"I HAVE much to say about the climate of the planet, about its wonderful alternation of heat and cold, with unmitigated and burning sunshine for one fortnight and more than polar frigidity for the next, and about the people, their ugliness, and their want of ears, these being useless appendages in an atmosphere so peculiar modified."
The "planet" in question was the moon, and the reporter was the eponymous hero of Edgar Allen Poe's story, The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall. It was written in the 1830s, and is interesting for its insights into the meteorological notions of the time.
Hans Pfaall was a bellowsminder of the town of Rotterdam who found himself in financial difficulties and decided, as is not uncommon even nowadays, that he might be better off elsewhere. He manufactured a balloon, which he launched with the aid of "a gas never yet generated by any other person than myself whose density is about 34.7 times less than that of hydrogen." He was aware that the atmosphere becomes less dense with height, and that this might inhibit his ambition to rise indefinitely, but he theorised that the air would not die away completely before he had risen sufficiently high for the attraction of the earth to be superseded by that of the moon. He could then simply drift down to what he hoped might be a more hospitable world than the one he left behind.
After 17 days, and 7,254 miles above the earth, Hans awoke after a short sleep to find that "the earth below had suddenly and inexplicably increased in volume. Thunderstruck, he thought the balloon had burst, but then discovered that the real earth was now above his head, and that the body below him was in fact the moon: "The bouleversement in itself was not only natural and inevitable, but had been long actually anticipated. Whenever I should arrive at the exact point in my voyage where the attraction of the planet should be superseded by the attraction of the satellite."
Two days later he was there: "I was now close upon the planet and coming down with the most terrible impetuosity. The whole country as far as the eye could see was thickly interspersed with diminutive habitat ions, and I tumbled into a vast crowd of ugly looking people, who none of them uttered a single syllable or gave themselves the least trouble to render me assistance. Above me, the earth looked like a huge, dull copper shield about 2 degrees in diameter, fixed immovably in the heavens overhead."