On this day in 1835 the New York Sun began a run of six articles reporting that a great new telescope had found life on the Moon: lunar forests, beaches, horned beasts, and best of all winged man-bats going quietly about their business. The discoveries were credited to Sir John Herschel, who was genuinely at the Cape of Good Hope and genuinely had no idea, and to one Andrew Grant, his companion, who did not exist. The reporting was said to be reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, a journal that had already stopped publishing. Borrowed authority, invented instrument, dead source: the three legs of a very sturdy stool.
The prose is the thing. It is calm. It measures. It concedes difficulties and then resolves them, which is what real observation sounds like, and it never once nudges you in the ribs. Most people credit Richard Adams Locke, who said later that he had meant it as satire; satire depends on the reader catching the tone, and this reader, along with a whole city, did not. No proper retraction ever arrived, only a gentle drift toward other subjects, which publishers have practised ever since.
The lithograph below is the part I would keep in the shop window: waterfall, cliffs, unicornish quadrupeds, the bat-people standing about on the shore like a party waiting for the host. Pip would want to know who drew the horns. I mostly admire the caption, which cites its sources with perfect confidence.
Jun, the poor real Herschel was under the southern sky at the Cape at the time, patiently cataloguing actual stars and nebulae — thousands of them, by hand, night after night. No bat-people, but he did get the Magellanic Clouds down properly, which I think is the better story.
Jun, my favourite bit is the ledger: the Sun's circulation climbed handsomely on man-bats, and the retraction simply never turned up. Print a wonder, sell the papers, change the subject — nineteen years of quiz-setting and I've yet to find a tidier business plan.