An expert on Martians landed in Estes Park recently.
David Baron of Boulder, author of the just-released “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” spoke at the Estes Park High School auditorium on Saturday night to a small but appreciative audience. The Estes Valley Library sponsored the event.
If you like history, science, social psychology, humor, journalism, and fiction, you would have found yourself right at home listening to Baron explain how Americans in 1906 were duped into believing a civilization existed on Mars.
For one thing, The New York Times said so in a front-page article that year.
Proof came in 1877 and 1894, when several astronomers mapped the planet. It wasn’t easy to see, as the telescopes of the time weren’t that sophisticated, but men like Percival Lowell and Nikola Tesla built labs and observatories dedicated to explaining the planet’s mysteries.
Lines on maps of Mars were said to be canals that carried water, and circles on the maps were thought to be cities.
“In 1901,” Baron said, “Martians invaded popular culture in the form of songs, ads, theater, and comics.”
Society was changing — there were cars and airplanes. Anything was possible. Why not a peaceful civilization on Mars?
Lowell financed a trip to the Andes in South America to locate a huge telescope and camera in the hopes that it might assist in communication with Mars. David Todd, a professor at Amherst College, and his wife, Mabel, made the trip.
The photographs were supposed to prove that there was life on Mars.
“The proof was weak, but Lowell was persuasive, and the public was receptive,” Baron said.
Life on Earth was unstable. World War I was threatening, Charles Darwin said humans were not made in the image of God, the depths of space were being revealed, and Earth was not in the center. People wondered where God fit into the new discoveries.
When Todd began to collect questions from the public to ask Martians, the queries were surprisingly philosophical. Where do spirits go when we die? What is the right way to live?
Martians, it seemed for a time, were our role models for a perfect society.
But the power of wishful thinking without science could not be sustained, Baron said. In 1909, the Martian craze began to dissipate.
The canals that Lowell thought he saw were debunked as optical illusions.
Lowell died in 1916, still committed to his ideas about Mars.
Since the 1960s, Mars has been photographed by myriad spacecraft, but only a few objects from early astronomers’ maps matched the photos. There are no canals, cities, or civilizations.
However, as wrong as Lowell was, he still had a huge effect on the Space Age.
“He lit a fire,” said Baron. Fiction writers from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ray Bradbury influenced a generation of youngsters who would grow up to become serious scientists, like Carl Sagan.
Baron said it took him seven years to write “The Martians.” He knows a lot about the subject.
But does he believe there is life on Mars?
“I believe there could be,” he said.
Elisabeth Sherwin is a journalist who teaches memoir writing at the Estes Valley Community Center. She holds a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked as a copy editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner, and was a reporter, editor, book reviewer, and copy editor at the Davis (Calif.) Enterprise. She also taught journalism at UC Davis Extension. She lives in Allenspark. Her book reviews and other writings can be found on her website, Printed Matter.