The Great Moon Hoax
From 25 August 1835 the New York Sun ran a series of six articles reporting that Sir John Herschel, from the Cape of Good Hope, had seen life on the Moon through a new telescope: forests, herds of bison, temples of sapphire and intelligent winged people four feet tall, which he called Vespertilio-homo. The material was presented as a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science, which had by then been out of print for years. The Sun's circulation rose to fifteen thousand, the largest in the world. The author was the reporter Richard Adams Locke, writing satire on the fashionable speculation about inhabitants of the planets; the paper never printed a retraction, and Herschel learned of his discovery by post.
The Letters from Ummo
From 1966 Spanish ufologists received typewritten letters from the inhabitants of the planet Ummo, in the system of the star Iumma: hundreds of pages on physics, society and language, each marked with an emblem of three strokes. The correspondence ran for twenty years, produced a literature of its own and several religious groups, and was cited as the most detailed extraterrestrial message on record. In 1993 the Madrid psychologist José Luis Jordán Peña publicly stated that he had written them himself, as a social experiment in what educated people are prepared to believe. The typewriter, the Spanish syntax and the scientific errors of the sixties all matched his authorship.
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