Brigham Young, speaking from the pulpit on July 24, 1870 — decades after the Great Moon Hoax had been exposed — said this: “Who can tell us of the inhabitants of this little planet that shines of an evening, called the moon? When you inquire about the inhabitants of that sphere you find that the most learned are as ignorant in regard to them as the ignorant of their fellows. So it is in regard to the inhabitants of the sun. Do you think it is inhabited? I rather think it is. Do you think there is any life there? No question of it; it was not made in vain.”

So now we’ve got the sun being inhabited too, according to Brigham Young speaking officially in 1870. His reasoning echoed William Herschel’s from seventy-five years earlier: God wouldn’t make celestial bodies just to leave them empty. That would be wasteful. “It was not made in vain.”

This is essentially a theological argument that God is efficient. It’s an interesting claim given how much of the universe appears to be empty space, dead rock, and hostile gas giants. If God hates waste, the cosmos has some explaining to do. But the argument made sense to people at the time, both inside and outside Mormon circles.

Hyrum Smith and other early church leaders also speculated about inhabited worlds. This wasn’t some embarrassing secret that church members tried to hide. It was discussed openly, from pulpits, in official publications. The doctrine of plural inhabited worlds was baked into Mormon theology from the very beginning. The question wasn’t whether other worlds had inhabitants. The question was which specific worlds, and what those inhabitants might be like.

The problem with this kind of speculation is that it ages poorly. What seemed reasonable in 1837 looks absurd in 2026. Time has not been kind to the moon Quakers theory.

The same thing happened to other nineteenth-century thinkers who believed in lunar life. Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, the German urologist-turned-astronomer, became a laughingstock despite his legitimate contributions to impact crater theory. Thomas Dick, with his 21.9 trillion solar system inhabitants, became a punchline. Even William Herschel’s ideas about solar beings were quietly forgotten by historians who preferred to remember his actual discoveries — Uranus, infrared radiation, the structure of the Milky Way. Nobody wants to talk about the sun people.

THE AFTERMATH: SPACE TRAVEL AND THEOLOGICAL AWKWARDNESS

The story doesn’t end in the 1890s. It gets an epilogue in the Space Age.

On May 14, 1961, during a stake conference in Honolulu, Hawaii, Joseph Fielding Smith made a statement to his congregation. Smith was, at that time, President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He was next in line to become President of the entire LDS Church. He was as close to the top of church leadership as you could get without holding the top position.

This is what he said: “We will never get a man into space. This earth is man’s sphere and it was never intended that he should get away from it. The moon is a superior planet to the earth and it was never intended that man should go there. You can write it down in your books that this will never happen.”

Write it down in your books. That’s not hedging. That’s not “I suspect” or “it seems unlikely.” That’s stating something as certain fact and inviting people to record it for posterity.

The timing was particularly unfortunate. Less than a month before Smith made this statement, on April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human in space. On May 5, American astronaut Alan Shepard followed. The statement that “we will never get a man into space” was already wrong when Smith made it, though news traveled slowly and the full implications may not have been clear to everyone in Honolulu.

In May 1962, Smith privately instructed that this view — the impossibility of space travel — be taught to “the boys and girls in the Seminary System.” The church’s educational arm was apparently meant to inform the next generation that space travel was impossible. This was happening while that same generation was watching live coverage of Mercury missions and dreaming about astronauts.

Eight years after Smith’s statement, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Joseph Fielding Smith was still alive. He was still President of the Quorum of the Twelve. His statement about space travel being impossible was now definitively, publicly, globally, obviously wrong. Anyone with a television had watched it happen.

Six months later, in January 1970, Joseph Fielding Smith became President of the Church.

The Apollo astronauts did not encounter six-foot-tall beings in Quaker attire. They did not find bat-winged humanoids building sapphire temples. They did not stumble upon bipedal fire-wielding beavers tending their cozy lunar huts. They found gray dust, rocks, and the profound silence of a world that had never known life. The moon was dead. The moon had always been dead. Thomas Dick’s 4.2 billion lunar inhabitants didn’t exist and never had.

On September 14, 1971, the crew of Apollo 15 visited Utah. Two of the astronauts had walked on the moon during their mission. They brought with them a Utah State Flag that they had carried to the lunar surface and back. They presented this flag to Joseph Fielding Smith, who was by then President of the LDS Church.

The flag of the Mormon state had traveled from Earth to the moon and back. The prophet who had said it would never happen was there to receive it. Local news coverage described the presentation as a ceremonial honor. The news reports made no mention of Smith’s 1961 statement.

When asked later about his prediction that man would never reach the moon, Joseph Fielding Smith reportedly gave a simple response: “Well, I was wrong.”

It is, perhaps, the most honest thing any religious leader has ever said about a failed prediction. No excuses. No reinterpretation. No claims that he was misunderstood or quoted out of context. Just a straightforward admission of error.

THE HOAX THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

Richard Adams Locke thought his moon satire was so obviously absurd that everyone would get the joke. He wrote about bipedal beavers building huts, fire-wielding aquatic creatures, bat-men engaged in philosophical conversation. He expected readers to recognize it as parody, to laugh at themselves for almost believing it, to learn something about how easily people are fooled.

He was completely wrong. People didn’t recognize the satire. They didn’t laugh at the absurdity. They just believed in bat-men. And when they found out it was fake, most of them weren’t even angry. They thought it was fun.

Thomas Dick kept writing and lecturing about the plurality of worlds until his death in 1857. He never abandoned his belief that the moon was inhabited. He did condemn the Moon Hoax in his later work, writing that “the Law of Truth ought never for a moment to be sported with.” He apparently didn’t recognize that his own unverifiable claims about billions of lunar inhabitants had helped create the credulous audience that made the hoax believable in the first place.

Franz von Paula Gruithuisen died in 1852, having never admitted that his lunar “Wallwerk” was just an optical illusion caused by natural geological formations. He went to his grave believing he had seen a city on the moon. A crater on the moon now bears his name. So does a lunar mountain range — Mons Gruithuisen Delta and Mons Gruithuisen Gamma. The moon remembers him, even if it never hosted his imaginary city.

The Painesville Telegraph, which had dutifully reprinted the Moon Hoax to its readers near Kirtland, continued publishing until 1986 without ever becoming particularly famous for anything else. Its moment of historical significance was running stories about bat-men that turned out to be fake.

Philo Dibble died in 1895, taking whatever he actually remembered about Joseph Smith’s lunar comments — if anything at all — to his grave. We’ll never know what he really said, what he actually heard, how much he embellished, or whether Oliver Huntington remembered the conversation accurately.

Oliver Boardman Huntington died in Springville, Utah, on February 7, 1907. He never did preach to the inhabitants of the moon, despite what his patriarchal blessing had promised. The blessing did say “if it shall be expedient,” and apparently preaching to moon Quakers was never expedient. Maybe the timing was never right. Maybe the travel arrangements couldn’t be worked out. Maybe the whole thing was just a nineteenth-century religious figure expressing nineteenth-century ideas in a nineteenth-century patriarchal blessing format.

Benjamin Day, the founder of the Sun who launched the hoax that fooled America, had sold the paper to his brother-in-law Moses Yale Beach in the late 1830s. He’d grown bored with the daily work of editing and publishing. The creative excitement of building something new had faded into routine, and Day was the kind of person who needed creative excitement. He died on December 21, 1889.

Day’s legacy is complicated. He created the penny press revolution, making news accessible to ordinary Americans. He invented newsboys. He pioneered crime reporting and human interest journalism. He also published the most successful newspaper hoax in American history and never apologized for it.

Interestingly, his grandson Benjamin Henry Day Jr. invented Ben-Day dots — the printing technique that would later define comic book art. The same tiny colored dots that give comic books their distinctive visual style came from the grandson of the man who gave America bat-men. The family had a gift for visual innovation across generations.

The Sun continued operation until 1950, when it merged with the New York World-Telegram. The building at 280 Broadway where it was published still stands, now home to the New York City Department of Buildings. The original clocks bearing the newspaper’s masthead and motto — “It Shines for All” — are recognized as a New York City landmark. The building outlasted the paper and the hoax and all the people involved in both.

WHAT THIS REALLY TELLS US

The lesson here might be about the dangers of mixing science and religion, or about the human tendency to believe what confirms our existing worldview, or about how terrible people are at transmitting information accurately over time. All of those lessons are valid and worth considering.

But honestly, the main takeaway is probably simpler than any of that.

In 1835, American newspapers could convince the entire country that bat-men were building temples on the moon, and people were so ready to believe it that they started planning missionary work before the week was out. Yale professors traveled to New York to examine source documents for a story about fire-wielding beavers and came home still believing it was true. Religious groups started strategizing about how to convert the Vespertilio-homo to Christianity within six days of reading about them. The most educated people in America fell for an obvious hoax because they wanted to believe it was true.

We like to think we’re more sophisticated now. We have satellites and telescopes and rovers sending back high-definition footage of lunar surfaces that are definitively, boringly lifeless. We’ve actually been to the moon. We’ve analyzed lunar soil samples. We know exactly what’s up there, and it’s not Quakers or bat-men or fire-wielding beavers. It’s gray dust and ancient rock and nothing else.

No one seriously believes in moon Quakers anymore.

Then again, people believe all sorts of things about the moon these days. Some people think the 1969 landing was faked on a soundstage — that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin never left Earth, that the whole thing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick in a secret facility. Some people think the moon itself is artificial, which is an impressively comprehensive form of lunar skepticism. Some people think it’s an alien spaceship that’s been monitoring humanity since before recorded history.

Richard Adams Locke wrote about bipedal beavers and bat-men and expected readers to recognize it as parody. He thought the absurdity would be obvious. He was wrong in 1835, and if he published the same story today, formatted as a viral article with AI-generated images, a significant percentage of viewers would believe every word.

The six-foot Quakers of the moon remain undiscovered. The bat-men of the Ruby Colosseum have not been found. The fire-wielding beavers have failed to make contact. Joseph Fielding Smith was wrong about space travel, but he was honest enough to admit it. William Herschel was wrong about the sun being inhabited, but he was right about Uranus and infrared radiation and the shape of the Milky Way. Franz von Paula Gruithuisen was wrong about the lunar city, but he was right about meteor craters. Thomas Dick was wrong about 21.9 trillion solar system inhabitants, but at least he showed his work.

The moon continues to orbit the Earth at an average distance of 238,900 miles, as silent and lifeless as it’s been for billions of years. Whatever secrets it holds, well-dressed extraterrestrials in Quaker fashion don’t appear to be among them.

But give it time. Thomas Dick calculated 4.2 billion lunar inhabitants. Maybe they’re just very, very good at hiding.

Someone’s probably already making a podcast about how NASA is covering them up.

REFERENCES

NOTE: Some of this content may have been created with assistance from AI tools, but it has been reviewed, edited, narrated, produced, and approved by Darren Marlar, creator and host of Weird Darkness — who, despite popular conspiracy theories, is NOT an AI voice.

Views: 4