The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where “Fake News” Began

The Great Moon Hoax of 1835: Where “Fake News” Began Thinking back to the many childhood grocery-store trips made with their parents, Americans of a certain age will remember nothing so vividly as the Weekly World News. It always stood out on the checkout stand’s impulse-buy rack, in part because of its adherence to stark yet jumbled black-and-white cover designs even as all the other magazines grew slicker and simpler. But what really caught our young and impressionable eyes had even more to do with the contrast between the surrounding publications’ mundane coverage of home, family, and celebrity and the WWN’s unfailingly, screamingly outlandish headlines: “I WAS BIGFOOT’S LOVE SLAVE!” “WILD WEST TOWN ON VENUS!” “BAT BOY LEADS COPS ON 3 STATE CHASE!” For many of us, the temptation to buy (or at least flip through) an issue of the WWN lay in keeping up with the exploits of Bat Boy, the most prominent of many fictional characters to which its extravagantly lurid yet oddly sober

Added 26 Jun 2026