Mars and Martians. They go together in the public's mind. The Earthling fascination with "alien invaders" goes back a long time. But why? And what does it say about all of us here on Earth? Dean explores this cultural phenomenon with David Baron, author of The Martians.
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Episode Transcript:
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Dean Regas: Mars and Martians. They go together in the public's mind, don't they? Our idea of alien invaders goes way back.
[Appointment on Mars, 1952]: And now, CH Maslin presents Act One of Tonight’s tale of tomorrow: Appointment on Mars starring Leslie Neilson.
Dean Regas: There were even some writers in the Renaissance who hypothesized about what was happening on distant planets. Mercury. Aliens are definitely hot blooded. Venusians are mysterious, and Martians are warlike.
[Red Planet Mars, 1952]: There it is, the red planet Mars. For over 2000 years, the symbol of war.
Dean Regas: These stereotypes were based on the limited info astronomers had at that time. Mercury is closest to the sun, so yeah. All right. Venus is shrouded in clouds, so mysterious. Mars. Well, Mars was just, well, to put it mildly, frustrating.
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas. And this is Looking Up, the show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today is David Baron, author of American Eclipse and his newest book called The Martians.
So David Baron, my guest today, is going to do way better at this, but I want to give you my version of Earthling Martian history. How are changing observations of this little red planet also change how we view life there.
So back in the 1600s, the invention of the telescope led astronomers to see planets completely differently. And since the planets looked round like Earth, maybe they weren't balls of fire like the sun and stars, but were worlds. Worlds you could actually visit!
And then enter. Writers. Writers with imagination, more so than scientists, took the little scraps of knowledge and crafted them into science fiction. There were stories about aliens from all of the planets, but it wasn't until the 19th century that telescopes got good enough to add more to the stories, to take sci-fi into the modern age...
[The War of the Worlds, 1953]: This could be the beginning of the end for the human race. For what men first thought were meteors are the often ridiculed flying saucers, are in reality the flaming vanguard of the invasion from Mars.
Dean Regas:...Or at least narrow down the places where life might exist. And all signs pointed to one place: Mars.
David Baron: Hi, my name is David Baron. I'm a science writer, and my latest book is called The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.
Dean Regas: Well, David, thanks so much for joining me today.
David Baron: Thank you, Dean.
Dean Regas: So I would say it's safe to say that people over the centuries have done some unbelievably terrific PR work for the planet Mars, right? I mean, this little red planet has definitely captured our imaginations. And so if we want to think really far back, what did people think about Mars like before the invention of the telescope and maybe even during the first century using a telescope?
David Baron: Right. Well, so Mars has been a mystery for a very long time. I mean, in ancient times when it was just this strange reddish light in the sky, it was different from the other celestial objects. Every couple of years it would flare into brilliance. I mean, you just couldn't ignore it in the sky, and then it would fade away into the background stars. So it seemed like this strange kind of omen, and the fact that it was the color of blood made it attached to perhaps violence or war.
By the 18th and 19th century, when astronomers could make out the surface of Mars, it looked sort of Earthlike. It had dark areas that looked like oceans and light areas that looked like continents.
Astronomers figured out that it turned on its axis in about 24 hours, a little bit longer than the day length on Earth. But the patterns on the surface were long a mystery, and they really captured the imagination by the late 19th century.
Dean Regas: Well, and then enter Percival Lowell, the founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and avid planet hunter — tell us his background and how he became like the Martian hype man.
David Baron: Absolutely right. He really was that. So Percival Lowell was a fascinating character. He was an aristocratic Bostonian. For a while, he traveled the world as kind of an anthropologist, but as he approached the age of 40, he decided to become an astronomer. He had the funds to create his own observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona — the Lowell Observatory — and he founded it specifically to study the planet Mars because he knew of astronomers in Europe who were seeing things on Mars that suggested the possibility of a civilization on Mars, these strange lines on Mars that were unexplained. And Lowell decided he was going to be the one to come up with the explanation. And boy did he ever.
Dean Regas: Well, and so I've seen through a lot of old refracting telescopes and looked at Mars during oppositions, like when it's the closest approach to the planet. And I gotta say, my eyes are, they're definitely playing tricks on me. I think I see lines, which I can imagine are canals, and green patches could be forests, and then it's like the shapes change and morph away. And I think, did I really see that? So, it's so tantalizing. Like Mars was this tease in the late 19th century.
David Baron: Exactly. And so Lowell was seeing what you were seeing.These strange straight lines on Mars that would come and go with the seasons, it seemed. And now, it was an earlier astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli in Italy, who in 1877 first reported these straight lines. He figured they were waterways of some sort. He called them canali, which in Italian means channels. It was promptly mistranslated as canals in English.
However, Percival Lowell, trying to explain these strange lines on Mars, decided they were canals after all — not shipping canals, but irrigation canals. That, in essence, the Martians had created this global irrigation network to survive on a planet that was pretty much running out of water. All the water that was left was tied up in the polar ice caps, and so the Martians, in order to hang on, were tapping the melt-water in the spring in each hemisphere, bringing the water down to their farms and their cities.
And it was a theory that started out as kind of an interesting idea that captured the public's imagination. But the remarkable thing is by 1907, he had pretty much convinced the world that this was true. You could open The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal in 1906, 1907, and read in all seriousness about the Martian civilization, the canals on Mars, and even attempts to communicate with the Martians. But the biggest thing he did that changed our society was he really got the public excited about outer space.
This period I write about — this Mars craze at the turn of the last century — is what pushed science fiction to become what it would become in the 20th century.
[War of the Worlds, 1938]: There’s something happening, some shape is rising out of the pit. And then they’ve got a small beam of light against a mirror...
Dean Regas: So H.G. Wells comes in and writes The War of the Worlds about a Martian invasion of Earth. And so does this become kind of like the long-lasting blueprint for Mars sci-fi and kind of what we think of aliens today?
David Baron: You know, it's really interesting because The War of the Worlds, which was published in book form in 1898, is, I would say, the best-known piece of Mars fiction to come out of the era that I write about in my book. And so, when I started doing research, I imagined that that must reflect what the people at the time thought of the Martians — that they were these hideous monsters that we needed to fear, that might come to Earth to conquer our planet.
The remarkable thing is even though that was such a popular idea in fiction, that was not what people at the time thought. Indeed, the supposed real Martians, according to the folks at the time, including Percival Lowell, were these almost angelic creatures that were more highly moral and peaceful. It was a civilization that we should aspire to become. Indeed, they were often portrayed — the Martians — with wings, as if they were angels.
So H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds did establish a sub-genre of science fiction — the alien invasion novel — but the remarkable thing is that's not what the people at the time thought about the Martians. They were not afraid of the Martians.On the contrary, the idea was if we could get in contact with the Martians, they might end up being our saviors.
Dean Regas: Well, and then we fast-forward to the space age, and then some of the spacecraft start flying by Mars and getting some actual pictures. No canals, no cities. What did those flybys kind of do to this Martian mythos?
David Baron: Yeah. So there were a lot of people at the time who were very disappointed to see what a bleak landscape Mars was, because in the imagination it was this land of fantasy...
[Planet Mars, 1979]: Viking’s instruments failed to detect organic compounds of any kind. That fact, in the opinion of some observers has increased the odds against the existence of living organisms on mars.
David Baron: And even after Percival Lowell's theory had pretty well been debunked, through much of the 20th century it was still believed that Mars had life — perhaps just lichen or plants. And there still was this sense that even if the lines weren't canals, there must be something to explain these straight lines that people were seeing all over Mars.
David Baron: And yet those first flybys in the 1960s found nothing resembling a canal, no straight lines at all, no signs of life — just a cratered landscape.
[Planet Mars, 1979]: But on the basis of just a few experiments done at only two sites, very bland sites on the planet, I think it would be unscientific for us to come to that conclusion. All we can really say for sure is that we have come across some very interesting chemistry, the kind of chemistry we do not see in surface samples from the earth or surface samples from the moon, and that's about where we are at the moment.
David Baron: So in the end, what Lowell was seeing was nothing more than optical illusions. It was looking at a planet at the very limit of perception, where what you're seeing are naturalistic features — maybe stippling or shading — that the eye is trying to make sense of, is looking for patterns, and the eye connects the dots. And it wasn't until we had better ways of imaging Mars, getting closer, that the optical illusions went away.
Dean Regas: To put it another way, another one of your themes, I think, in your book kind of highlights that our thoughts about Martians really say more about us than what we actually knew about Martians.
David Baron: No question. So really, a lot of my book — even though it's called The Martians — it's really about humans. What was it about the people at that time, the turn of the last century — what we remember as the Gilded Age — that made them want to believe in the Martians?
There was a lot. It was a time of glamor for very few. This was a time of great divide between the rich and the poor. It was a time of labor unrest. There was anarchism in Europe assassinations of heads of state, including President William McKinley, killed in 1901 by an anarchist. There was a feeling that society was falling apart, and the idea that there was a better world next door was something very appealing.
But it was more than that as well. For several centuries at that point, science had been undermining traditional religious belief — certainly Christian belief. It was hard to see where there was room for God anymore. From Copernicus to Galileo to Newton to Darwin, you had scientists explaining with natural laws the workings of the universe. So where was there room for God?
And suddenly, Percival Lowell has said we've got these superhuman beings on the world next door that could answer all our questions. They could become stand-ins for God. There was serious discussion about getting in contact with the Martians, communicating with them. And there was this wonderful newspaper article I found from 1909 that was published in a number of papers. It was headlined “Questions Mars Might Answer.”
Now, you might think we would be asking them questions about technology — how to build a better airplane; you know, the Wright brothers were just starting — or how to build canals. And yet the questions on this list were the most basic questions about our existential existence. The questions on this list — they were these existential, religious questions: What is the meaning of life? How can we prevent human suffering? Where does the soul go when you die?
These were the questions people had for the Martians. And I think that speaks to why people wanted to believe in the Martians — because they were going to be looking out for us. They were going to become the new guardian angels overseeing the Earth.
Dean Regas: Well, it's a great read and a great story. David, thanks so much for joining today and sharing a little bit about your book and your research.
David Baron: Thanks, Dean. It was a lot of fun to write the book, and great to talk to you about it.
Dean Regas: So Martian mania swept the country and the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and it's amazing that it's still with us. But I gotta say, man, Mars is such a tease.
Dave and I talked about it a bit in the interview, but the early space missions that flew past Mars really stopped the Martian craze. And then the fleet of Mars orbiters like Mars Odyssey, Mars Express and others that have been working for decades — by the way — they revealed something different: old lake beds and riverbeds.
And in 1996, President Bill Clinton announced that we have a Mars rock...
[President Bill Clinton]: More than four billion years ago, this piece of rock was formed as a part of the original crust of Mars.
Dean Regas:...And it has life in it.
[President Bill Clinton]: Rock 84001 speaks to us across all of those billions of years and millions of miles. It speaks of the possibility of life.
Dean Regas: Well, fossilized life. Well, microscopic bacteria-like fossilized life. Well, OK, maybe it's not life, but it sure looks like life. OK, well, most scientists now think it's not life. But what a ride that little rock took us on, that's for sure.
[President Bill Clinton]: Its implications are as far-reaching and awe-inspiring as can be imagined.
Dean Regas: We sure do have a tendency — even scientists — to look for an alien explanation. I'm not saying it's aliens, but we sure have been saying it's aliens for hundreds of years.
Looking Up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen and Carlos Lopez Cornu produce and edit our show and are totally freaked out after I told them I think aliens are not 3 to 6 feet tall, but instead microscopic and are probably in the studio right now. Probably all over the soundboard.
Our Jenell Walton is our vice president of content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platforms manager. Our theme song is “Possible Light” by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah Pflum, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up!
Additional credits: Some songs featured in this episode: "Seeds of Martian Life" by Algol, "Single Litter" by Blue Dot Sessions, "Heroes" by Piotr Hummel, and "Corns A Poppin'" by Jerry Wallace and Cora Rice.
