The 1835 Great Moon Hoax and its Latin American reprints

Record summary

The New York Sun’s 1835 series falsely attributed spectacular lunar discoveries to astronomer John Herschel. Newspapers elsewhere, including Latin American and Caribbean publications, reprinted or discussed versions of the story. This is useful for studying how alleged nonhuman beings, celestial landscapes, and authoritative scientific language traveled through nineteenth-century print networks. The precise regional reprints need to be identified in newspaper archives rather than assumed from the New York originals. The episode is a documented press hoax, not evidence of an observation on the Moon.