Original Fake News: Civilisation found on moon

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Everyone is familiar with the term "fake news" but the first example of fake news also remains one of the best examples.

Two years after it was first established, the New York Sun printed an outrageous story on August 25, 1835.

The newspaper claimed that civilisation had been discovered on the moon, populated by bat-winged humanoids and bipedal tailless beavers. The newspaper provided pictures to back their claim.





The discovery was purported made with a powerful telescope by well-known astronomer Sir John Herschel. Herschel was apparently oblivious of his involvement in this hoax.

The Sun never issued a retraction and sales in the newspaper boomed.

The newspaper was groundbreaking for less tawdry reasons. It was the first paper in the world to send reporters out to cover stories, rather than rely on news being mailed in by readers.

It was also the first newspaper in the world to write about crime!

So much for journalistic integrity

Jeez, and they didn't have QAnon around yet to make up crazy $hit!

It would seem that the proclivity of media to exaggerate or even publish hoaxes has a long tradition. This reminds me Orson Welle's radio program War of the Worlds which was unintended consequences when listeners thought he was really talking about a Martian invasion

But we are talking about a more innocent time when people would believe anything they read or hear without critical thought....oh wait...I guess things haven't really changed.

I remember the balloon boy hoax very well. Kinda wish Bigfoot was real.

Fake News has always been around, like the New York-based newspapers that lied about the deadly living conditions of the Elmira POW camp during the American Civil War.

I think the point is that America's first major newspaper used a fake news headline to sell

it set the tone for all other major papers that came after it....

Bigfoot- I go back and forth on.

But the balloon boy thing. I was never fooled, and laughed at it as a certain hoax from the get go. The reason that I knew that that party balloon, though huge for a party balloon, couldnt possibly carry a fifty pound kid into the sky was that years earlier I had gone through a phase of having "an aspie obsession" with zeppilins and dirigibles, and new that helium balloons have 80 pounds of lift per 1000 cubic feet. So a grade school boy of slightly less than that weight would need a balloon only slightly smaller than that. A 1000 cubic feet is about twice the size of a midsized car. Much bigger than that balloon.


PT Barnum offered to buy the Cardiff Giant from the farmer who "discovered" it. When the farmer refused Barnum made a copy and billed it as the "real Cardiff Giant". Both Barnum's "real" fake Cardiff Giant, and the original real Cardiff Giant toured the nation in competing traveling exhibits (both raking in tons of money for both of their respective owners from the credulous). The original real Cardiff Giant that Barnun counterfeited was of course itself fake.

So the Cardiff Giant was kinda like the Iraqi nuclear program. Folks in Iraq scammed their dictator into thinking they were an agency working hard to build him A bombs so they could live on the gravy train, which enabled the dictator to lie about having A bombs, which enabled an American president to lie about Iraq having A bombs - to justify America invading Iraq.So Bush...did one better than PT. Barnum, and created a fake version OF a fake version of...a Cardiff Giant.

The Iraqi nuclear bomb situation reminds me of the Nazi attempt to build a bomb. Werner Heisenberg, who Hitler had tasked to build the bomb, dragged his feet so the Nazis could never have the bomb. The truly ironic thing was, while Heisenberg believed he knew how to build an A bomb, the truth was, he had no idea what he was actually talking about. So even if he had put all his efforts into the bomb, he still would have failed.