FAIR
Did Joseph Smith say the moon was inhabited by people dressed like Quakers?
FAIR Latter-day Saints
The line comes from Oliver B. Huntington. In 1881 he wrote that Philo Dibble had described Joseph talking about lunar inhabitants — about six feet tall, Quaker-style dress, living near a thousand years. Huntington was remembering Dibble remembering something from roughly the 1830s–40s. That is third-hand, forty to fifty years late, with no contemporary diary from Joseph, no sermon, no revelation. Huntington later published a version in the Young Woman’s Journal (1892) and tied it to his own 1837 patriarchal blessing about preaching to ‘inhabitants of the moon.’ A blessing remembered that way is still not a First Presidency letter. 19th-century astronomers, including William Herschel, openly guessed that the moon and even the sun were inhabited. Brigham Young’s later remark about the sun belongs in that same popular cosmology, not in the canon. The Church has never taught moon-Quakers as doctrine. Apollo did not falsify a standard work we never had.
A late third-hand journal is not a prophecy. It is a 19th-century rumor with Quaker clothing on it.
- One source. Decades late. Not Joseph’s hand. Not in the Standard Works.
- Famous Christian scientists of that century said similar things about the moon.
- Deuteronomy 18 tests speech in the Lord’s name — not a cousin’s memory of a conversation.