The Great Moon Hoax, 180 Years Ago

On August 25, 1835, the New York Sun published the first in a series of articles detailing the wonders astronomers had supposedly seen while observing the moon with a super-powered telescope. They described a lunar surface covered in lush forests and teeming with bipedal beavers, bearded blue unicorns and, most astonishing of all, a race of humanoid bat-creatures. Readers were enthralled, and the series was widely reprinted and discussed. There was just one problem: not a word of it was true. The New York Sun was a low-rent “penny paper” that typically dealt in sensationalist fare about murders and tenement fires, but beginning on August 25, 1835, it briefly became the world’s premier scientific authority. The transformation began with the publication of “Great Astronomical Discoveries,” a six-part series that claimed to recount the earth-shattering findings astronomer Sir John Herschel had made while observing the heavens in South Africa. According to the Sun’s editors, the stories were culled from articles that had originally appeared in the Supplement to the Edinburgh Journal of Science. They promised to describe “celestial discoveries of higher and more universal interest than any, in any science yet known to the human race.”


http://www.history.com/news/the-great-moon-hoax-180-years-ago

Sounds like most newspapers and BBC news

1835 was an interesting time.