The Great Moon Hoaxer

MANAGERS of SETI, the privately-run search for extraterrestrial intelligence, were recently indignant at an apparently deliberate false claim of an artificial radio signal from the red dwarf binary EQ Pegasi - an unlikely abode for aliens anyway. No-one could confirm the ``signal'', and this instance of what the organisation calls the ``worst kind of irresponsible science" has been thoroughly discredited. But astronomical hoaxes, although rare, have not always been failures. The most spectacular of all, perpetrated in 1835, deceived tens of thousands of people into believing that astronomers had found an advanced civilisation on the Moon. The genius behind it, the journalist Richard Adam Locke, wrote a series of articles to this effect in the New York Sun, claiming that Sir John Herschel, then observing in South Africa, had seen lunar forests and oceans inhabited by man-like creatures taking their ease.

A clever deceiver?

His pack of lies did not cause any great disaster. They doubled the Sun's circulation to 20,000 copies - the highest in the world at that time - and they raised public excitement about the Moon and its possible inhabitants, and extraterrestrial intelligence generally, to a pitch that would not be reached again until the days of the Apollo landings. Locke was a clever deceiver. Herschel, being so far away, could not be contacted for verification. Locke's articles were allegedly re-printed from the non-existent Edinburgh Journal of Science, sent to him by a Scottish astronomer, Dr Andrew Grant, who did not exist either. He was also an expert at pseudo-scientific techno-babble. In 'a supposed conversation with his assistant, Herschel is made to ask whether it was possible to ``effect a transfusion of artificial light though the focal object of vision". In plain language, this means shining a searchlight on the Moon, but plain language would have been fatal. He stated that Herschel had built a seven-ton telescope with a magnification of 42,000, a power that would have enabled him to peer down at the Moon as if from a few miles. With this, Herschel was reported to have seen lunar creatures walking with ``erect and dignified" postures, making "impassioned and emphatic gestures" which indicated that they were ``rational beings.'' Locke's downfall began when he stated that some notes from the Edinburgh journal were being withheld because they were ``too mathematical for popular comprehension". Astronomers pounced. Where, they demanded, were these mathematical notes? At the printers, Locke said innocently, but eventually he had to admit that they were forgeries. Herschel, when finally shown Locke's articles, was at first furious, asking who had written this ``drivel.'' But when told of the newspaper's massive circulation increase, he understood how the hoax had aroused public interest in science, and roared with laughter. There has since been a noted lack of good astronomical hoaxes. My hopes rose in 1978 when the Cutty Sark Scotch Whisky Company offered £1 million to anyone who could discover an alien artefact and bring it, at their own expense, to the Science Museum in London. I hoped someone might fake up something and give the company a well-deserved fleecing, but nobody did.