According to the New York Sun, it was a "new theory of cometary phenomena." Apparently, an astronomer named Sir John Herschel had not only discovered new planets orbiting other stars, he had "solved or corrected nearly every leading problem of mathematical astronomy."

The most exciting of these new astronomical discoveries: life on the moon.

It turns out that not only had Herschel not actually found life on the moon or cracked the entire field of mathematical astronomy, he wasn't even aware of these alleged discoveries, much less that they had been linked to him.

http://www.businessinsider.com/biggest-scientific-hoaxes-history-2016-9?IR=T#life-on-the-moon-in-1835-3

 

The police immediately fled (well, what would you do?) But, as you can probably guess based on the title of this article, the UFO wasn’t really from space.

The flying saucer was an almost unbelievably elaborate April Fools’ Day prank by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, whose love of April 1 is well-documented. (In 2011, he claimed that he bought Pluto to reinstate its status as a planet.)

The flying saucer was actually a hot air balloon shaped like a UFO that was supposed to land in London’s Hyde Park on April 1, but because of wind changes, had stopped in a field in Surrey the day before. Branson was on board, along with the silver-clad person who had startled the bobbies.

Mostly yes, but it came with one extra, ugly wrinkle: Twitter is a useful tool for rapidly spreading information during emergencies, and the fake shark post was gumming up the works a bit. When someone brought this to the attention of Michael, he was dismissive. "So twitter is part of the emergency response now Adam? Hold on while I go and bang my head against a wall," Michael tweeted. As of this writing, Michael's original hoax had earned 87,494 retweets.

The show began on Sunday, October 30, at 8 p.m. A voice announced: “The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in ‘War of the Worlds’ by H.G. Wells.”

Sunday evening in 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy “Charlie McCarthy” on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. By then, the story of the Martian invasion was well underway.

Welles introduced his radio play with a spoken introduction, followed by an announcer reading a weather report. Then, seemingly abandoning the storyline, the announcer took listeners to “the Meridian Room in the Hotel Park Plaza in downtown New York, where you will be entertained by the music of Ramon Raquello and his orchestra.” Putrid dance music played for some time, and then the scare began. An announcer broke in to report that “Professor Farrell of the Mount Jenning Observatory” had detected explosions on the planet Mars. Then the dance music came back on, followed by another interruption in which listeners were informed that a large meteor had crashed into a farmer’s field in Grovers Mills, New Jersey.