Great Moon Hoax - Authorship

Authorship

Authorship of the article has been attributed to Richard A. Locke, a Cambridge-educated reporter who, in August 1835, was working for the New York Sun. Locke never publicly admitted to being the author, while rumours persisted that others were involved. Two other men have been noted in connection with the hoax: Jean-Nicolas Nicollet, a French astronomer travelling in America at the time (though he was in Mississippi, not New York, when the moon-hoax issues appeared), and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine. However, there is no good evidence to indicate that anyone but Locke was the author of the hoax.

Assuming that Richard A. Locke was the author, his intentions were probably, first, to create a sensational story which would increase sales of the New York Sun, and, second, to ridicule some of the more extravagant astronomical theories that had recently been published. For instance, in 1824, Franz von Paula Gruithuisen, professor of Astronomy at Munich University, had published a paper titled "Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings". Gruithuisen claimed to have observed various shades of color on the lunar surface, which he correlated with climate and vegetation zones. He also observed lines and geometrical shapes, which he felt indicated the existence of walls, roads, fortifications, and cities.

However, a more direct object of Locke's satire was certainly Rev. Thomas Dick, who was known as "The Christian Philosopher" after the title of his first book. Dick had computed that the Solar System contained 21,891,974,404,480 (21+ trillion) inhabitants. In fact, the Moon alone, by his count, would contain 4,200,000,000 inhabitants. His writings were enormously popular in the United States, his fans including intellectual luminaries such as Ralph Waldo Emerson.