A Man, a Plan, a Canal—Mars!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

For centuries, humans have looked up into the night sky and wondered, are we alone in

the universe? The possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos remains one

of the great mysteries, and one that I don't expect to see resolved in my lifetime.

But for a brief period headed into the 20th century, much of the Western world believed

that this question, are we alone, had finally been answered? Because we had discovered evidence

of an advanced alien civilization living on Mars.

Alexander Graham Bell wrote that he thought there was no question that there was intelligent

life on Mars. There were, you know, professors at Harvard and Yale and Brown, Ivy League

institutions, who were totally on board with this. To the point where, in the end of 1907,

the Wall Street Journal said the biggest news of the year was proof of intelligent life

on Mars.

This is David Barron, a science journalist and author of a new book called The Martians,

the true story of an alien craze that captured turn of the century America. David says

that news of extraterrestrial life at that time permeated the culture.

Martians were everywhere. You'd see Martians depicted in Broadway plays and Vodville skits

there were songs about the Martians in Tin Pan Ali music. There were Martians advertising.

There was a Martian in the comics, a guy named Mr. Skigak from Mars, who was in newspapers

across the country.

I recently spoke with David about his book, and so much of it still resonates with debates

that we're having today about science, expertise, and truth.

The story he tells is one of mass delusion, about the dangers of unchecked speculations

seeping into public discourse, and is a drama that centers around the misplaced ambitions

of one wealthy amateur astronomer who convinced the world Martians were real.

Here's my chat with David Barron.

So your book centers on a character named Perseval Lowell, and he's sort of the engine

powering this idea of life on Mars. Could you talk about who Perseval Lowell was?

Well, so Lowell was an interesting man psychologically.

No, obviously I never met him, and I'm not a psychoanalyst, but he clearly had a big ego

and a fragile ego.

So Perseval Lowell came from one of the most prominent families in New England.

The Lowells of Massachusetts were incredibly wealthy, were big philanthropists, were big

in the culture of Massachusetts and the United States. Perseval graduated from Harvard,

like all the men in the family did.

He was the eldest son, and he had a lot of weight on his shoulders.

He was a lowell.

His father had told him and his brother that they had to do something important with their

lives.

And so for a while, he traveled.

He was a writer.

He was one of the very first Americans to go to Korea.

He wrote a book about it.

So he really made quite a name for himself as this kind of roving anthropologist.

And as he approached the age of 40, he decided he wanted to become an astronomer.

And he had the wealth to do it in a big way.

And he really, he became, in essence, the most famous astronomer of that time in America.

And so when Lowell takes up astronomy, like what is going on in the field and maybe more

specifically what was going on with Mars?

So there were big advances in astronomy in the 19th century.

Telescopes were now getting quite large and sophisticated.

And so astronomers by the late 19th century were getting a really good view of the surface

of Mars.

Now Mars, of course, is right next to us in terms of its orbit.

But Earth and Mars only come close together once every 26 months.

And about every 15 years, Earth and Mars come especially close together.

And that's the time when you can really get through your telescope, see Mars in relatively

good detail.

Well, 1877 was one of those years.

And there was an astronomer in Milan named Giovanni Scapparelli who decided he was going

to create a new map of Mars.

And night after night, he studied the planet and he drew what he saw with precision.

And when he came out with this map, Mars, first of all, looked very Earth-like.

It had dark areas that were soon to be oceans and light areas that were thought to be continents.

But Scapparelli also saw these fine lines criss-crossing the light areas.

And he imagined that they were waterways of some sort.

So he called them canali, which in Italian means channels.

They were water channels of some sort.

Well, canali was translated or mistranslated into English as canals, which has a very different

meaning.

Yeah, like a channel or waterways naturally occurring in the landscape, but a canal,

like that's made by something or someone.

Right.

There were a mystery.

And these lines that looked so straight that they seemed artificial might be.

And it was, first of all, when he decided in 1894 to dedicate the next stage of his life

to studying Mars, to becoming an astronomer, and he was going to solve the mystery of

the canals.

Right.

And low ultimately comes up with this grand theory.

He says, not only are the canals real, but in fact, they're a massive planet-wide system

created by an advanced alien civilization living on Mars, which is like crazy.

Could you explain his thinking at the time?

Right.

So I know that today it sounds ridiculous how could anyone take this seriously.

But it was, I actually give him credit.

It was a coherent theory that fit with a lot of ideas about Mars at the time that at

least was worth investigating.

So here was the theory.

Mars, it was widely believed, was an older planet than Earth.

So Mars hardened and became habitable before Earth did.

So you might imagine that there was life on Mars before on Earth, that life on Mars became

intelligent before life on Earth.

So now Mars, it was thought, was in its dying phases.

And it was known that Mars had polar ice caps.

So if, in fact, there was intelligent life on Mars, and the water was running out, well,

what you would need to do was tap the melt water from the ice cap and bring the water down

to where your cities and your farms are.

That's what he thought the canals were.

This was a worldwide irrigation network that allowed the Martians to survive off the water

from the ice caps.

So it was a coherent theory, but he went into it wanting to prove himself right, which

was kind of a mistake in science.

Yeah.

Well, of course, has a lot of time and money at his disposal to prove himself right.

So one of the first things he does is build this Staley Art Observatory out in Flagstaff,

Arizona.

And he starts looking at Mars through his big, expensive telescope and then drawing

what he sees.

But for low, could you describe what are the obstacles of trying to look at the surface

of Mars back in the 1800s?

Yeah.

I mean, we have to put out of our minds everything we know about Mars today, because we've all

seen high resolution photos and videos of the surface of Mars.

We know what it looks like, but cast yourself back into the late 19th century.

All we knew about Mars was what you could see through an Earthbound telescope of a planet

that at its closest is 35 million miles away.

But more than that, you're looking through the Earth's atmosphere.

It's like looking at the sky from the bottom of the ocean.

This ocean of air distorts the light as it comes in.

And so looking at Mars, even through a fine telescope, it tends to go in and out of focus

at wobbles.

So you only have often just split second glimpses of clarity.

So you have to stare at the planet over long, long periods to get these moments of clarity

and then remember what you saw.

And so those canals, it's not like you could stare at the planet and you would just see

this whole array of canals.

No, you would see this fuzzy orange red orb in your telescope wobbling around.

And then suddenly you'd see a little bit came into focus and I saw some lines and you

draw those and then you stare some more and you see more of these lines.

So it was very, very difficult to really get a sense of what was there.

And in the book, you actually write about going to Lowell's Observatory yourself.

I did actually so in 2018, I went to the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff to look through

Lowell's very telescope at a time when Mars and Earth were exceptionally close.

And just staring at this apricot colored orb in the telescope, it really sort of hypnotic.

You stare and you stare and you stare and it's sometimes hard to know what you've seen

and what you thought you saw, what you imagined you saw.

And is he working with other folks that are sort of buttressing his claims or what is

how is he alone in this field?

Well, so he had when he established Lowell Observatory, he actually hired away a couple

of Harvard astronomers to help him first found the observatory and then he kept one on

his staff.

And so this assistant of his, who was a finest astronomer named Andrew Ellicott Douglas,

AE Douglas, he went along with his boss, he saw the lines too, he mapped the lines.

But over time, he started to question whether the lines were real or if they were illusory.

And as soon as he expressed any doubt about it, Lowell summarily fired him, which says

a lot about Lowell that he did not like to be questioned.

Yeah.

So when, first of all, Lowell sees these channels, which he posits are canals, are they immediately

accepted as a thing in the scientific community or is there a debate about them?

Oh, there was huge debate.

So these lines on Mars, these canals on Mars were very hard to see.

There were astronomers at other observatories with excellent telescopes who didn't see the

lines.

Even Scapper Ellicott said they're not always there.

You don't always see them.

You have to have the right viewing conditions and to make it even more complicated, the

lines came and went.

So it seemed that they came and went with the seasons on Mars.

It was all very mysterious.

But when you have one astronomer saying, I don't see them on another who says I do, well,

the one who doesn't see them, you can say, well, your eyesight isn't good enough, your

telescope isn't good enough.

Your observatory is located in a place with bad air overhead that you can't really get

a clear view of Mars.

So those who saw them kind of had the upper hand against those who didn't see them.

And so how does Lowell ultimately start pushing his grand theory out to the public?

So Lowell was incredibly articulate.

He was considered an excellent speaker.

He came from a prominent family.

People would listen to him.

But all sorts of means of conveying his ideas.

So first of all, in Boston at the time, there was a popular organization called the Lowell

Institute, which brought in prominent speakers to give free lectures to the public.

And of course, this was founded by one of his late cousins.

In fact, it was overseen by Lowell's very father.

Lowell was invited to speak about Mars to the Lowell Institute, which actually had its lectures

in a big auditorium at MIT.

So he reached audiences that way.

Lowell then published the text of his talks in the Atlantic Monthly, the founding editor

of the Atlantic Monthly, was James Russell Lowell, also a relative.

And so he was very good at presenting his ideas to the public.

And it doesn't take long before you have a few lectures, you have a few articles in

the Atlantic that journalism he's not connected to just like takes this up and is very excited

by these ideas.

Can you talk about what the papers were like at this time and how they kind of use the

Mars craze to sell papers?

So this was a time when there was a revolution underway in America's newspapers.

So the famous publishers Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst were basically inventing

the tabloid press, which at the time was called the yellow press.

And they latched on to anything that was sensationalistic.

Well, the idea of life on Mars fit right in.

And so the Pulitzer and Hearst newspapers, when there was talk of the Martians, they really

pushed it out onto the public.

And they latched on to what Lowell was saying.

And so that helped to propel this idea out into the general populace.

Yeah, and beyond the press, other prominent scientists and academics are really pushing

Lowell's theory too, including Nikola Tesla.

So how does he fit into all this?

So Nikola Tesla was a genius who changed the world.

He also was an eccentric guy.

And in 1899, after having done all this work with the distribution of electricity by wires,

he was getting interested in what was called wireless, what today we would call radio.

And so he set up an experimental laboratory in Colorado in 1899 to study how electrical

waves were transmitted through the atmosphere.

This was before, there was anything, there were no radio stations, but you could listen

to the to natural electromagnetic radiation like from lightning.

And Tesla one night, a lone in the lab, was listening to the sounds of distant lightning

and other things.

And he heard the weirdest thing in his receiver.

It was this signal that repeated in triplets.

It was sort of a click, click, click, click, click, click over and over again.

And he pondered for a while what could possibly be causing it.

And Tesla eventually decided there was no natural explanation.

The most logical explanation was this was Percival Lowell's Martians sending a signal

to the earth.

And when Tesla announced this to the world, the craze just completely took off.

And one of the things that you do in the book is sort of cast yourself back to this time

period.

And you fly out, say that you probably would have gotten wrapped up in this craze around

Mars too.

So can you, can you talk a little bit about that?

Like what is happening around the turn of the century that made life on Mars feel like

it made complete sense?

Well, so this was the period that today we remember as the Gilded Age, which makes it sound

like it was this glittering, wonderful time.

It really wasn't for many, many people, right?

We know that there was this tremendous divide between the few exceptionally rich and the

many who were desperately poor.

This was a time when there was violent labor unrest, when there was anarchism, William

McKinley president, William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist in the United States.

So there was a sense that the world was falling apart, that things were not going so well

on Earth.

And part of the, of Percival Lowell's theory was that the Martians were not only in advance

of us intellectually and in terms of their technology, but they were better than us morally.

After all, if the planet has developed this global irrigation network, that means everyone

everywhere is working together.

The Martians in the Arctic are working together with those in the equator that there must

not be warring nations.

This is an entire planet that's pulled together as one.

And that was a very appealing notion to people at that time to think that, well, maybe

it's possible to create a world where there's less violence, where people, where beings

are working together.

And more than that, if we could just get in touch with the Martians, maybe they could

solve our problems here on Earth.

You know, I think if you were to tell people today that there was evidence of intelligent

life in the universe, and I think people think about it as like, well, if we had evidence

of that, it would be so like Earth shaking to everything we believe with up and theology.

It would upend our sense of self in the universe, our sense of science.

And we actually went through this where people mostly believe this.

And it seems like it didn't have that type of effect where it upended everything.

It really just sort of like, it kind of fit in nicely with everyone's view of God

and religion and science.

Could you talk about that like how much it was so kind of nicely metabolized into our

worldview?

Yeah.

I mean, that really surprised me because you would think that, and there were people at

the time speculating that this would cause traditional religion to crumble.

I mean, you know, if if Christ came to Earth to save our souls, did Christ go to Mars

to live?

I mean, that seems to be stretching things.

But actually, no, theologians and clergy were able to incorporate these ideas and not

really fit, they didn't feel that it undermined their beliefs in any, if anything, they found

ways for it to amplify their beliefs.

This would just even more world, more beings for God to oversee and it just showed the

glory of God to be even greater than we imagined.

Yeah.

So it isn't just like the G. Wiz aspect of Mars in life.

It really is about hope and how we want our, you know, the world to be.

Well, that was one of the big deep discoveries I felt that I made in studying that peer

because I first went into it.

I think this is just, this is a relic in good tale.

Can you believe it that at that time, people really believed that there were Martians.

But then I came to see that it spoke to some very deep universal desires of all of us.

And this really, this really became clear when I found this newspaper article that ran

across the country, many newspapers in 1909 at a time when there was serious discussion

of coming up with a way to communicate with Mars.

And so this article, the headline was, questions Mars might answer.

So it was a list of what we should ask the Martians when we finally get in touch with

them.

I think we would ask them practical questions about building canals or, or maybe how to improve

on the airplane of the right brothers, because surely the Martians are far in advance of

us when it comes to motorized flight.

No, the questions we were suggested for us to ask Mars were the most existential questions.

What is the meaning of life?

What happens to the soul when you die?

How can we prevent human suffering?

These were the questions we had for the Martians.

After the break, the Mars fever breaks, and why this story still resonates today.

Stick around.

We are back with David Barron.

So at the turn of the century, bowls ideas about Mars are at the peak of their powers.

But pretty soon, more traditional astronomers see this popularity, and they just decide

it's time to finally put an end to all this craziness.

Yes.

So among the anti-canals, there were those who said these lines on Mars are nothing more

than optical illusions.

It's the fact that we're looking at a planet at the very limit of our perception.

The eye is connecting up dots and seeing lines where there aren't any.

And so one of the most prominent of these anti-canalists was Edward Walter Monder, who was an astronomer

at the Greenwich Observatory in London.

And he came up with a really interesting experiment to see if this could be true.

He actually recruited these children, these young teens at a boys' school right near the

Observatory, to take part in an experiment where he took a map of Mars and where there

were canals, he erased the canals, so he erased the straight lines, and replaced them

with meandering rivers or just stippling and shading things that would be natural, not

just a straight irrigation canal.

And he had these depictions hung at the front of the classroom, and the boys were instructed

to stay in their seats.

They couldn't go any closer for a better look.

And where they were to draw what they saw at the front of the room, they didn't know

it was a map of Mars, they had no idea what they were doing.

They were just asked to draw it as faithfully as possible.

Well it was really interesting, those in the front of the room who could see the drawing

very clearly drew it accurately with meandering rivers and stippling.

Those in the very back of the room who were so far away, they really couldn't make out

any of the details at all left those features out entirely.

The boys in the middle of the room where they could see that there were some fine features

but didn't know what they were, drew straight lines.

They were seeing those very illusions.

And so this then became, Lolo called it derisively the small boy theory of the lines on Mars,

which he said, well how can you trust these granite school boys over an accomplished astronomer

like me?

I can tell the difference between an illusion and what's real.

Yeah, he had just enough magnification to see something.

And therefore he started connecting the dots himself and drawing canals.

Right.

And so in fact, and what what monitor the astronomer who did the study said was he thought that

the reason no one had seen the canals on Mars until the late 19th century was because

the telescopes weren't big enough and good enough.

It was as if we had been in the back of the room and couldn't see any details on Mars.

And then those telescopes brought us to the middle of the room where we could see that

were some details what we weren't seeing them clearly.

And he said, when we get even better observatories, then we will move to the front of the room

and know what's really there.

So this small boy theory is basically the first shot across the bow at Lolo.

But how did he ultimately end up being taken down?

Well, so I mean, at some point the whole thing would have crumbled, but it was another astronomer

very much like him, interestingly, another wealthy amateur who had for a time believed

in the canals of Mars who then woke up to the fact that they weren't really there.

So his name was Eugen Michel Antoniotti.

He was originally from from Greece.

And Antoniotti had made these maps of Mars criss-crossed by the canals.

So he had seen them.

He believed in them.

But over time he started to wonder if in fact his eyes were playing tricks on him.

And so in 1909, when Mars and Earth came especially close together, Antoniotti gained access

to the largest telescope in Europe, outside Paris, to examine Mars on some of the days when

it's at its very closest approach.

We're not going to have another good chance like this for 15 years.

And he got incredibly lucky.

One of those nights he was staring at Mars when the air over Paris was dead still.

It was perfect conditions for observing the planet.

And whereas Mars almost always is this wobbly object in the telescope, comes in and out

of focus, Mars was sitting dead still.

He could see the planet surface with incredible clarity.

And here's this man who knew where the canals were supposed to be.

He had drawn them.

He believed in them.

They weren't there where he was supposed to see canals.

Instead he saw very natural looking features.

So Antoniotti, for him, it really was, it was like this vision he saw that he was now

going to tell the world what was true.

And he decided he was going to take Lowell down.

And things began to really unravel for Lowell after that.

Some people who supported him began to just drop off very quickly, including Scaparelli,

who was the first person to describe canals on Mars.

Exactly.

Scaparelli shortly before he died in 1910, he said, you know, these lines may be perfectly

natural.

And I think we should stop calling them canals Camille Flamaria and the French astronomer

who had inspired Lowell and who continued to believe there was life on Mars was backing

away from the idea that these lines were anything more than natural lines of some sort

or illusions.

And so Lowell was really kind of the last one holding the back at this point.

He was, but he, you know, he just dug in his heels even more.

And which speaks to his stubbornness, to his ego.

And I think sometimes in a sense that the more intelligent you are, the more you should

be able to accept what's real.

But in fact, intelligence can make you incredibly smart at deluding yourself.

So after Antoniati came out and said that the canals disappeared through this superior

telescope.

One of Lowell's arguments was the telescope was too good, it was too powerful.

And that it's its own power was creating illusions.

So I don't think I'm giving anything away to say there are no Martians who never work

channels on Mars.

But as that idea started to gain some traction toward the, toward the end of Lowell's life,

he never gave an inch.

He claimed to, to his dying day that he was this suffering genius who people might doubt,

but he would someday be proven right.

I mean, it's pretty easy to see him as a, a cook and a stubborn man.

But you know, I gather from your book, you do have charitable opinions of, of Lowell

and his legacy.

Could you describe like what, what you think of him in the totality?

Well, I mean, it's actually, it's really interesting when I went into writing this book.

I thought that I was writing a cautionary tale because in fact, to the extent people know

about the canals of Mars today, it's generally remembered as one of the great blunders of science.

And it was a story about how we can fool ourselves into believing things that aren't

true because we wish they were true.

But it actually is also a very inspiring tale because Lowell did a lot of good imagination

is important and Lowell had that in spades.

And he really did push people to try to answer the question about what's going on on Mars.

And he really did, he inspired the children of that era to get excited about outer space.

I mean, it's actually, it's a kind of a divide among scientists even today.

We've got those who are very conservative who feel their job is to collect data in a

very objective way.

And then you've got those who want to take the data and imagine how it all fits together

into some grand theory.

And both are really important in science.

You need the collectors and you need the dreamers, those who imagine what's true.

So I think there's a fine line between imagination, in science, and dreaming of what might

be and getting excited about it, but knowing when to pull back when the evidence just

doesn't support that.

And that was Lowell's great fault is that he never knew when to back down.

Yeah.

I think people today might look back at the Martian craze and think everyone was so naive

and gullible.

But when I read your book, I found myself thinking about our world today and our fraught

relationship with science and truth.

And so what does Lowell's story make you think of in the present day?

So much.

So it was a very interesting essay written about my book in the New Republic by the Harvard

Legal Scholar Cass Sunstein.

And he brought up the name of RFK Jr.

And I think there are interesting parallels there.

Here you have someone from one of the most famous families in Massachusetts who has now

built a reputation around skepticism on vaccines.

You know, most in the scientific community think this is bunk.

You know, the very study that started this all that said there was a link between vaccines

and autism has been shown to have been fraudulent.

And yet, RFK Jr.

built his identity around this idea.

And he's a lot of people find him very articulate, charismatic.

And again, I can't speak for what's going on inside his head.

But I think one can see parallels to Percival Lowell from a prominent Massachusetts family

had a lot needed to prove that he was an important person.

His way of doing it was this theory about life on Mars.

And even as people tried to chip away at it, he was unwilling to give an inch because

that would have just crushed his ego.

Yeah.

Also, this compulsion of having these ultimate, wealthy, privileged insiders, casting themselves

as renegade outsiders to orthodoxy, what is that narrative so compelling?

That's a good question.

But I guess what I would say is a lot of folks in this situation cast themselves as skeptics.

But I'm all for skepticism.

Science should be built on skepticism.

But I often think that it's some of those people who promote skepticism who are not skeptical

enough of themselves.

We all have to have the humility to understand that we are fallible human beings who, when

we latch onto an idea, are loath to give it up.

I mean, I've been a science journalist and writer for 40 years.

Most of what science reporters report on is wrong because you're looking at the cutting

edge of science.

You're at that point where something's known, but it hasn't quite been figured out.

And people are trying to get better data and coming up with theories.

And most of the time, they're wrong.

Eventually, we moved beyond it and we can see in hindsight which was the right path.

It happens all the time, but it doesn't usually happen on quite so grand a scale as it did

with Perseveralow.

Well, Dave Barron, thank you so much for talking with me.

I just had a blast reading your book and a blast talking to you.

It was so much fun.

Well, Robin, it was my pleasure and with the last name like yours, I figured it was bound

to be that I would come on your show.

Makes sense to me.

99% of his vote was produced and edited this week by Joe Rosenberg and Jason Dillion,

mixed by Martin Gonzales, music by Swansea.

Kathy, too, is our executive producer co-hosted, is our digital director, Delaney Hawes, our

senior editor.

The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian

Lay, Losh Madon, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Talon and Rain Stradley, and me Roman

Mars.

Then 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence.

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