That Time New York Fell For A Moon-Goat
"This is a most extraordinary affair! Pray, what does it mean?"
Hello from Everything Is Amazing, a science newsletter obsessed with the power of curiosity and kindness and joyful stupidity and what you feel when you see pillars of light that aren’t actually there, and - oh blimey, who knows, really? Throw me a stick and watch me go.
In this Sunday edition for paid subscribers, we’re going back two centuries to look at one of America’s most gleefully absurd and shamelessly opportunistic scientific hoaxes.
But first - I will never miss an opportunity to point you towards yet another example of my favourite visual bias, pareidolia, the “Woah, I can see a face in this random object!” cognitive glitch (or anthropomorphic superpower to help us train our empathy, as I tried to argue here).
Here’s an absolute cracker of an example.
In 2016, Easyjet passenger Nick O'Donoghue was startled to see this from 30,000ft - a figure apparently walking along the top of the clouds:
Zooming in only makes it creepier:
On reddit, a pilot explained:
"It's a factory's exhaust rising up through a low overcast. There must be a low level inversion and the smokestack gets the hot exhaust above the inversion. Beautiful pic! (I've seen this a couple times as a pro pilot)".
Atmospheric science to the rescue!
But I bet all of us would pay good money to be able to believe, just for a thrilling moment, that giants are real and the reason we don’t see them is because they walk on the sides of the clouds facing away from us.
Secondly: our Solar System has a new alien visitor!
Astronomer Phil Plait explains:
“On July 1, 2025, astronomers with ATLAS, the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, were alerted that a new object was detected moving across the sky. This was no ordinary space rock though: its trajectory and velocity indicated it was not from our solar system. In other words, it’s coming from another star, across the gulf of interstellar space!”
It’s moving a mindboggling 58 kilometres a second (that’s *gulp* over 200 thousand kilometres an hour), there’s no danger of it hitting us since it’s passing outside the orbit of Mars - and you can read Phil’s writeup of it here.
Okay! Today I’m rerunning an EiA piece that first went out in 2022 as a sort of sequel to this piece on a ludicrous newspaper hoax from the 1970s…
So I’d like to remind you of that deeply special year when a sizeable part of New York became convinced there were goats on the Moon.