In 1906, the New York Times ran the headline, “There is life on the planet Mars.”
It was based on the work of Percival Lowell, a professor who was convinced Mars contained a series of irrigation canals built by a dying civilization.
People packed lecture halls to hear Lowell, of the Boston Brahmin Lowells, who was quite convinced we’d all soon be speaking to Martians.
There were scientists who tried to counter Lowell’s claim, saying he was only seeing what he wanted to see. But the country was convulsed with giddy anticipation and dancing; Orchestras played a new two-step called, “A Signal from Mars.”
Science writer David Baron has written a book about it all: “Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.”
“Mars seems to have a place in our culture beyond the other planets,” Baron says. “It’s a place of adventure and imagination and mystery, and that sent me on this exploration into history.”
6 questions with David Baron
What sent you on your journey to research the Martian craze?
“I was born in the 1960s, and it often seemed like I was surrounded by Martians. I mean, on Saturday morning cartoons, there was Bugs Bunny with Marvin the Martian, who seemed intent on destroying the Earth. There was that sitcom called ‘My Favorite Martian.’ There were Martians in old movies, sci-fi movies. There was Martians in comic books.
“Now I am a science writer. I write about astronomy, and as an adult, I came to wonder, ‘where did that all come from? Where did this general idea that there’s something magical about Mars?’
“And when I started looking at newspapers from the very beginning of the 20th century, my jaw just dropped because here were articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Herald proclaiming the existence of the Martians in all seriousness.”
What sparked the Martian craze?
“So in terms of the Mars portion, some astronomers were reporting these strange straight lines, crisscrossing Mars. An Italian named Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877 first reported them. He called them canali, which meant channels. He thought they were maybe water channels of some sort. It was mistranslated into English as canals.
“But at first, people joked about the idea of canals on Mars. Later, there was a serious idea that there were canals on Mars. But why did people want to believe there were canal-building Martians? Science at that point, for several centuries, had been undermining religious beliefs and a belief in a God who was actively involved in human affairs. From Copernicus to Galileo, to Newton to Darwin, it seemed harder and harder to believe that there was something special about us and that someone was looking out for us. And these Martians were thought to be superhuman. They were beyond us in evolution. They were more moral than us. They were more technologically savvy, and the thought was they were almost guardian angels looking down on us, who, when we could communicate with them, could be our saviors.”
Enter Percival Lowell. How does he become your central character?
“ He came from one of the most storied families in New England, the Lowells, who founded the city of Lowell, Massachusetts. As he approached the age of 40, he became fascinated with Mars. He was reading what some astronomers in Europe were saying about the possibility of life on Mars, and he used his vast fortune to establish an observatory in Arizona. It’s still there, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. And he saw these weird straight lines crisscrossing Mars, and he came up with a theory that in fact, they were canals, not navigation canals, but irrigation canals. Mars, he said, was a dying planet. It was older than Earth. It was losing its water, and as it was drying out. The Martian civilization, in order to survive, had to bring meltwater from the polar ice caps, where all the moisture was left, and bring it down to their desert farms and their cities. It was taken as an interesting idea for a while. But eventually it really settled in as almost proven that this was the case.”
Talk about how this got inflated and how it gave people so much hope.
“Part of it was Percival Lowell was giving people back something that they had lost, which was the idea of these supernatural beings who could become our saviors. There are these wonderful depictions of Martians from the time, some of them winged like angels, actually watching the earth. So that here we are, down having our little lives, imagining that there are these superior beings on the planet next door who could become our saviors. So even though H.G. Wells actually wrote ‘The War of the Worlds’ in the 1890s, and his Martians were these evil creatures come to earth to destroy us and take over the planet. That was not the widespread view of what the supposed real Martians were like. They were beings we should emulate.”
How did the theory crumble?
“In 1909, there was an astronomer in France who, in fact, had been a canalist. He had mapped the canals on Mars but started to question his own vision and whether maybe he was being tricked by his eye. And on a particularly clear night in 1909, when Mars was at its closest approach to Earth in about 15 years, looking through, in fact, the largest telescope in Europe, this astronomer named [Eugène] Antoniadi didn’t see the canals. They vanished, and so the idea started to really build that maybe the lines were never there at all.”
Are we seeing maybe something else play out where we see a huge swath of the country now believing things that aren’t true about, let’s say, vaccines?
“There’s a big debate about climate change, I mean, among the public, if not among scientists. We all have to watch out for our biases. Right? And sorting out what’s true and what isn’t true can be difficult. We all can get caught up in these belief systems and focus on any kind of evidence that supports what we already believe and dismiss anything that’s outside it. It was true back then in terms of believing in the Martians. I’m sure it’s been true forever, as long as there have been humans, and so we have to be careful about getting caught up in ideas without really testing them and being skeptical of our own beliefs.
“But it’s also an inspiring tale. Percival Lowell died in 1916, and at that point, it had pretty well been shown that this whole idea of the Martians was wrong. The obituaries were very forgiving. They were talking about how this was a man who inspired the public to get excited about outer space, even though his Martians never existed. And in fact, it was that Mars craze at the turn of the last century that inspired modern science fiction, that started this whole new literary genre.
“But beyond that, the scientists who took us into outer space did so because of the Mars craze. Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry who built the first liquid-fueled rocket when he was a teen, read H.G. Wells’ ‘The War of the Worlds’ about Mars and thought, ‘I wonder if we could go there?’, and he dedicated his life to coming up with a way to send people eventually into outer space. There are lots of stories like that. The ripples of that crazy time come all the way down to today in terms of laying the groundwork for the space age and for our own ability to get to Mars, perhaps sending people there as soon as the next decade.”
Book excerpt: ‘The Martians’
By David Baron
Excerpted from “The Martians” by David Baron, © 2025. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. All rights reserved.
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Thomas Danielian produced and edited this interview for broadcast with Todd Mundt. Allison Hagan produced it for the web.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
Copyright 2025 WBUR
