From the Moon to Martians: Pre-digital Lessons in Falsehood

Part 1 of The Evolution of Misinformation

False claims are not an Internet invention. They have flourished whenever a new medium multiplies speed or spectacle faster than verification can catch up. Misinformation - falsehood shared unwittingly, and disinformation - falsehood crafted to deceive, are distinct, yet history keeps showing how one feeds the other. Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it plainly: misinformation is error; disinformation is strategy.

The Great Moon Hoax (1835)

For six August mornings, the New York Sun published “dispatches” describing bison roaming lunar plains and bat-winged humanoids flying over crater lakes. Author Richard Adams Locke intended the series allegedly as satire, but soaring sales - three extra presses ran day and night - quickly turned the fiction into front-page fact across the United States and Britain. Media outlets quoted it; sermons cited it; lecturers explained it; only weeks later did the paper admit the ruse. Locke’s deliberate invention was disinformation; the eager reprinting by rival editors and parish newsletters converted it into mass misinformation before anyone had checked a telescope.

Yellow Journalism, Cuba, and the Road to War (1890s)

Half a century later William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought a circulation duel that rewarded the gaudiest copy. Their papers printed tales of Spanish soldiers feeding Cubans to sharks and paraded sketches of victims, many drawn from hearsay. When the battleship Maine exploded in Havana harbour, Hearst’s headline “Destruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy!” left no factual cushion. Historians at the U.S. State Department now list yellow journalism as a factor nudging Congress toward the Spanish-American War. The editors’ purpose was clear—sell papers, sway sentiment - so the stories qualify as disinformation; yet tens of thousands who repeated them did so in good faith, turning motive-driven distortion into ignorant, if not innocent, belief.

Telegraph Wires Shorten the Fuse (1848 → 1861)

Between those two episodes, a quieter revolution made every scoop portable. In 1848 six New York dailies joined together to telegraph the foreign news that was arriving by ship in Boston to Manhattan, so it could go to press without delay. This marked the birth of the Associated Press, proving that speed beats cost and caution. Thirteen years later, Western Union’s transcontinental wire snapped into service, allowing those same bulletins (reliable or not) to race from Atlantic to Pacific in minutes and moved the ten-day Pony-Express lags into history. Contemporary critics were already uneasy: a New York Times editorial in 1858 warned that telegraphic dispatches were “superficial, sudden, unsifted—too fast for the truth.” The complaint reads like a nineteenth-century premonition of X (formerly Twitter): velocity as virtue, verification as an afterthought.

War of the Worlds and the Myth of Panic (1938)

On 30 October, Orson Welles delivered his radio drama in the breathless cadence of breaking news bulletins. Newspapers next morning declared America gripped by hysteria, yet letters archived at Princeton and modern media scholarship show only scattered alarm; the larger panic tale was itself a journalistic embellishment, a convenient stick for print editors to swing at their new broadcast rival. Here, misinformation grew not from Welles’s fiction, which listeners broadly recognized as theater, but from competitive newspapers quoting one another without verification.

Why the Pattern Matters Now 

Across these vignettes, the same engine hums: spectacle lures attention, speed outruns scrutiny, and commercial or political incentives reward the headline first and the correction never. Today, the engine turns faster. In May 2023, a New York lawyer filed a federal brief citing six court decisions that did not exist – unvalidated hallucinations supplied by ChatGPT and presented as fact. Within days, the story landed on the New York Times front page, and the attorney faced sanctions, a twenty-first-century echo of the Moon Hoax’s telescopes and the Martian landings’ newsprint with a good deal of laziness added.

What those nineteenth and early twentieth-century episodes demonstrate is that while technology does not cause falsehood (at least in the distant past it didn’t), it magnifies the gap between the moment a claim appears and the moment someone asks, “Where is the evidence?” The VeroVeri information audit service, based on our VALID™ Framework, functions like a pre-flight checklist - confirming each claim’s airworthiness before your content takes off, sparing you turbulence down the line.

Stay tuned for our next post, as we continue our examination of the evolution of misinformation.