American culture was obsessed with Martians in the early 1900s. In a new book, bestselling author David Baron explains how this “alien craze” started with one astronomer in Flagstaff. He spoke with KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny about the power and peril of imagination.
Tell me what made you want to write about this frankly bizarre period in American history when everybody was crazy about Martians.
I was born in the 1960s and I grew up with Martians. I remember as a kid watching Bugs Bunny cartoons on Saturday mornings and there was Marvin the Martian trying to destroy the Earth … Martians were in comic books, of course sci-fi …. And I started to wonder, where did that all come from? ... When I started to look at newspapers from the early part of the 20th century, my jaw just dropped, because before Martians were staples of science fiction they were truly thought to be scientific fact.
Right, and that all traces back to Percival Lowell here in Flagstaff. Tell me the story, how did this all get started?
Percival Lowell founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff in 1894 specifically to study Mars. This was a time when there was a mystery about these lines on Mars. An astronomer in Italy, Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, had seen these strange straight lines on Mars and wondered what they were. He thought they might be natural waterways. He called them canali, which in Italian means channels. It was mistranslated into English as canals. People sort of joked about it.
But when Percival Lowel came along to try to explain these lines on Mars, he came up with a theory that said they really were canals. He had a very elaborate and logically consistent theory that said Mars was inhabited by intelligent beings who were surviving on this planet that was running out of water by tapping the meltwater from the polar ice caps.
Why do you think the public at the time was so eager and ready to this the story?
The Martians, in his theory … they were highly sophisticated in terms of their technology. They were highly moral. They had evolved a world of peace … There were serious attempts to communicate with the Martians. The sense was the Martians could answer our most existential questions: Where does the soul go when you die? How do you lead a meaningful life? How do we prevent all suffering? These were the questions the Martians were going to answer. So Lowell basically gave the public back some faith in higher beings. The public really wanted to believe in the Martians that he was selling.
How long did this mania for Martians last and what eventually ended it?
For a long time there had been astronomers who were skeptical about Lowell’s theory, and even skeptical that these lines existed on Mars at all. They said, it could just be that they are optical illusions … that it may be that what we’re seeing is natural features that our eye is connecting up into these lines. In 1909 that idea was pretty well proven to be true. Astronomers very quickly backed away. Lowell never gave up. He never backed down.
I’m curious whether you see this story as an inspirational tale of the power of the imagination or is it more of a cautionary tale about how far our myths and ideas can escape reality?
That’s one of the things I loved about writing the book, is it’s really both. It is a cautionary tale. We have to be careful about believing things simply because we want them to be true … At the same time, Percival Lowell changed the world in a lot of good ways. It was the excitement about Mars at the turn of the last century that really launched science fiction and inspired the Space Age itself.
So the book is The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn of the Century America, out today. David Baron, thank you for speaking with me.
Thank you, Melissa.
