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The Men Who Once Lived in the Moon
by Jerome Clark
FATE | May 2008
The prosaic astronomical facts are these:
The Moon, at least 4.5 billion years old, seems to have been formed out of debris from the young Earth’s collision with a slightly smaller celestial body, perhaps about the size of Mars. Its mean distance from the earth is 238,000 miles, and it is 2,160 miles in diameter. A flurry of meteoritic impacts and, later, volcanic activity shaped the bulk of its surface features between 4 and 2.5 million years ago. Since then, the Moon has remained essentially stable except for the now much rarer encounter with a meteorite or comet.
That Moon was not, however, always so. Once upon a time, not all that long ago as the historical calendar goes, it was a far more lively place.
Speculation about life there stretches back to the ancients, whose unaided eyesight led them to discern oceans, land masses, and vegetation on the lunar surface. But in the late Middle Ages, after telescopes were directed toward the Moon, the debate did not end; if anything, it intensified.
In 1638, clergyman and amateur scientist John Wilkins (1614–1672) wrote in his book The Discovery of a World in the Moone: “That those spots and brighter parts which by our sight might be distinguished in the Moon, do show the difference between the Sea and Land of that other World… The spots represent the Sea, and the bright parts Land… That there are high mountains, deep valleys, and spacious plains in the body of the Moon… That there is an atmosphere, or an orb of gross vaporous air, immediately encompassing the body of the Moon… That it is probable there may be inhabitants in this other World, but of what kind they are is uncertain.”
A Theological Imperative
Though many educated and influential men of his time agreed with the premise, others scoffed. Among the believers, though, Wilkins’s contemporary, Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687), a German astronomer and cartographer of the Moon, argued for oceans and “selenites,” as he called the beings who he believed lived on the land areas or continents.
A number of Moon-life advocates took their guidance from a more or less explicitly theological premise which embraced—sometimes demanded—the presence of intelligent entities on all worlds. In the words of James Ferguson (1710–1776), the Scottish autodidact and popular writer on astronomy, God created “an inconceivable number of suns, systems, and Worlds, dispersed through boundless space… From what we know of our own System, it may be reasonably concluded that all the rest are with equal wisdom contrived, situated, and provided with accommodations for rational inhabitants…ten thousand times ten thousand Worlds…peopled with myriads of intelligent beings, formed for endless progression in perfection and felicity.”
In a multi-volume biblical commentary published between 1817 and 1825, the Methodist clergyman Adam Clarke infers from Old Testament references that there “is scarcely any doubt remaining in the philosophical world, that the Moon is a habitable globe… All the planets and their satellites…are inhabited; for matter seems only to exist for the sake of intelligent beings.”
The great astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738–1822), honored for his discovery of Uranus in 1781, believed that life thrived on the Moon. He also thought that he had detected telltale signs of it through his telescope.
In journal entries written in the latter 18th century, Herschel detailed sightings of immense trees, forests, and pastures. By 1778 he was seeing “circuses”—circular formations—which in his estimation represented cities, towns, and villages. Through 1783, canals, roads, and patches of vegetation caught his eye, or at least his imagination. None of this appeared in any of his published work, however, probably because in time Herschel grew more sensitive to the limitations of the telescopes of his time and entertained doubts about what he had actually seen. Telescopes had played “many tricks” on him, he confided to a friend. From then on, when he talked of extraterrestrials, he made no claim to eyewitness validation of his own.
Lunar Structures
In an 1824 paper boldly titled “Discovery of Many Distinct Traces of Lunar Inhabitants, Especially of One of Their Colossal Buildings,” German astronomer Franz von Paula Gruithuisen (1774–1852) argued for vegetation, which he said he had seen, and for animals. He did not claim to have seen the latter but to have observed the paths they left in their migrations; the animals travel “from 50° northern latitude up to 37° or possibly 47° southern latitude.” Gruithuisen reserved the most sensational revelations for the third part of his paper, where he outlined observations of lunar structures: walls, forts, roads, cities. A structure with a starlike shape was surely a religious temple.
