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When the Moon Was Full of Man-Bats · Ebbs of History

• Jason: Alright, are we ready? Mm, hold on, let me set up my page real quick. Okay. Welcome to The Ebbs of History, the show where we dive into the strangest, wildest, and sometimes downright creepiest stories the past has to offer. From dancing plagues to pirate queens, you'll laugh, you'll gasp, you'll even groan at my impeccable dad jokes. But, most importantly, you'll learn how history is way cooler than your textbook ever told you. We are history-loving hosts, Zoe, Gavin. And I'm Jason, and in every episode the three of us will take a quick trip through time and see what lessons we can still learn today. This is the Ebbs of History. Welcome back, History Lovers. We're so glad you're here. How was everybody's week? Good. we had Camp Crinton call Last time we recorded we weren't doing it, but we ca we both of us were counsellories. At like a theater musical theater camp this past week. And Two weeks. Gavin is finished with his session but I still have a camp left. I'm very excited to start. It's a two week camp, right? Yeah. But she has two of them. What show did you guys do this past two weeks? I don't know if any of our listeners are gonna know. Well, 'cause I didn't. And when we we follow musical theater pretty close. Yeah. it's called Dear Edwina and it was the junior version. it was basically it was really cute. It was it's an advice giving show and people write in and all the songs are from the letters that the these kids are writing in and it's really really cute. It sounded really good from he listening to you guys walk around the house the past two weeks singing the songs and talking about it. It I really want to see the actual I really liked it. That's good. but we just saw the Odyssey today. Yes. That was a life changing movie. And Spain just won the World Cup. yeah. It's lot of things a lot of things happened today. Yeah. So on a scale of one to ten, what would you give the Odyssey? Ten thousand. You've liked it that much? I really enjoyed it. The music alone. Was a ten. Yeah. The music was really good. my god. That's Christopher Nolan movies in in general. Yeah. I believe it really hasn't had time to sink in for me, you know. Right, 'cause we just finished watching it like two hours ago. Yeah. 'Cause the thing is is I knew the story before I r I read it in English class, but it it came to life it was like two years ago when I read it. So it was like the world was coming back to life. 'Cause when I first read it I was really confused, but the way he did it, it was so Easy to understand. It wasn't linear, which kinda helped. Yeah. No, because I was like the first like couple minutes of the movie, you're with Penelope and Telemachus. And like if I remember correctly, that's not how no it is. I was like, I I really enjoy that they're starting here because you learn about them so later so much later on in the story, chronologically. And it's just I really enjoyed that they started there and you got the backstory of how the wife was feeling, how the son was feeling. I I don't know, it made them more human to me 'cause they were kinda just like such big figures in this in the Odyssey. But I don't know, they it they humanized it for me. I didn't realize how stacked the cast was. Yeah. There was a lot of cast. my god. Yeah. There was Tom Holland, there was Ann Hathaway, there was Indea. Like there was everyone. Everybody. John Leguizamo. Anyone who's anyone was in that movie, kinda. Who who played Odysseus? That was Matt Damon. Okay. Matt Damon. It's like everyone. Yeah. Alright. So before we start today, I've got a little bit of a fact check. Not really a fact check, but more of a Extra fact to help you understand something from the Radium Girls episode. Listener Moseph brought up a point about Zoe's Radium Girls episode. Remember when you said what the girls each got after their company settled with them? Yeah. What was it? I don't remember the exact number, but I remember it was it was like ten thousand and then they got a yearly pension. It was ten thousand base payment and then medical bills and a pension of sorts until they died. Uhhuh. Well Mosef's point was that ten thousand dollars didn't really hit all that well. Mm-hmm. Like how much that is. Because this was in nineteen twenty eight. yeah. So how much do you think ten thousand dollars would have been today? We weren't adjusting for inflation. No, we were not. I'd say like about like a mm twenty million. I went high. Yeah, you did. I feel like I'd say Five hundred thousand. Gavin, you're closer. It was only a hundred and ninety five thousand dollars. That's crazy. It's like it's still not enough. It's better than ten thousand, like, you know, 'cause that's how we what we said. It's still not enough to cover what those girls went through. Yeah, it's just like yeah. No no amount of money really is good enough. Yeah. For corporate greed, but here we are. Yep. Like that's it's little bit different than ten thousand. Not enough to like buy a house today. Right. Well back then you probably could have but Well no no even to no you're right. You're right. Today it would nef not not been able to buy even a house. You're right. Not even a condo. Mm mm. it's just it's crazy. Alright, so that's to say thanks Mosef for the tidbit on how we can really make things hit a little bit harder. So in the future minutes I've already I've already written the next episodes up through October and they're written. Yes, they're all done and ready to go. they all include inflation numbers. If there's a number. If there's a number, yes. All right. Let's dive into today's topic. In eighteen thirty-five a New York newspaper told the world that a famous scientist had spotted unicorns, beach loving beavers, and flying bat people living on the moon. The wild part? Almost everybody believed it. Picture New York City in the summer of eighteen thirty five. No phones, no TV, no internet, no group chat. If you wanted to know what was going on in the world, you bought a newspaper. And the hottest newspaper in town was a scrappy little thing called the Sun. You spoke to the owner of the sun. You spoke to God I put a pause in here in my script just because I knew you guys were gonna do that. Now, the sun was special. It was one of the very first penny papers. Zoe. Wanna guess why they called it that? 'Cause it cost a penny. it cost exactly one penny. How about we adjust that for inflation? How much I'm not going to do that. before the sun came along, newspapers cost around six cents and were sold by subscription to fancy rich people. Before the sun came along, there was no It was dark. It was still But a publisher named Benjamin Day had a different idea. He printed his paper cheap, packed it with crime stories, scandals, and weird true tales, then had kids called newsboys sell it on the street corner for a penny a pop. Suddenly, regular working people could afford the news. The sun became wildly popular, which means Benjamin Day became very interested in one thing. Selling more papers. Enter our main character, a writer named Richard Adam Locke. Locke was smart, sneaky, and a little bit fed up. See, in those days a lot of the so called scientists were running around making big claims with zero proof. One super popular writer, a Scottish minister named Thomas Dick, basically declared that the moon was home to over four billion people. Four billion. With no telescope on Earth, powerful enough to actually check Folks just believed him. And why? Because he sounded confident and used fancy words. That is the power of persuasiveness. And it's the power of confidence. Encouraged people? Was it four million people. He said it was the moon was home to over four billion people. At that point, is that more than Earth? Like at that point in history. I think it may have been yeah. So right now i if that's true, it would basically have doubled since then. It's doubled. no, population has has exponentially grown. I know it it exponentially grows, but it's a lot. In eighteen thirty five the global human population was estimated to be between One point zero four and one point zero five billion. Yeah that's what? So he's claiming that on the moon four times four times the amount of people that are on Earth at this time. I guess bro. Alright, so this claim drove Locke up the wall. So he decided to write a story so ridiculous, so over the top, that everyone would obviously realize he was making fun of those puffed up science claims. It was supposed to be a satire, a joke, a great big come on people, think harder. That is not what happened though. On august twenty first, eighteen thirty five, the son ran a tiny teaser. It's that a brilliant real-life astronomer named Sir John Herschel had made quote astronomical discoveries of the most wonderful description. And here's the sneaky genius part. Sir John Herschel was a totally real, totally famous scientist at the time. His dad had discovered the planet of Uranus. John Herschel was real. And at that exact moment that this satirical article came out The real Herschel was on a real expedition at the Cape of Good Hope. Way down at the southern tip of Africa, doing real astronomy. He was thousands of miles away with no way to quickly say, that wasn't me that said that. Perfect cover. Locke claimed his big story had been reprinted from a respected science magazine called the Edinburgh Journal of Science. Sounds legit, right? Here's the punchline. Only a few people knew. That journal had stopped publishing two years earlier. It was basically a ghost, but the name still sounded fancy and trustworthy and with confidence, so nobody questioned it. Then you can see where this is going, right? Uh-huh. Then, starting on august twenty fifth, the discoveries dropped. Six articles over six days, each one wilder than the last. The articles describe Herschel's incredible new telescope. They said it weighed nearly seven tons and could magnify things forty-two thousand times. For comparison, that would have made it more powerful than telescopes that we have today. In 1835, supposedly built by hand. that should have been clue number one. Yeah. Guys. Yeah. Come on. Locke even claimed the telescope had a bonus gadget bolted on. a quote hydrogen oxygen microscope that projected the moon's surface onto a giant canvas screen. Like the world's first movie theater. I mean that's cool. If that's r if that was real, that would be really cool. None of this is how telescopes work. But Locke spent so many paragraphs describing screws and lenses and tonnage that readers' eyes glazed over and their brains went, Wow, sounds official. That was the whole trick. Bury a wild lie under a mountain of boring technical sounding detail. But people were too busy grasping at what the telescopes saw. First, dark red poppy like flowers, the very first living things ever spotted on another world. Then forests, beaches with white sand, blue oceans with tides, then animals. lots of animals. There were little bison. With a fleshy flap over their eyes, like built-in sunglasses. To handle the moon's harsh light, of course. Obviously. There were tiny blue goat creatures with single horns. Basically moon unicorns. Frolicking around like playful kittens. The article said that the astronomers were charmed to pieces watching them. Charmed to pieces. And then came the beavers. Not regular beavers. These are moon beavers. They walked upright on two legs, carried their babies in their arms like people do, and instead of building dams, they built little huts. And get this. The article said you could see smoke coming out of the huts, which meant that the moon beavers had figured out fire. Fire using, hut building, baby cradling beavers on the moon. my god. My note just says here moon beavers. Moon beavers, it's all you need. Like Says it all. Yeah, moon beavers. Just when readers thought it couldn't get bigger, a fourth article, the one a lot of people think is the most famous, revealed the showstopper. Intelligent, human like creatures with the wings of a bat. They stood about four feet tall, covered in copper colored fur, and they flew, talked, built temples, and made art. The astronomers supposedly named them Vespertil Homo, which is Latin for Batman. Is that what Batman Batman's based off of? Can you say that Latin word again? It is Vespertilio Homo. Homo. They even gave the gorgeous valley where they lived a name, the Ruby Colosseum. Locke described them deep in conversation, gesturing to one another, clearly thinking and feeling just like people do. He was painting a whole society up there, and to cash in even harder, the sun hired a local artist to draw the lunar landscape based on Locke's descriptions, and sold the picture as a separate print. So you could literally buy a poster of the moon bat people to hang on your wall. Ugh god. Now here's where it goes from funny to bananas. People believed it. Of course they did. Not a few people. By some estimates, around ninety percent of New Yorkers took it as the honest truth. The Sun's sales exploded. It became for a moment the most widely read newspaper in the entire world, selling around nineteen thousand copies. Rival papers, not wanting to miss out, started reprinting the story as if it was their own scoop. One rival even invented its own exclusive correspondent, who claimed to have been right there for the discovery. Fake news copying fake news And it didn't stop at New York. The story got reprinted in city after city, and eventually overseas translated into French, German, and Italian. Whole pamphlets about the moon bat people sold out across Europe. This is a story going viral almost two hundred years before the word viral meant anything other than you should probably see a doctor. That's crazy. That's crazy. And it wasn't just regular folks. A group of scientists from Yale University, smart people, were so convinced they traveled all the way to New York to see the original Edinburgh documents for themselves. my god. The Sun's staff, who obviously had no documents because none existed, sent the Yale scientists walking back and forth between the printing office and the editorial office over and over hoping they'd give up. And they did. Those brilliant Yale scholars went home, still believing it was real. Imagine being a genius and getting played by a guy going, the papers? Those are in the other building. No wait. They're in this building. Wait, nope, that building. Ugh. It kinda sounds it kinda sounds like the Book of Mormon where he's like, You have to copy it onto normal paper. Even better, speaking of Book of Mars, even better, some religious groups got so excited about meeting their new moon neighbors that they started talking about raising money to send missionaries and Bibles up to the moon. What a Land of Land of Bats. Nobody had a rocket. Nobody had any way to get to the moon. Didn't matter. They were ready. But maybe the angriest person in America was a young, broke, not yet famous writer named Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, that Edgar Allan Poe. The spooky raven guy. Mm-hmm. Just two months earlier, Poe had published his own story about a man who flies to the moon in a balloon and finds creatures living there. So when the sun's moon story blew up and made everyone rich and famous, Poe was furious. He was convinced that Locke had stolen his idea. He grumbled about it in letters for years. He was both impressed and deeply, deeply salty. Which is, you know, fair. So how did it all end? Slowly. Because news traveled at the speed of horses and ships back then, it took weeks for people in Europe, where the real Herschel was reachable, to go, wait, he never said any of this. Other newspapers started poking holes in the story. One rival paper claimed Locke had confessed the whole thing while chatting in a bar. Finally, on september sixteenth, eighteen thirty five, the Sun quietly admitted the articles were made up. September what was the year? Eighteen thirty five, same year. So like a month. Wouldn't it be cool though? It would be. But here's the kicker, and it's a big one. The Sun never really apologized. There was no giant We Lied, we're sorry headline. And readers, they mostly weren't even mad. They thought it was a fun ride. The paper kept selling great. Crime, it turns out, sometimes pays in pennies. Richard Adam Locke spent years not admitting he wrote it, then finally fessed up in 1840. He always said the same thing. It was supposed to be a joke that made people think harder about who they trust. Instead, it became proof of exactly the opposite. That if you dress up wild story in a confident sciencey language and stick a famous real name on it, an enormous number of people will swallow it whole. Flying bat people, fire beavers, moon unicorns, and a whole city saying, Yeah, sounds about right. Not bad for a penny. Histiography! So, how do we know all of this? Lucky for us, the original six articles still exist, and historians have read every wild word. You can still read it yourself today if you wanted. They were also reprinted as pamphlets and even sold as fancy illustrated picture of the moon's lunar animals. So we can literally see how people imagine the bad people. Where historians sometimes disagree is on intent. Was Locke purely making fun of gullible readers? Or was Benjamin Day mostly just chasing profit? Most evidence points to both being true at the same time. Scholars also place the hoax inside a bigger story. It landed at a moment when religion, brand new science, and cheap mass printing all collided at the same time. The Edinburgh Journal of Science Detail The fact that it had already shut down is one of the clues researchers used to prove just how carefully Locke built his fake article. It was designed to look real. Mm-hmm. Lessons we've learned today. You probably have this down, but it's people are just so gullible and they'll believe anything that you tell if it's backed by if they say it's backed by science. Like we we were watching videos the other day, right? Where it like how to improve your media literacy and it kind of was just like, Okay, the doctor says it's true, but You gotta do your own research. Yeah, I I have one. Yeah, go for it. Like one of my main topics of this podcast is don't believe everything you hear and always question. It's the main theme of our podcast. Basically. Basically, yeah. what I have is Kind of along those lines. The People who got fooled in 1835 weren't stupid. Mm-hmm. They were gullible. Yeah. They weren't dumb at all. Yale scientists fell for it. Yeah, it's not like a stupidity problem. It's a everyone is believing it problem. They got tricked by a story. Yeah. Because it used real famous people's names, fancy scientific words, and trusted sounding source. And because it told Them something they already wanted to believe. Mm-hmm. That is exactly how fake news works today. Just a lot faster. Mm-hmm. So the move is always the same. Slow down. Ask who is actually saying this and how would they know? And check more than one source before you share. That's a big lesson. That's the only lesson that I have for today. Yeah. If a bat person shows up in your feed, your Instagram feed. And trust me, the modern version absolutely will be the person who asks for proof. Curiosity plus a little doubt is a superpower in today's world. Especially today, like you can pretty much make anything with AI. Exactly. I feel like, yeah, with the AI with AI coming into it, it becomes a whole other thing. More so now than ever before in history. that it could be fake. You just don't know anymore. There's also a thing called cognitive dissonance, meaning you might know it's fake, but you don't care and you still forward it to your friends or say that it's true because you want to believe what it is that you're seeing. Yeah. You want to believe. And that's a major problem that we have today. Mm-hmm. Time for the Fun Fact Challenge! Are you guys ready? Probably not. Remember, you don't have to wait for me to finish. that's like my least favorite thing now. I've started writing my questions a little bit longer now too. So that I can get some of them out. Number one I don't like it. Number one, number one, number one. The Great Moon hoax claimed it was reprinted from a respected science magazine to make it sound trustworthy. What was the magazine? The sun. wait. Zoe, do you have an answer? Can you finish the question? What was the magazine? That it came from? Mm-hmm. It was it like the Scottish It was Scottish something. Yeah. Scottish something. Sounds like a pretty good museum. It's always close, but I'm not gonna give you the point on that one. It was the Edinburgh Science Journal. Alright, Tide Zero Zero I'm sorry. Nil nil. Nil nil. Today is still World Soccer Day. yeah. Number two, a young writer who would later become super famous for spooky poems and stories. Blood Zoe. Edgar Allan Poe. He was convinced the hoax had stolen his idea because he'd written his own moon story two months earlier. Edgar Allan Poe. Number three. The sum became one of the first penny papers. What major change in how newspapers were sold and priced made people go for it? They co only costed a penny and they were sold by little newspaper boys. That is correct. How how did you get that from that? I just I'm just guessing 'cause I knew you would get it, so I knew it to kinda like do a Hail Mary, you know? Maze, maze, maze. I'm maze, I'm maze, I'm maze. Alright, I'm gonna give you guys closest to the pin. It's not actually from the episode, it's from something else. What? How many people was the earth estimated to have in 1835? Locked in. Locked in. You both gotta give me an answer 'cause it's closest to the pin. Okay, I'll go first. Actually Gabba go first. One point nine five wait no. I don't really know how to say it, but it's like if one point nine five billion people. One point seventy five billion people. Zoe is closest. You're both way over. But Zoe is closest. 1.04 to 1.05. dad, that was really I know, And I win again. And Zoe wins again. Hmm. I'm just so awesome. But it was on a pin, so Yeah, closest to the pin. Yeah, no one no one got that first question. Yeah. This day in history! Today is July twenty third. In nineteen fourteen, Austria Hungary delivered a harsh Ultimatum to Serbia. Weeks after Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination, the demands were nearly impossible to accept, and within days the dominoes fell that dragged the world into World War One. Good job. Or the Great War. Or the Great War, as it was known back then. Good job. It was World War One. in nineteen sixty two the Telstar satellite relayed the first live television signal across the Atlantic Ocean. People in Europe and North America watched the same broadcast at the same moment, a giant leap towards today's instant worldwide communication. And then, lastly, in nineteen ninety five, comet Hale Bop was discovered by two stargazers, Alan Hale and Thomas Bop. On the very same night and totally independently. Nearly two years later it became one of the brightest, most watched comets of the entire twentieth century. That's cool. I remember that one very vividly. You could see it in the sky at night. That's cool. It was really cool. What happened to it? Where is it now? somewhere else in space. I guess. No but like what do you mean like you remember it? 'Cause it was in nineteen ninety five. I was there. Yeah primary source right here, baby. Not really, no. Okay, so they work like planets do. Mm-hmm. You know, like planets circle the sun. Yeah. Comets s basically circle like that, but it's in a much wider orbit and it's not always the sun that it's orbiting. It's more of the it's more of like a an oval. Like And it's huge. Very much so, yeah. It's it's less circular, it's way oval. But like so, Halle's Comet happens No, it's Halle. Tally? Yes. Halley's Comet comes every seventy six years. So it's it's a loop is seventy six years. Hm. So that's how comets work and that's why Hell Bop we may never see I don't know. Mm-hmm. But don't really have like a timeline yet. Right. And if it's the if it was first discovered in nineteen ninety what, that would be nineteen ninety three. Yeah. and we had never seen it before or had any historical record of it before, we'll probably not see it in our lives. Yeah. If ever. 'cause even like Halley's comet. Is I just wrote an episode and it has something to do with ten sixty six and the Battle of Hastings. Halley's comet does. That's cool. So we have historical records back to at least ten sixty six of Halle's comet going around. Every seventy six when the world started. That's one that's right. One like where are we on that timeline? That seventy six EO timeline. It happened in nineteen eighty six. Okay. So it's not gonna be around till twenty sixty ish? So we're talking about like thirty more years in. Twenty sixty one? Okay. I'll probably be alive then. Yeah. You probably will, yeah. I'm hoping I am too. Yeah. It's not that far away, to be honest. It's just kinda like you'd be like seventy by then. I'd be older than that 'cause if I were I'd no, I four then seventies. So I'd be eighty. You were four? You remember it? No. Not Halle's comet. I remember Hell Bob. Different. Alright, so there it is. A one penny newspaper put fire wielding beavers, blue unicorns, and flying bat people on the moon. And the whole city believed it. The trick wasn't the moon. It was the confidence, a famous name, and readers who wanted it to be true. Stay curious, stay skeptical. That's it for this episode. Thanks for traveling through time with us on the Ebbs of History. If you like today's story, share it with a teacher, a friend, or your family on Instagram at Ebbs of History. If you have any show ideas, corrections, or questions, you can contact us at questions at ebbsofistory dot com. Signing off, there's been your co-host Gavin Zoe. And me, Jason, reminding you that history is not just about the dates and battles, it's about people, curiosity, and the weird, wonderful choices that shaped our world. until next time. Keep wondering, keep laughing. And keep learning through the ebbs of history.