“Yale College was alive with staunch supporters”, a reporter wrote years later. “The literati- students and professors, doctors in divinity and law- and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard of the news of the man in the moon? These were the questions that met you everywhere. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.”

Reading about the New York Sun Moon Hoax of 1835 never makes us not smile.