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You'll never guess what happened! There was a balloon hoax! Ha ha, but not the one you're thinking of! This one was in 1844! And perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe! I feel that this is bizarre: In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe published a completely fictitious article in The Sun newspaper in New York about
a lighter-than-air balloon trip by famous European balloonist Monck Mason across the Atlantic Ocean taking 75 hourswith the headline
- ASTOUNDING NEWS!
- BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:
- THE ATLANTIC CROSSED
- IN THREE DAYS!
- SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF
- MR. MONCK MASON'S
- FLYING MACHINE!!!
I read Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket a while ago. It had a few interesting parts, but a lot of it was rather dry, as Poe really did not want to write a novel and had borrowed long, boring descriptions of like boating procedure from Jeremiah Reynolds' Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas to fill space. I seem to remember reading that somewhere, anyways. Audiences at the time thought this made the story more believable. Also, it's kind of like From Dusk till Dawn in that there is kind of a continuous narrative, but the story is very disjointed. In Pym, they travel to the North Pole (or was it the South Pole? Who can keep those straight?), and I guess at the time people had not been to either pole, so it was conceivable to them that ... well, I won't give away the excitement, but some crazy, exciting stuff happened. And yeah, they were confused as to whether it was real or not, kind of like the people who thought The Blair Witch Project was real. Okay, I don't remember why I'm talking about Pym anymore. It just seemed related. Also tangentially related: Five Myths that People Don't Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, including the Priory of Scion.
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