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Mystery Lab / Rumours & reporting

Where Do the News Cards Lead?

Reveal the links behind three fictional news cards, then open their cited note to see whether it supports their claim.

Rumours & reporting · two guided observations

What will we explore through the Moon Hoax story?

The 1835 Sun series invoked a real astronomer and a scientific journal in its account of lunar life. Neither the number of installments nor the source’s name alone established the claimed discovery.

Here, we use an original fictional story about a garden stone that supposedly gives off its own light. First reveal which note the three cards cite. Then open that note and compare what it actually says with the claim made about it.

1. Reveal whether the three cards rely on independent evidence. 2. Open the cited note and compare its contents with the claim.

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Continue with the story and its records

Explore how the difference you noticed connects with the surviving records of the historical story.

Read the 1835 Moon Hoax story
Open the source

Sources and scope

We consulted a Library of Congress account, a Cooper Hewitt article and a Smithsonian Libraries catalog record for an 1859 edition. The latter two belong to the same Smithsonian institutional group; they are not three independent institutional confirmations.

  1. 01
    Belief, Legend, and the Great Moon Hoax Library of Congress · Folklife Today, 2014 · Checked 2026-10-22
  2. 02
    The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum · 2015 · Checked 2026-10-22
  3. 03

The wording and explanatory diagram are original. This is not a new edition checked against the complete original newspapers or all of Herschel’s research records, and it does not reconstruct every historical reprinting route. No newspaper, illustration or book scans or historical quotations are reproduced. It estimates neither readers’ beliefs nor sales.