Is there life outside of Earth? More than a hundred years ago, there was widespread belief that intelligent Martians were an advanced civilization and contact with our interplanetary neighbors was inevitable. Science journalist and author David Baron explores this early fascination with Martians in his new book, THE MARTIANS: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America (Liveright: Aug. 26, 2025), and discusses the many strange and amazing extraterrestrial tales with Weird Historian.
If you’ve been following this site for a while, you know that I, too, am fascinated by the turn-of-the-century Martians. They led me to my 2020 book, The Big Book of Mars. So I was especially delighted to speak with Baron about his discoveries and fascination. Our conversation about intelligent Martians, Percival Lowell and Camille Flammarion’s firm beliefs in them, communication ideas, and much more follows below (or listen on the Weird Historian podcast):
Weird Historian: Nice to speak with you, David! Tell me a little bit about your background and how it led to your discovery of the Martians.
David: Well, so a couple of answers. I’ve been a science journalist my whole career, so going on 40 years. And then I got into writing books. I’ve always been interested in telling science stories in a way that I hope will appeal to people who don’t think they care about science. I suspect you might say the same thing. I look for great characters and great stories that will hopefully carry people along—and I might teach them a little science along the way. So, I’ve written a book back in the early 2000s called The Beast in the Garden. It’s about the growing conflict between people and large predators. It was about a fatal mountain lion attack here in Colorado. But then my second book was American Eclipse and that came out in 2017 and that was a whole different thing where I was writing science history and that’s the true story of a total solar eclipse that crossed America’s Wild West in 1878 and helped inspire America’s rise as a scientific power. But it’s just a fascinating tale of the Wild West and Thomas Edison who was in Wyoming for the eclipse and this all-female expedition from Vasser that came out to Denver in 1878.
So after writing American Eclipse, I was interested in doing science history again and I really was racking my brain to find a good historical tale that had to do with science that maybe would have some connection to the American West where I live and would have some relevance today. And I remembered learning about Percival Lowell when I was a kid. And it took me a while to remember how I learned of it. And it was from Carl Sagan in his Cosmos series on TV back in 1980. And so I always knew that there was this guy named Percival Lowell who convinced himself and a good portion of the public that Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings. And when that popped into my head, I thought, well, that’s a story that has relevance today for number of reasons and the more I looked into it the more fascinated I became.
Marc: Yeah, Percival Lowell’s story is an amazing one. As you began researching Lowell, did you start to uncover other Martian stories in the periphery, or did you know some of the others happening in that same era?
David: So I knew that Nicola Tesla had come to Colorado sometime in the late 1890s and thought he got radio signals from Mars. So that was also in the back of my head. But what really did it for me—having spent several years writing my previous book, American Eclipse, where I spent months just looking through old newspapers—was doing a search on Martians in some digital databases of newspapers from the turn of the last century. It just all came alive because here were these full-page articles with banner headlines proclaiming the existence of the Martians and all sorts of things, how the Martians were sending us signals and attempts to communicate back with them. And the stories of these supposed canals—a lot of it was in the so-called yellow press, the tabloid press, but there it was in the New York Times in 1906. And that’s what really convinced me that this is a forgotten part of history.
This appropriate for your website, this weird bit of history that has ripples that have come down to today. And when I was a kid in the 1960s, I grew up with Martians. They were in Bugs Bunny cartoons. There was Marvin the Martian. There was a sitcom called My Favorite Martian that my family watched. They were Martians and comic books and sci-fi novels. And this is where they came from. Before they were staples of science fiction, not that long ago, they were really thought to be scientific fact.
WH: Yeah, it really is incredible that this was front page news around the world. It wasn’t even just focused here. I also had known about Tesla when I first started discovering the Martians, and I started looking at newspaper archives for stories about him to actually write for this site when I first started it. And before I found the stories on Tesla I was looking for, I stumbled across a story about a guy in London who was telepathically communicating with a Martian woman in 1926. And I was like, “What is this? What?!” So I dug into that and I got so absorbed in it. And then I kind of found all these other stories going on as well—like you said, a forgotten part of history. This was just like a common belief amongst the most respected scientists.
One thing I found fascinating—and I’m curious if you found the same thing—is that I grew up always knowing about the War of the Worlds panic from 1938 with the Orson Wells version on the radio. And that to me as a kid was ridiculous. How could anyone believe Martians landed? They fled in the streets? This just sounded silly. But all of a sudden you realize like that they had been primed for decades with front page headlines on the New York Times, as you said, in other newspapers from well-respected scientists that Martians were there and they were intelligent trying to communicate with us. With that context, aside with other things going on during the period, it doesn’t seem so crazy anymore.
David: Absolutely. Yeah, there was one thing that I actually left out of my book. I had thought at one point about opening my book in 1938 but it just felt a little too cliched. But I had ended up tracking down a man who must have been well into his eighties—a guy who was a kid at the time and told me about how they lived in Newark and they fled their home. There actually have been people lately who have been saying the whole 1938 panic was overblown, that people really didn’t flee. They did! Maybe not in the numbers that people tend to think, but here this family really fled and yeah, it makes perfect sense. I quote in my book this woman who wrote a letter to Orson Wells afterwards, chastising him for making her so scared, but explaining why she was so scared because didn’t scientists say that there were canals on Mars? So, yeah, it was not that crazy.
WH: I also love the fact that so many people missed the beginning of that broadcast when Welles announced it was a dramatization because they were listening to a ventriloquist on the radio.
David: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Exactly.
WH: What?! Now, that’s weird. Was there a particular theory on ways we could contact Martians or receive their messages that really stood out to you?
David: Well, there were quite a few. A lot of them were visual. The one that Camille Flammarion, the French scientist, talked about explores how would you establish contact with another planet where you have no idea what kind of language they have. But he was saying, well, one thing that presumably any intelligent civilization would know about is geometry. So why don’t we communicate with geometry? You know, with a giant array of lights on the earth that trace out a circle and then we’d see if they showed us a circle back and then we would do a square and maybe they would reply with a square and then we would do a triangle. You’re not communicating very much, but at least you’re communicating, “Hello, we really exist.”
So that was one idea. But there was this idea that a Harvard astronomer had to put together a whole array of mirrors to reflect sunlight toward Mars and to use Morse code flashing dots and dashes. Not that the Martians would know what that meant.
Then the most obvious thing was radio, which is of course what Nikola Tesla was proposing and what he actually thought he received, which were radio signals from the Martians. And the thing is that folks at the time thought it was crazy that radio signals could go all the way from Mars to the Earth, which of course today we know of course we do that all the time sending back images from our rovers on Mars. So people didn’t believe him in part because they wondered how radio signals go that far.
WH: I always liked the idea of using the universal language of mathematics to somehow show there’s intelligence here.
David: Also, I should say, of course, is that lot of people believed in telepathy at the time and there was thought we could communicate with the Martians telepathically and there were people who thought they were doing that. So that was also certainly talked about as a suggestion for how we would communicate with the Martians.
WH: Yeah, there was thought that Martians communicated telepathically, I think, because of the thin atmosphere and using antenna to transmit thoughts would be easier that having a voice be transmitted.
David: Well, I hadn’t heard about. It may be true, but there was this lingering idea that Martians might actually be the souls of dead humans. That was an idea that Camille Flammarion in France wrote about. So perhaps they were disembodied souls or maybe they had bodies there, but they had gone across from one planet to the other just as spirits and so maybe we could communicate with them that way.
WH: Yeah. Well, as long as we’re talking about spiritualism, I did want to ask you a little bit about that. What are your thoughts on why Martians appealed not only to scientists but to spiritualists and mystics? I know you mentioned Helene Smith, the medium, who claimed to have visited Mars and was writing in a Martian language. What needs or hopes do you think people were projecting onto Mars at that time?
David: This was one of those subjects—and you probably found the same thing—where the deeper I went the more fascinating it became. It just became richer and richer. And when I started out it all seemed a little silly and whimsical and I would say that is how the public treated it at first. So in the 1890s and maybe the very beginning of the 20th century, a lot of the writing about Mars people weren’t totally sold on. I mean, they thought it might be true, but they thought it was kind of fun. And so Martians appeared in vaudeville skits and Tin Pan Alley songs and people wrote silly poems about them.
But it really turned serious after that. Particularly when Percival Lowell pretty well convinced a lot of serious people that his theory was right. And that’s when it really invaded religion. And I think the reason people were so keen to believe in the Martians is by then, for several centuries, science had been undermining so many traditional religious beliefs, from Galileo to Copernicus to Newton to Darwin, the findings of science seem to be leaving very little room for God. Or at least a God who was intimately involved in our daily affairs. So maybe it was a God who created the universe, but where was there room for God when everything that happened from, you know, physical things and the evolution of species seemed to be explainable by just plain old natural forces? And here came Percival Lowell kind of giving the public back deities, because the Martians, despite what H.G. Wells wrote about, suggesting that the Martians were these evil monsters set out to destroy us, that was not the widespread belief about the Martians. That was really such a small part of it. I mean generally the Martians were seen as highly evolved intellectual, technologically savvy, but also moral and peaceful beings. And here they were, these this superior civilization on the planet next door. And there were a lot of these depictions of the Martians watching us, I mean, literally with their telescopes, keeping an eye on Earth. I think that gave people a great sense of comfort, particularly after traditional religious ideas had been undermined by science. Here, science was giving us back this sense that we weren’t alone and in fact we were being watched over by beings who could perhaps answer life’s mysteries.
I was fascinated when I came across this sidebar article that was read in a number of newspapers. I think it was in 1909. It was a list of questions the Martians might answer. And this is again when there was talk of how we might communicate with the Martians. So what would we ask them? Well, it wasn’t practical things like, “How do you build an airplane?” or “How do you construct a canal?” which would be obvious. It was, “What’s the meaning of life?” and “How do you prevent human suffering?” and “Where does the soul go when you die?” That’s what the Martians were supposed to answer for us.
WH: The mysteries of life!
David: So what started out for me as this sort of fun whimsical story became very profound. I think it really is a story of our great longing not to be alone and wanting to find purpose and meaning in the universe.
WH: That’s really well said. And to your point about the difference of H.G. Wells’s Martians, the evil Martians, versus the more general perception, I found that before War of the Worlds, all the writing was more of projecting Mars as a utopian society. I saw it as a way to say, “Hey, why don’t we act more like them?” The Martians were said to be so devout, and because they were so devout, look how great life was there. So the thought was, if we’re more devout here, things could be better here, too.” It felt like for religious leaders, it was a way to help improve morals and behaviors on Earth.
David: People were projecting onto Mars. I mean this was true of Lowell, projecting onto Mars what he hoped and believed was there as opposed to what was really there. But the general public was doing the same thing. So the question is, how did this craze happen? Well, part of it was because of Percival Lowell and Flammarion and Giovanni Schiaparelli, but why was there this fertile ground where these ideas flourished? And that said more about I think where the public was at the time—that people really wanted to believe it was true.
WH: Yeah, I think so. And as weird as it all is, looking back to me, it’s so important that it all happened and I’m wondering your thoughts on how all that Martian madness ultimately had an impact on science and pop culture.
David: Right. So, on the one hand, it all seems like a silly story, but it had profound effect—profoundly good effects—on the way things developed in the 20th century. So first of all, there was a huge effect on literature. Science fiction emerged from the Martian craze. H.G. Wells was writing what today we would call science fiction in the 1890s, but the modern science fiction came about in the teens and the twenties of the 20th century. And the man who is credited as the father of science fiction is a fellow named Hugo Gernsback, after whom the Hugo Awards are named. And Gernsback said the reason he got excited about outer space and wanting to imagine travel among the stars and so forth was because of reading what Percival Lowell said about Mars when he was a kid. That was true of a lot of folks. The children at the time who just found this so exciting and invigorating this idea of beings on the planet next door and it changed their lives.
The other big fiction of the time, well, one of the big fiction writers of the time was Edgar Rice Burroughs who is most famous for his Tarzan books, but he wrote this whole series about Mars and the adventures of John Carter—an Earthling on Mars. These book, for much of the early 20th century got a lot of kids excited, including Carl Sagan, who attributed his interest in becoming a planetary scientist to reading Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars books that came directly out of Lowell’s view of Mars. So it inspired science fiction. It inspired scientists. It inspired rocketry itself. Robert H. Goddard the father of American rocketry. The man who built the first liquid-fueled rocket was a teen in the 1890s and read The War of the Worlds. And it was that that he attributed his interest in figuring out, well could we actually go to Mars? How would we do it?
So it was that excitement, even though it was excitement about something that wasn’t true in the end, it was that imagining what might be out there that really inspired folks. For instance, I think even today, if we’re ever going to get to Mars, which I hope we will, and I think we will, it’s not ultimately the rocket fuel that’s going to get us there. It’s the enthusiasm and the imagination of the general public. It’s people saying, “Wow, we want to do this.” And that comes from ultimately, Percival Lowell who really lit the fuse of getting people excited about Mars that has filtered down through the generations.
WH: Absolutely. I agree with everything you said and I’ll add one thing going back to the John Carter series you mentioned: John Carter starts in the first book waking up in a cave in Arizona.
David: Yeah. Right.
WH: I always imagine it’s probably just outside of Lowell’s observatory in Flagstaff.
David: Exactly.
WH: Yeah, those influences are pretty amazing. And of course, now we’ve got robots on Mars. So, one more question: Despite all that we’ve learned about Mars that’s different than what was believed a century ago, but also given what we’ve learned about extremophiles, do you think that we may yet find Martians? Just in the very different form than they thought back in those days?
David: It’s absolutely possible. We now know that early in its history, Mars had at least periods when it was quite lush. There’s evidence that there are rivers and lakes on Mars. There’s sedimentary rocks there that were laid down in water. There’s every reason to think that Mars was habitable in its early years. Life emerged on Earth pretty early in Earth’s history. We don’t know how life comes about, but if it came about so quickly on Earth, it could well have come about quickly on Mars. So there may well once have been, again, we’re probably talking about microbes on Mars, and it’s quite possible that those microbes continue to exist today. They probably would be hidden underground somewhere. But it is possible that there are Martians. But even more mind-bending, it is possible that we are all Martians. Because as I say, life may well have emerged on Mars early in its history. We know that there are rocks from Mars that make their way to Earth. And particularly, this would have been true early in both Earth and Mars history when a lot of material was being blasted off the planets and being exchanged. An there is this theory called panspermia that says that life may travel from planet to planet. And so it is possible that if life emerged on Mars before it emerged on Earth and life was transported from Mars to Earth early in its history that Mars may have seeded life here. And so if we do find life on Mars, one of the big things we want to find out is how similar to life on Earth is it? Because if it turns out it’s quite similar, it might suggest that either life on Earth seeded life on Mars or the other way around.
WH: Yeah, it really is fascinating. I like how you were just describing that. I’ve often thought that, too. Maybe life was on Mars way back when and couldn’t thrive the way it’s been able to here. Did it end up here on a meteorite and suddenly it had the environment it needed to grow into us. And maybe we’ll just make our way back home in the end.
David: Lowell, of course, got it all wrong. I don’t mean to suggest that Lowell was some genius who has been proved right today by any means. Obviously, there’s no civilization in it. But it’s interesting that his theory was that Mars had once been a lush, wet planet and it was running out of water.
WH: Yeah.
David: And that actually has turned out to be true. There wasn’t a civilization that grew up there before it started running out of water. And I think it’s just a coincidence that he’s right about that. But it is interesting that he’s right.
WH: I’m hoping at some point they’re able to get beneath the surface and see if they can find something. I was fascinated learning about the Labeled Release experiment on Viking and the positive results for life that Dr. Gil Levin and Pat Straat found. I’d spoken with them and they swore by their data and NASA never repeated those tests. And now we know that there’s ice under the ground. And I know it’s not easily accessible, but the elements are there, at least for microbial life, so could very well be something there. It continues to fascinate and hopefully we’ll find some answers in the near future.
David: Yeah, I hope so.
For much more on this subject, pick up a copy of David Baron’s THE MARTIANS: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.
