--- title: "Moon Myths and Hoaxes: From Cheese to Bat-People to Hollow Spaceship" description: "The moon is the most visible object in the night sky, close enough that its surface features are distinguishable with the naked eye, and humanity has been making up extraordinary things about it for as long as we have written records. The stories are not random — they follow patterns that reveal something consistent about how people approach things they can observe but not reach. The moon is visible but inaccessible. That gap between observation and understanding is where mythology lives.\n\n## Is the Moon Made of Cheese?\n\nThe cheese comparison has roots in sixteenth-century folklore, where it functioned as a metaphor for credulity rather than a literal belief. The earliest recorded usage appears in 1546 in playwright John Heywood's book of proverbs: \"Ye fetch circumquaques to make me beleeve… that the moone is made of a greene cheese.\" The \"greene cheese\" referred to young, unripened dairy product rather than anything green-coloured — and the sentence was making fun of the kind of person who would believe such a thing.\n\nThe image persisted precisely because it captures something about the moon's appearance: round, pale, slightly pockmarked. Various folk tales feature characters mistaking the moon's reflection in water for a wheel of cheese and drowning in the attempt to retrieve it. The metaphor has proven durable enough that NASA, in 2002, photoshopped an expiration date of April 1st into an image of a lunar crater for their Astronomy Picture of the Day website.\n\n## The Great Moon Hoax of 1835\n\nIn August 1835, the New York Sun published a series of articles claiming that the astronomer John Herschel, observing from the Cape of Good Hope with a powerful new telescope, had discovered life on the moon. The series ran to several instalments, each more remarkable than the last.\n\nThe initial creatures resembled bison with a \"remarkable fleshy appendage over the eyes, crossing the whole breadth of the forehead.\" Subsequent articles introduced unicorn-goat hybrids, miniature zebras, long-necked sheep, and — most memorably — bipedal beavers. The beaver description was precise: the animal resembled \"the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet.\"\n\nThe star attraction, however, was a population of bat-people — four feet in height, covered in copper-coloured hair, with membranous wings. They were observed building huts and apparently engaging in social activities, though the telescope was described as being unable to distinguish the finer details of their behaviour.\n\nThe New York Sun's circulation reached 19,360 copies on the strength of the series, making it the most widely read newspaper in the world. The articles began with sufficient technical description of the telescope's construction to lend scientific credibility. Richard Locke, the Sun employee who wrote them, later claimed satirical intent. The paper never published a retraction. Some readers died believing in lunar bat-people.\n\n## Nazis on the Moon\n\nA conspiracy theory that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and has demonstrated considerable cultural persistence holds that the Nazi government established a lunar base by 1942, and that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to it in 1945 rather than dying in the Berlin bunker.\n\nThe theory has a factual hook: a V-2 rocket test in 1942 did exceed the boundary that later definitions would use to mark the edge of space. German rocketry was genuinely advanced. The theory then extrapolates from this to infrastructure that would have required resources, materials, and launch capabilities several orders of magnitude beyond anything the Nazi programme possessed.\n\nThe irony is that Nazis technically do exist on the moon in a more literal sense. Lunar craters have been named after Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus — both Nazi Party and SS members who were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip after the war. Von Braun contributed to the V-2 programme before contributing to the Saturn V rocket. Debus transitioned from Nazi weapons test director to Kennedy Space Center's first director in 1963. Both claimed their party membership was pragmatic rather than ideological.\n\n## The Hollow Moon\n\nIn 1969, the Apollo 12 mission deliberately crashed rocket components into the lunar surface to test seismic monitoring equipment. NASA scientists reported that the moon \"rang like a bell for almost an hour\" after the impact.\n\nThis observation was accurate, and it has been used ever since to support the theory that the moon is hollow. The seismic response of the lunar surface is, in fact, different from what you would observe on Earth — slower wave propagation, longer duration. Scientists attribute this to the moon's composition and internal structure, which differs substantially from Earth's.\n\nWhat the hollow moon theory requires — a significant void inside the moon large enough to produce the observed resonance — is inconsistent with what we know about how the moon formed and the density measurements that have been taken. The moon is less dense than Earth, but not hollow. The \"ringing\" is real. The inference drawn from it is not well-supported.\n\n## The Alien Spaceship Theory\n\nThe hollow moon hypothesis branches naturally into a more ambitious version: the moon is not merely hollow but artificial — a vessel constructed by an unknown intelligence, either placed in Earth's orbit deliberately or encountered by our planet in the distant past.\n\nTwo Soviet scientists, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, published a paper in 1970 arguing that the flatness of lunar crater bottoms was inconsistent with natural meteorite impact. Large impacts should produce deep craters; instead, the craters are shallow relative to their diameter. The scientists argued this implied an armoured shell beneath the surface — a shell that would absorb impacts before they could penetrate to the hollow interior.\n\nThe crater-depth argument has a less exotic explanation: the moon's gravity is sufficient to cause surface flow of ejected material back into craters over geological time, and the composition of the lunar crust affects how impact energy is absorbed and distributed. But the spaceship theory has proven more memorable than the geological explanation.\n\n## The Hologram\n\nAt the far end of the lunar conspiracy spectrum is the claim that the moon is not a physical object at all but a projection — a hologram created either by governments (to conceal spending), by aliens (to deceive us about our cosmic situation), or by whoever is running the simulation we apparently inhabit.\n\nThe hologram theory gained its most committed modern advocate in former Coventry City goalkeeper and professional conspiracy theorist David Icke, who proposed that the moon is an artificial body amplifying signals from Saturn's rings, projected by entities he describes as \"lizard people,\" and transmitting a false reality into human brains. Icke arrived at this conclusion, by his own account, without consultation with astronomers or physicists.\n\nBackyard astronomers report \"glitches\" in the moon's appearance as evidence. These observations are generally attributable to atmospheric interference, equipment issues, or confirmation bias — the tendency to notice and remember observations that fit an existing belief while discounting those that don't.\n\n## What These Myths Reveal\n\nThe moon is, in fact, a large rock orbiting Earth, formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago in a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized body. It has been visited by twelve human beings. Its surface has been mapped in extraordinary detail. None of this has substantially reduced the production of lunar mythology.\n\nWhat the myths share is a consistent structure: the moon is visible but unreachable (historically), observed but not understood, familiar but alien. Into that gap between what can be seen and what can be known, human imagination inserts meaning. The bat-people of 1835, the Nazi bunker of popular culture, the alien spaceship of Soviet speculation — all are expressions of the same cognitive tendency to find, or invent, significance in the night sky's most prominent feature.\n\n## Key Takeaways\n\n- The moon-as-cheese metaphor dates to 1546 and was always a joke about credulity, not a literal belief.\n- The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 ran in the New York Sun, described bipedal beavers and bat-people, and briefly made the paper the most-read in the world.\n- Named lunar craters commemorate two former Nazi Party and SS members — Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus — who later led American space programmes.\n- The Apollo 12 seismic experiment genuinely produced unusual resonance readings; the hollow-moon interpretation of those readings is not supported by density measurements.\n- The moon hologram theory requires dismissing or explaining away the observations of thousands of amateur and professional astronomers; it has no evidentiary support." url: https://decodingtheunknown.pub/article/moon-myths-hoaxes-conspiracy-theories-history.md canonical: https://decodingtheunknown.pub/article/moon-myths-hoaxes-conspiracy-theories-history datePublished: 2026-04-28 dateModified: 2026-04-28 author: - name: Simon Whistler url: https://decodingtheunknown.pub/author/simon-whistler publisher: Decoding the Unknown image: "https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1532693322450-2cb5c511067d?w=1200&q=80" type: Article contentHash: 12182c26ddd330f6c11f83ae2c197a5250f1ad903123bc1b03ad14413066b970 tokens: 2250 summaryUrl: https://decodingtheunknown.pub/article/moon-myths-hoaxes-conspiracy-theories-history.md.summary.md --- The moon is the most visible object in the night sky, close enough that its surface features are distinguishable with the naked eye, and humanity has been making up extraordinary things about it for as long as we have written records. The stories are not random — they follow patterns that reveal something consistent about how people approach things they can observe but not reach. The moon is visible but inaccessible. That gap between observation and understanding is where mythology lives. ## Is the Moon Made of Cheese? The cheese comparison has roots in sixteenth-century folklore, where it functioned as a metaphor for credulity rather than a literal belief. The earliest recorded usage appears in 1546 in playwright John Heywood's book of proverbs: "Ye fetch circumquaques to make me beleeve… that the moone is made of a greene cheese." The "greene cheese" referred to young, unripened dairy product rather than anything green-coloured — and the sentence was making fun of the kind of person who would believe such a thing. The image persisted precisely because it captures something about the moon's appearance: round, pale, slightly pockmarked. Various folk tales feature characters mistaking the moon's reflection in water for a wheel of cheese and drowning in the attempt to retrieve it. The metaphor has proven durable enough that NASA, in 2002, photoshopped an expiration date of April 1st into an image of a lunar crater for their Astronomy Picture of the Day website. ## The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 In August 1835, the New York Sun published a series of articles claiming that the astronomer John Herschel, observing from the Cape of Good Hope with a powerful new telescope, had discovered life on the moon. The series ran to several instalments, each more remarkable than the last. The initial creatures resembled bison with a "remarkable fleshy appendage over the eyes, crossing the whole breadth of the forehead." Subsequent articles introduced unicorn-goat hybrids, miniature zebras, long-necked sheep, and — most memorably — bipedal beavers. The beaver description was precise: the animal resembled "the beaver of the earth in every other respect than in its destitution of a tail, and its invariable habit of walking upon only two feet." The star attraction, however, was a population of bat-people — four feet in height, covered in copper-coloured hair, with membranous wings. They were observed building huts and apparently engaging in social activities, though the telescope was described as being unable to distinguish the finer details of their behaviour. The New York Sun's circulation reached 19,360 copies on the strength of the series, making it the most widely read newspaper in the world. The articles began with sufficient technical description of the telescope's construction to lend scientific credibility. Richard Locke, the Sun employee who wrote them, later claimed satirical intent. The paper never published a retraction. Some readers died believing in lunar bat-people. ## Nazis on the Moon A conspiracy theory that emerged in the mid-twentieth century and has demonstrated considerable cultural persistence holds that the Nazi government established a lunar base by 1942, and that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped to it in 1945 rather than dying in the Berlin bunker. The theory has a factual hook: a V-2 rocket test in 1942 did exceed the boundary that later definitions would use to mark the edge of space. German rocketry was genuinely advanced. The theory then extrapolates from this to infrastructure that would have required resources, materials, and launch capabilities several orders of magnitude beyond anything the Nazi programme possessed. The irony is that Nazis technically do exist on the moon in a more literal sense. Lunar craters have been named after Wernher von Braun and Kurt H. Debus — both Nazi Party and SS members who were brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip after the war. Von Braun contributed to the V-2 programme before contributing to the Saturn V rocket. Debus transitioned from Nazi weapons test director to Kennedy Space Center's first director in 1963. Both claimed their party membership was pragmatic rather than ideological. ## The Hollow Moon In 1969, the Apollo 12 mission deliberately crashed rocket components into the lunar surface to test seismic monitoring equipment. NASA scientists reported that the moon "rang like a bell for almost an hour" after the impact. This observation was accurate, and it has been used ever since to support the theory that the moon is hollow. The seismic response of the lunar surface is, in fact, different from what you would observe on Earth — slower wave propagation, longer duration. Scientists attribute this to the moon's composition and internal structure, which differs substantially from Earth's. What the hollow moon theory requires — a significant void inside the moon large enough to produce the observed resonance — is inconsistent with what we know about how the moon formed and the density measurements that have been taken. The moon is less dense than Earth, but not hollow. The "ringing" is real. The inference drawn from it is not well-supported. ## The Alien Spaceship Theory The hollow moon hypothesis branches naturally into a more ambitious version: the moon is not merely hollow but artificial — a vessel constructed by an unknown intelligence, either placed in Earth's orbit deliberately or encountered by our planet in the distant past. Two Soviet scientists, Michael Vasin and Alexander Shcherbakov, published a paper in 1970 arguing that the flatness of lunar crater bottoms was inconsistent with natural meteorite impact. Large impacts should produce deep craters; instead, the craters are shallow relative to their diameter. The scientists argued this implied an armoured shell beneath the surface — a shell that would absorb impacts before they could penetrate to the hollow interior. The crater-depth argument has a less exotic explanation: the moon's gravity is sufficient to cause surface flow of ejected material back into craters over geological time, and the composition of the lunar crust affects how impact energy is absorbed and distributed. But the spaceship theory has proven more memorable than the geological explanation. ## The Hologram At the far end of the lunar conspiracy spectrum is the claim that the moon is not a physical object at all but a projection — a hologram created either by governments (to conceal spending), by aliens (to deceive us about our cosmic situation), or by whoever is running the simulation we apparently inhabit. The hologram theory gained its most committed modern advocate in former Coventry City goalkeeper and professional conspiracy theorist David Icke, who proposed that the moon is an artificial body amplifying signals from Saturn's rings, projected by entities he describes as "lizard people," and transmitting a false reality into human brains. Icke arrived at this conclusion, by his own account, without consultation with astronomers or physicists. Backyard astronomers report "glitches" in the moon's appearance as evidence. These observations are generally attributable to atmospheric interference, equipment issues, or confirmation bias — the tendency to notice and remember observations that fit an existing belief while discounting those that don't. ## What These Myths Reveal The moon is, in fact, a large rock orbiting Earth, formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago in a collision between the proto-Earth and a Mars-sized body. It has been visited by twelve human beings. Its surface has been mapped in extraordinary detail. None of this has substantially reduced the production of lunar mythology. What the myths share is a consistent structure: the moon is visible but unreachable (historically), observed but not understood, familiar but alien. Into that gap between what can be seen and what can be known, human imagination inserts meaning. The bat-people of 1835, the Nazi bunker of popular culture, the alien spaceship of Soviet speculation — all are expressions of the same cognitive tendency to find, or invent, significance in the night sky's most prominent feature. ## Key Takeaways - The moon-as-cheese metaphor dates to 1546 and was always a joke about credulity, not a literal belief. - The Great Moon Hoax of 1835 ran in the New York Sun, described bipedal beavers and bat-people, and briefly made the paper the most-read in the world. - Named lunar craters commemorate two former Nazi Party and SS members — Wernher von Braun and Kurt Debus — who later led American space programmes. - The Apollo 12 seismic experiment genuinely produced unusual resonance readings; the hollow-moon interpretation of those readings is not supported by density measurements. - The moon hologram theory requires dismissing or explaining away the observations of thousands of amateur and professional astronomers; it has no evidentiary support.