Mystery of the Crazy Moon

For hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, people believed that the full moon caused insanity. Police and other emergency people swore that when the moon was full, they were busy.
The fact that the full moon caused insanity was well known. For centuries, stories were made up and told of vampires, werewolves, and other “people“ who became animals under a full moon. These stories came about because everyone knew that Luna made one loony. They saw it with their own eyes, felt it themselves. This made the werewolf and vampire stories even scarier.
But then in the end of the twentieth century, statisticians studied it and made a discovery: the full moon doesn’t, in fact, drive people crazy.
So the question becomes not “why does the moon make people insane” but rather why they thought that in the first place? Because it was a fact, a certainty. An unassailable truth.
Why was this believed so strongly? Perhaps reality changed?
Reality has, indeed, changed in the last century. When I was a kid, at night the sky was full of stars, and the Milky Way was a beautiful streak across the night sky. Today you have to be in a huge desert or an ocean to see the milky way. I now see few stars, the brightest being the International Space Station.
Reality has changed. In the last century we have gone from horses to cars, from oil lamps to hot tungsten to LEDs, from universal darkness on a moonless night to where it’s no brighter under a full moon than no moon.
And today nobody sleeps well and everybody is crazy. You can’t go where you already are.
9/25/2025