I love this - In 1835 the New York Sun ran six front-page articles claiming the astronomer John Herschel had built an enormous telescope in South Africa and spotted an entire lunar civilisation complete with bison-sized goats with single horns, two-legged beavers, forests, oceans, and winged humanoid creatures the paper named Vespertilio-homo, or man-bats. It had enormous amounts of people fooled and ran for weeks before anyone official admitted it was invented. The newspaper’s circulation figures remained significantly higher even after the revelation. Herschel himself only heard about his own discoveries second-hand, and reportedly found the whole thing quite amusing.