Mars and Martian Mania: A Brief History

What a difference a word makes: When Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli peered through his telescope in 1877 to view the surface of Mars in detail, he noticed lines crisscrossing the planet like channels of water. And that is how he described those lines—as “canali,” which in Italian simply means “channels,” in the sense of riverbeds or arroyos. That single, innocent word—canali—was mistranslated into English as “canals,” implying structures built to shunt water in one direction or another. Canals could, of course, only be created by intelligent life forms.

Did Schiaparelli’s observation hint that alien canal builders lived on Mars? Author and astronomer Percival Lowell thought so. He spent his life trying to prove that a utopian society existed on our planetary neighbor and published frequently on the subject. Lowell died long before the first photos of Mars would show no manmade canals, or any other signs of an erstwhile utopian civilization. But Lowell’s fanaticism sparked a lingering public love affair with the idea that life could thrive on Mars.

NASA's Mars missions owe a debt to Nikola Tesla for his work in robotics and radio remote control for guided vehicles. He may also have cemented the public’s belief in life on Mars by announcing that he’d received communications from the planet at his laboratory in Colorado Springs. While conducting experiments on high-frequency electrical transmission in 1899, Tesla picked up cosmic radio waves on his instruments.

Announcing this development, he publicly opined that the messages came from outer space, possibly from inhabitants of Mars. In a Collier’s Weekly article dated February 19, 1901, Tesla wrote, “At the present stage of progress, there would be no insurmountable obstacle in constructing a machine capable of conveying a message to Mars … What a tremendous stir this would make in the world! How soon will it come?” Later discoveries revealed that Tesla had actually picked up common radio waves emitted by interstellar gas clouds.

As a novel, The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells was published in 1898 to critical and public success. The book received renewed interest in 1938 when the young Orson Welles, who would later become an iconic actor and director, chose to adapt the novel into a radio drama to be performed the night before Halloween.

Eschewing a standard storytelling format, Welles opted to structure the radio broadcast as a series of realistic news bulletins that described an attack on New Jersey by aliens from Mars.

The performance proved so realistic that people literally panicked in the streets. The next day—which was Halloween—Louis Winkler of the Bronx told a New York Times reporter, “I didn’t tune in until the program was half over, but when … the ‘Secretary of the Interior’ was introduced, I was convinced it was the McCoy. I ran out into the street with scores of others, and found people running in all directions.” Perhaps more than any other single event, Welles’ broadcast fueled the public’s fascination with the Red Planet and the possibility of detecting intelligent life there.

On November 28, 1964, NASA launched the Mariner 4 unmanned space probe to take “flyby” photos of the Red Planet. On July 14, 1965, those images returned to Earth, showing a pockmarked planetary surface devoid of any structures or other signs of habitation. In 1969, NASA launched the Mariner 6 and Mariner 7 probes to make additional observations of the Martian landscape.

Hundreds of photos revealed a barren, rocky wasteland with no hints of life, quashing fears—and hopes—that aliens populated Mars. Earthlings’ collective obsession with a Martian invasion faded, though debates continued among citizens and scientists alike about whether the planet had previously been inhabited.

After the Mariner space probe missions of the 1960s established that Mars harbored no alien marauders poised to attack Earth, interest in the issue of life on Mars died down. The consensus seemed to be not only that Mars didn’t support life in the present, but also that it never had in the past.

That sentiment shifted in 1996, when the publication of a paper in Science magazine suggested a meteorite from Mars, discovered in the Allan Hills of Antartica, contained the biomarkers of primitive life forms. A group of NASA scientists wrote that their analysis of meteorite ALH84001 showed possible microfossils of primitive bacteria—a finding that would mean life, at least in some form, once existed on Mars.

The report caused a sensation in the press, but later developments cooled the popular and scientific enthusiasm for life on Mars. In 2022, another study published in Science found the organic matter in ALH84001 was formed geologically, not biologically. Nonetheless, the search for extraterrestrial life continues, and NASA rovers Curiosity and Perseverance—as well as missions from China, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, the European Space Agency and others—are continuing to explore the enigmatic Red Planet.