Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that your friends should know about, but they probably don’t.

I'm your host this week, Jenn, and with me is (introduce each host and their blurb)

I'm Aaron, and this week I learned that the difference between being an awesome extreme sports star, or an idiot with a 4 wheeler who had it coming, is sticking the landing.

I'm Shea, and this week I learned that the opposite of formaldehyde is casualdejekyll.

Steve was a man, oh so bold

Who isn’t here today because of the cold

Or maybe his back, he’s all out of whack

Either way he is just so damn old.

Moon Hoax

M-O-O-N, that spells ‘hoax’. (This is actually a Steve joke, but I love it so much I’m using it. Thanks, Steve and Stephen King.) This week I am bringing you the story of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Before Orson Welles freaked the hell out of his listening radio audience with his take on the H. G Wells classic War of the Worlds, a different media medium sent its followers into a tailspin from a fantastical story.

It’s something I first read about in the 1981 edition of Reader’s Digest Strange Stories, Amazing Facts that my dad’s mom left me when she passed away (along with the entire series of the Time-Life crazy paranormal books and all kinds of kooky stuff. It was great until I think my mom got rid of the books bc she thought they were devil-y.)

* https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-great-moon-hoax

* https://daily.jstor.org/how-the-sun-conned-the-world-with-the-moon-hoax/

* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/great-moon-hoax-was-simply-sign-its-time-180955761/

* https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/08/the-great-moon-hoax/

* http://hoaxes.org/text/display/the_great_moon_hoax_of_1835_text

So yes, The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 began on the 25th of August in (surprisingly) 1835. Side note: August 25th is also the always delightful Big Gay Jim’s birthday (as well as my dad’s and Sean Connery’s. It’s quite the date.). It was on this day that New York magazine The Sun published the first of 6 articles by astronomer Dr. Andrew Grant, a self-stated associate of actual-for-real-honest-to-goodness-famous astronomer Sir John Herschel.

Alright, before I get into the articles themselves, here’s a little backstory on some of the players. First off, the Sun newspaper: it was founded in 1833 and was considered a ‘penny press’, an inexpensive and popular style of journalism with the working-class folk. Lots of illustrations and stories aimed at sensationalism, lots of true crime, and the like, often told in a narrative style. As the name suggests, it cost a penny which would be 26 cents in 2018. To break it down, it was cheap and titillating and exactly what the masses tend to crave and would definitely now be called a tabloid. It is perhaps today best known as the paper that printed the editorial that became ‘Yes, Virginia, There Is A Santa Claus’ and the film ‘A Miracle on 34th St.’ It ceased publication in 1950 when it merged with another paper.

Next big player, Sir John Herschel, the astronomer whose name gave the articles what gravitas they had. He was known for all kinds of awesome science-y shit such as: chemistry, experimental photography, botany, and mathematics. He invented the blueprint,