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The Bat Men of the New York Sun

In the late summer of eighteen thirty-five, a New York daily convinced the world that winged humanoids were roaming the lunar surface. Was it the greatest commercial swindle in early American journalism, or an elaborate philosophical joke that backfired?

6 chapters · 8 sourcesBy TouchéPublished October 8, 2026

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August 1835

The Penny Press

Benjamin Day founds The Sun, 1833
One cent a copy for working readers
Richard Adams Locke hired as reporter

Ada: It's late August, eighteen thirty-five, in Manhattan. The streets are thick with newsboys shouting, and for a single copper penny a dockworker can buy a paper that two years ago didn't exist.

Theo: And I'm Theo, here with Ada, and this is Historai. Today we're chasing the summer a New York daily convinced the world the moon was full of winged people.

Ada: That daily was The Sun, founded by Benjamin Day in eighteen thirty-three. One cent a copy, sold on corners to working people, while the elite papers charged six dollars a year.

Theo: So Day's whole business was volume. He needed people to keep buying.

Ada: Exactly. Police blotters, scandals, human curiosities, whatever moved copies. And he'd hired a sharp British reporter named Richard Adams Locke, who claimed descent from the philosopher John Locke.

Theo: That's a name to live up to.

Ada: Locke understood his readers hungered for science, for wonder, for discovery. So when Day agreed to run an unbelievable Scottish scoop, the presses rolled.

25 August 1835

The Scottish Dispatches

Headline credits Sir John Herschel
Fake reprint from defunct Edinburgh journal
Impossible 24-foot, 7-ton lens

Ada: August twenty-fifth. The front page announces Great Astronomical Discoveries by Sir John Herschel at the Cape of Good Hope.

Theo: Herschel being a real astronomer, right? That's not invented.

Ada: Very real. He'd genuinely sailed to South Africa in January eighteen thirty-four to map the southern skies. That's what made the whole thing so plausible.

Theo: Clever. Anchor the lie to a true fact nobody can easily check from New York.

Ada: And Locke dressed it up. He claimed it was reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, narrated by a Doctor Andrew Grant, Herschel's colleague.

Theo: Let me guess. Doctor Grant did not exist.

Ada: Pure fiction. And the Edinburgh Journal of Science had actually folded, so there was no publication to contradict him. Then came the showpiece: a telescope with a lens twenty-four feet across, weighing seven tons.

Theo: Seven tons of glass. That's not a telescope, that's a cathedral window.

Ada: Totally impossible, then and now. But Locke wrapped it in talk of hydro-oxygen illumination, projecting live images of the moon onto a canvas screen. It sounded like physics.

Theo: So the first installments were all optics and engineering.

Ada: They were. Serious, technical, authoritative. But as readers clamored for more, the reports shifted from optical physics to lunar biology.

28–29 August 1835

The Man-Bats

Miniature bison and single-horned goats
Upright beavers in huts with chimneys
Vespertilio-homo: bat-winged humanoids

Ada: So on August twenty-sixth, Locke takes us to the lunar surface itself. Basalt cliffs, fields of blood-red poppies, herds of miniature bison.

Theo: Little moon bison. I love that already.

Ada: And goat-like creatures with a single horn. Unicorns, basically, grazing on the moon. Readers couldn't get enough.

Theo: And this is running day after day, so the suspense just builds.

Ada: Six installments through August thirty-first. By the twenty-eighth, Locke introduces bipedal, tailless beavers, walking upright, carrying their babies in their arms.

Theo: Wait, upright beavers carrying babies?

Ada: Living in huts, with smoke rising from chimneys. The detail about the smoke is the giveaway, really: it implies they'd mastered fire.

Theo: That's a civilization, not wildlife. He's escalating fast.

Ada: And then, August twenty-ninth, the grand reveal. Vespertilio-homo. Four feet tall, covered in copper-colored hair, with the wings of a bat.

Theo: The bat-men. The ones the whole episode's named for.

Ada: The man-bats. Locke described them lounging beside sapphire temples, clearly intelligent, clearly social. Winged humanoids living in a civilization on the moon.

Theo: And people believed this? Not as a fun story, but actually believed it?

Ada: Swallowed it whole. The Sun printed sixty thousand pamphlet reprints and lithographs so people could see the creatures for themselves.

Theo: How did Locke end it? You can't keep bat-men going forever.

Ada: Cleverly. The series concluded with the great telescope accidentally catching the sun, which set the observatory on fire and destroyed the equipment.

Theo: So nobody could ever ask to look again. The evidence conveniently burns.

Ada: Exactly. A built-in excuse. Which raises the real question: what on earth did Locke think he was doing?

Summer 1835

Satire or Swindle

Possible target: Reverend Thomas Dick
Dick claimed billions of lunar souls
Poe's Hans Pfaall published that June

Theo: So was Locke a con man, or something stranger?

Ada: That's genuinely contested. The sympathetic reading is that he meant it as satire. His target, reportedly, was a wave of theological science, especially Reverend Thomas Dick.

Theo: Who was Thomas Dick?

Ada: A hugely popular writer who argued for a plurality of inhabited worlds. He actually calculated the moon's population at over four billion souls.

Theo: Four billion people on the moon, presented seriously?

Ada: In bestselling books. So the theory goes that Locke expected readers to catch the parody, to laugh at the absurdity and see the mockery of that kind of reasoning.

Theo: Except nobody laughed. They just believed it.

Ada: Public and clergy alike swallowed it whole. If it was satire, it completely backfired. Whether Locke truly meant high-minded mockery or just wanted to sell papers, we honestly can't be sure.

Theo: And meanwhile, wasn't there another writer who was furious about all this?

Ada: Edgar Allan Poe. That June, down in Richmond, he'd published his own lunar voyage tale, The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.

Theo: So Locke basically scooped Poe's moon story.

Ada: Poe thought so, and he was livid that Locke had stolen his thunder. He felt the whole idea had been lifted right out from under him.

September 1835

The Confession

Locke allegedly slips to reporter Finn
Rival Bennett attacks in the Herald
Yale delegation reportedly seeks sources

Ada: Here's where the story turns. There's a tale that Locke gave himself away over drinks.

Theo: The classic undoing. Loose lips in a bar.

Ada: Supposedly at the Washington Hotel taproom, Locke was drinking with a reporter named Finn from the Journal of Commerce. Finn mentioned his paper was about to reprint the whole series.

Theo: And Locke panicked?

Ada: The story goes he blurted out, don't print it right away, I wrote it myself.

Theo: That's a confession and a brag in one breath.

Ada: Now, accounts differ on how it really came out. Some say Locke slipped in the taproom; others say rival editor James Gordon Bennett of the Herald independently exposed him.

Theo: Either way, this is the gap, isn't it? Locke thought of it as a burlesque, but The Sun was selling it as hard science.

Ada: That's exactly the fracture. Front-page Scottish reports presented as unquestionable empirical truth, while their author considered the whole thing an intellectual joke.

Theo: And the academics? Didn't some scholars actually chase the sources?

Ada: Reportedly, Yale scholars came down to Manhattan looking for the original Edinburgh journals. Though it's disputed whether a real Yale committee traveled, or whether rival editors invented it to mock gullible professors.

Theo: So with the confession spilling across the rival papers, the whole scientific world braces for the fallout.

16 September 1835

The Largest Daily in the World

Herschel irritated by endless letters
Sun admits fabrication, 16 September 1835
Circulation surpasses the London Times

Ada: And what about the real Herschel, sitting at Feldhausen in South Africa? He learned of all this months later, from baffled correspondents.

Theo: Imagine opening your mail to discover you've supposedly found bat-men.

Ada: At first he was amused. But the letters kept coming, strangers asking whether he'd really seen the creatures, and he grew thoroughly irritated by it.

Theo: So did The Sun ever come clean?

Ada: On September sixteenth, eighteen thirty-five, it admitted the story was fabricated. But notice, no apology. Not a word of regret.

Theo: Of course not, because it worked, didn't it?

Ada: Spectacularly. Circulation shot past nineteen thousand, making The Sun the largest daily in the world, bigger even than the London Times.

Theo: So the lie built the empire. That's the uncomfortable lesson.

Ada: It is. It proved that technical jargon and authoritative framing, a real astronomer's name, a Scottish journal, the language of physics, could persuade an educated public of almost anything.

Theo: When you lay it out, the whole thing turns on three moves: anchor the fantasy to a real scientist, pile on the jargon, then burn the evidence so no one can check.

Ada: And whether Locke meant a philosophical joke or a cash grab, the public reaction was the same. People believe what arrives wearing the costume of authority.

Theo: Which feels uncomfortably current, honestly.

Ada: It really does. If you want, you can interrupt any episode and ask us anything, about Locke, about Poe, about where the line between satire and fraud actually sits.

Theo: And there's a whole other story in what happened to Edgar Allan Poe and his stolen moon tale afterward, if you're curious, it's one tap away.

Ada: This was Historai - where history answers back.

Research record