Illustration taken from George Griffith's A Visit to the Moon,
in 1900 Pearson's Magazine, finds a pyramid on the lunar surface fringed
by bleached bones. The novel Drowsy, written by John Ames Mitchell in 1917, is similarly illustrated, showing highly realistic moonscapes and a frontispiece depicting the ruins of a dead lunar civilization.
Ancient peoples throughout the world held the moon and its periodic eclipses in awe and for many it was a source of worship. From this sprang numerous intriguing myths and legends, including the notion firmly held by many Greeks that this small neighbor of Earth's was inhabited also. Lucian of Samosata, although Syrian, was a widely regarded Greek satirist and lyracist. He first wrote of his travels to that "great country in the air" in a published work entitled: 'True History'. Although more fiction that fact, it told the tale of a voyage in a sailing ship carried aloft by a whirlwind to the moon and a subsequent meeting with its inhabitants; claimed to be much like those of Earth.
In 1516 Lodovico Ariosto wrote an epic poem in which the theme was a lunar trip by way of "firie chariet". The astronomer Johannes Kepler, who published his famous 'Laws of Planetary Motion' between 1609 and 1618, also wrote 'Dream'; a book full of fantasies and visions based on the science of the day that included the idea of moon-dwellers. It was in the same year, 1634, that Lucian of Samosata's original work was first published in England.
Now the idea of life on other worlds was beginning to form in earnest and Bishop Francis Godwin pursued this theme four years later when he wrote: 'The Man in the Moon'. It recorded the adventures of a fictitious Spaniard, Domingo Gonsales, who trained large birds for an eventful trip that was to take him eleven days. So popular was this and other stories that moon voyages appeared in over 200 published accounts during the 17th century.
Moon-men were an emerging breed and their strange world was to become the object of increasing interest and speculation. It led to respected astronomers such as Sir William Herschel devoting much of their time to observing the lunar surface. He himself recorded on two consecutive nights in April, 1787 three bright white spots on the earthlit side of the moon which he concluded could only have been volcanoes. In 1822 German astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen announced he had discovered a "lunar city" possessing "dark gigantic ramparts". These were to be identified later as consisting of nothing more than haphazard surface ridges.
It was shrewd American news reporter Richard Locke who became the first person to recognize an opportunity for personal fame and fortune, when in 1835 he successfully duped the New York Sun and its readership. In August that year the newspaper was to publish the first of his amazing accounts alleging that Sir John Herschel, son of William, was using a revolutionary new lunar telescope at a site in Southern Africa and through it had observed goat-like creatures ambling about on the moon's surface. The tale gradually unfolded during the next week as successive editions of the Sun carried ever-more colorful descriptions of flora and fauna, also islands, rivers, birds and beasts. Meanwhile, poor Herschel remained oblivious to these events.
Lock possessed a nifty turn-of-phrase and capitalized on the limitations imposed on communications in the early 19th century. He milked it for all he was worth while the hoax continued, first ensnaring rival newspapers and then even eminent scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Readers avidly absorbed every word and were captivated by flowery descriptions of great works supposedly wrought on the lunar surface, such as this: "A lofty chain of obelisk-shaped or very slender pyramids standing in irregular groups, each composed of about thirty or forty spires, every one of which was perfectly square."
Lock crowned his literary achievement one week later by introducing into the narrative a colorful report of the lunar inhabitants. These hairy winged creatures were said to be four feet in height and "covered, except on the face, with short and glossy copper-colored hair, lying snugly on their backs. The face, which was of a yellowish flesh-color, was a slight improvement upon that of an orang-outang."
A rival newspaper subsequently exposed the whole things as being a hoax, although it took until mid-September before the Sun newspaper, who became willing partners in the dception, grudgingly owned up to it. Herschel for his part was to learn of this duplicity some time later and continued his observations at the Cape apparently somewhat amused at the claims and following furore in both America and Europe.
Lunar observers such as W.H.Pickering spent many years at the turn of this century mapping what he himself often described as "canals" present on the moon's seemingly ever-changing landscape. These maze of lines were observed to intersect mysterious dark spots, much in the manner of those more famous Martian canals which had been recoded by Shiaparelli and announced to the world in 1877. Pickering went on to claim that he had identified vegetation, along with "river-beds" and active volcanoes, or geysers. From his vantage point in the hills of Jamaica during 1919-24 the astronomer believed he was witness to the migratory passage of small insects or animals, in their leisurely traversing of the area around the moon's Eratosthenes crater.
Throughout the last 200 years many lunar observers have reported witnessing the brief appearance of inexplicable mists, cloud-like shapes, glows and flashes on a seemingly lifeless gray world. Walter H.Haas, who wrote in 1942 that Sir William Herschel's white spots on the moon might have been the impact flare of a large meteorite, himself observed a "milky luminosity" present on the wall of the crater Tycho. Astronomer F.H.Thornton reported seeing "a puff of whitish vapour obscuring details for some miles," one February night in 1949.
That same year, Spanish engineer Sixto Campo seriously promoted the theory that a technologically advanced civilization had once waged nuclear war against itself on the lunar surface. Annihilation followed swiftly for all he claimed and the resulting craters remain as testament to the holocaust on a now dead world. However, red glows continue to be observed in the region of the moon's north pole and blue misty glows have been periodically noted near craters at the south pole.
Russian astronomer N.A.Kozyrev, has recorded via spectrograms numerous incidents of red transient lunar phenomena, particularly in the 80-mile wide crater known as Alphonsus. It was at this location in 1965 that the final Ranger probe 9 crash-landed. Aristarchus is not only one of the brightest formations on the moon, it is responsible for more than half the number of reported TLP and has been a proven source for gaseous emissions.
Lunar Life or Transient Phenomena?
The Moon is far from being an inert and lifeless world. Many centuries of observation have noted occurencies on the lunar surface which take the form of glows, mists, flashes and similar illuminations. They have become more popularly described as Lunar Transient Phenomena (LTP), thanks to noted astronomer Patrick Moore who coined the phrase. It largely encompasses all such recorded signs of activity now generally thought to be volcanic in nature.
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