Reflecting Historic on Dr. Dre’s Great Planet Hoax

In the last days of August, 1835, the New York Sun serialized an article published in the Edinburgh Journal of Science, in which a certain Dr. Andrew Grant described the astonishing life on the Moon rendered visible by the “extreme powers” of “a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle.” He told of snowy volcanoes, ruby forests, crystal rivers and fertile valleys populated by horned bears, tribes of tailless biped beavers and an angel-like race of bat-people which he dubbed the Homo Vespertilio. Dr. Grant’s work was credited to his boss, astronomer Sir John Herschel, until it was discovered that Herschel had nothing to do with the article and that he had never heard of a Dr. Grant because this Dr. Andrew Grant didn’t exist. After some frantic searching and speculation within the scientific community, a new name surfaced.

Richard Adams Locke, a poet and journalist living in New York City, was tracked down as the culprit. Locke, who was said to be a descendant of the other Locke, never admitted to the public that he’d authored the article, though he mused on the “lunarians” among his friends with such persistence that they finally pinned him as the author and revealed their conclusion to the press. Pressed to reveal what they knew about the facts and the fictions of the work, Benjamin Day, publisher of the Sun, refused to admit even the possibility that the story had been a hoax. The scientific community was in an uproar. A student remembered the commotion the article had sparked at Yale University:

Yale College was alive with staunch supporters. The literati–students and professors, doctors in divinity and law–and all the rest of the reading community, looked daily for the arrival of the New York mail with unexampled avidity and implicit faith. Have you seen the accounts of Sir John Herschel’s wonderful discoveries? Have you read the Sun? Have you heard of the news of the man in the Moon? These were the questions that met you every where. It was the absorbing topic of the day. Nobody expressed or entertained a doubt as to the truth of the story.

When all was said and done, Day was able to pronounce that his newspaper, which was hardly known before the publication of the serial, now “possessed the largest circulation of any newspaper in the world: 19, 360.” The Sun‘s popularity remained, but with nobody to support or deny the controversial article, interest for the issue waned and nearly everyone forgot about the people on the Moon. Nearly, but not all.

One young writer in Baltimore was particularly peeved that this “moon-hoax-y” tale, as fantastic as it was rudimentary in its “ratiocination,” had absorbed the world while his own Lunarian hoax, more “original” in its “application of scientific principles,” published three weeks earlier in the Southern Literary Messenger, had been utterly ignored. The 26-year old Edgar Allan Poe wrote that:

Indeed, however rich the imagination displayed in [Locke's] ingenious fiction, it wanted much of the force which might have been given it by a more scrupulous attention to facts and to general analogy. That the public were misled, even for an instant, merely proves the gross ignorance which is so generally prevalent upon subjects of an astronomical nature.

His article, titled “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfall,” describes a trip to the moon in a balloon–attending with detail to the engineering of the flying machine and the analysis of the space trajectory to Earth’s ancient satellite.

August again, 185 years later, another Dr. has surfaced to tell us that he has made contact with our neighbor planets and is preparing a grand dissertation on their personalities and peculiarities. In an interview in this month’s issue of Vibe Magazine, Dr. Dre says:

An instrumental album is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. I have the ideas for it. I want to call it The Planets. I don’t even know if I should be saying this, but fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like. I’m gonna go off on that. Just all instrumental. I’ve been studying the planets and learning the personalities of each planet. I’ve been doing this for about two years now just in my spare time so to speak. I wanna do it in surround sound. It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work.

His interpretation? It’ll have to be in surround sound for Saturn to work? Did we ever know our elder and original jazz space-traveler to require “surround sound for Saturn to work?” I am tempted by Dre’s pronouncement, although, despite his enthusiasm for the subject, I must remain deeply disbelieving. Chronic 2001–replete with the D.P.G.C. sound but somehow caught between Nate Dogg’s .44 and a Florentine Gardens clubby sound–was already a step away from the more extraterrestrial, Funkadelic-backed grooves of the original Chronic, 1992. His next big project, Detox, has been in the works since then. Are we now to believe that, in his spare time, he will be transmitting the celestial music of the spheres?

This Dr., born Andre Romelle Young, might do otherwise to gain greater “plausibility in the details of the voyage itself.” Has he, for instance, considered the appearance of things below when looking from above–that the Earth remains a concavity until a certain distance from it is reached? And that, once we reach that height, the celestial roads pull away from the inward globe into a separation from the isolated spheroid that is analogous to an egg being shaped out of the entire field of vision? “Fuck it. [Laughs.] It’s just my interpretation of what each planet sounds like.“

No, Dr., this hoax will not have a second life. Travel to the heliocentric worlds is no longer so easily fictionalized. Not when we have had reliable transmission from them and from galaxies far beyond this one. Still, we await the Dr.’s results.

Hear Ra and His Astro Galactic Infinity Arkestra’s “Journey to Saturn”