Historical reports of extraterrestrial life on the Moon. The concept of life on the Moon has a long history. The first person to suggest that the moon was, like Earth, inhabited was Greek philosopher Anaxagoras (c. 500-c. 428 B.C.E.). Second-century writers Plutarch and Lucian of Samosata both wrote about the Moon as an inhabited world. Lucian’s story, A True History, tells about a war between the king of the Moon and the king of the Sun. Sixteenth-century Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto told of a trip to an inhabited moon in his epic poem Orlando Furioso. Similarly, Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-55) in Voyages to the Moon and the Sun predicted travel to the moon by rocket. Scientists such as Johannes KEPLER (1571-1630) and Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) depicted the moon as a world with intelligent life.
By the early 19th century, scientists were convinced that life and certainly not intelligent life could not exist on the Moon. In 1835, however, the New York Sun sponsored a “Moon Hoax,” claiming that the British astronomer John Herschel (1792-1871) then on an expedition to Cape Town, South Africa had discovered life on the moon using an extremely powerful telescope. The perpetrator of the hoax was Richard Adams Locke (1800-71), an immigrant writer. On August 25, 1835, Locke published a fantastic story claiming that Herschel had seen flowers, lakes, and trees on the surface of the moon. Locke elaborated on the story in future installments; he later stated that the scientist had also seen large animals resembling bison and unicorns and finally concluded that Herschel had seen intelligent winged humanlike beings.