Alien Universe

by Don Lincoln

  Day four was perhaps the high point of the narrative, when intelligent humanoids were observed. They were about four feet in height and covered with short and glossy copper-colored hair, except on their faces. Their faces were yellowish, similar to an orangutan. They also had wings. The wings were batlike, and so the author named them Vespertilio-Homo (or bat man). While the observers watched the creatures’ behavior, the article deferred a discussion of what they saw for a later and more detailed article. Mankind was no longer alone in the universe.

  It would be hard for day five to eclipse the revelations of the day before. Literary custom required a denouement. The article discussed more geology, observations of oceans, islands, and so forth. However a particular valley stood out with hills built of snow-white marble or perhaps semi-transparent crystal and adjacent to a flaming mountain, for in this valley stood what appeared to be an abandoned temple, triangular in shape and made of pure sapphire. The roof was made of a yellow metal, flame-like in construction. Since the temple seemed abandoned and all the observers saw were flights of lunar doves landing on the pinnacles of the roof, they were unable to speculate on the meaning of the temple’s imagery. Further searching revealed two other temples located a distance away.

  Day six was the final installment in the saga of Vespertilio-Homo. The astronomers saw more bat people, this time closer to the temples. These bat people were bigger than the former ones, lighter in color and “in every respect an improved variety of the race.” Happy and social, these new people sat around in groups passing the time, “We had no opportunity of seeing them actually engaged in any work of industry or art; and so far as we could judge, they spent their happy hours in collecting various fruits in the woods, in eating, flying, bathing, and loitering about on the summits of precipices.” With these observations, the record ends of the study of Vespertilio-Homo.

  The article goes on to say that the astronomers left the telescope and went to bed, only to be awakened the next day to find that the telescope had inadvertently lined up with the sun and the resultant image started the building on fire. Luckily no serious damage had been done, but it took several days for the soot and mess to be cleaned up, by which time the moon was no longer found in the night sky. Herschel then turned to studying the rings of Saturn, which he found to be debris of two worlds that had collided.

  Herschel was busy cataloging his observations of stars he had seen, so his assistants looked again at the moon, this time seeing an even superior form of Vespertilio-Homo. “They were of infinitely greater personal beauty, and appeared in our eyes scarcely less lovely than the general representations of angels by the more imaginative schools of painters.” The author (one of Herschel’s assistants) then closed by saying that he would defer discussion of these angelic bat people until Herschel could write something himself.

  Needless to say, the real Herschel had no part in this. He actually was doing research south of the equator and was more than a bit aggrieved when he later heard the liberties that had been taken with his reputation.

  So ended the six columns in the Sun. What impact did these columns have on the public? Well, quite simply, it was huge. The Sun sold out of its total circulation of about 20,000. Further, the competing papers in New York reprinted the story. Approximately 100,000 copies of the article were printed in New York City alone (at a time in which the population of New York was only about 300,000). With no radio, nor even telegraph, the story travelled across the country relatively slowly, although it arrived in the other major Eastern cities like Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore in a matter of days. It took a couple of weeks to make it to the Midwest and a month to Europe. English and French journals reprinted the articles, without naming the source of the material as a penny press newspaper in the United States. The story was even reprinted in Edinburgh. Given that the Sun attributed the original source to the Edinburgh Courant, presumably the Scottish people knew it was a fake, but they reprinted it anyway.

  While the Sun’s circulation didn’t change dramatically with the story, they did print a pamphlet containing all six columns, accompanied by several lithographs showing imagined renditions of Herschel’s discoveries. One of these is reproduced in figure 1.1. While the Sun never disclosed how many pamphlets were sold, later writers estimated the number to be about 60,000. At a cost of twelve cents a pamphlet, the Sun did end up making a fair bit of money.

  FIGURE 1.1. This lithograph did not appear in the newspapers but was included in a subsequent pamphlet printed by the New York Sun, which included all six articles detailing the moon hoax of 1835, as well as several figures that gave dramatic emphasis to the text. New York Sun.

  With 100,000 copies of the story printed in New York, along with a very large number printed elsewhere across the United States and the world, the moon hoax of 1835 was one of the first media events and something that would have been impossible just five years prior. The invention of steam-powered presses, along with less expensive paper, made it economical to produce newspapers in great quantities. When this was combined with the business model that sold the papers for a penny and utilized, for the first time, newsboys on street corners to sell them, large numbers of people could be reached quickly. The hoax also had an impact on journalism as a whole, starting a discussion on the question of standards in journalism and whether reporters had an obligation to report the truth.

  It was not very long before the Sun’s report was generally conceded to be a hoax, but there was a brief period of time when the broad public was transfixed by the idea of extraterrestrial life. The scholars of the day still debated the question of whether the moon might host life. The evidence was rather strongly against, most notably by watching the moon pass in front of stars. The image of the stars in telescopes remained crisp until the very last second, suggesting that the moon had no atmosphere. Air on the moon would have made the stars’ images blurry. However, while the debate continued among the community of scholars, the question was less mentioned among the public. The Sun’s story brought it to the fore. Thinking about Aliens was now mainstream.

  Mars

  While the moon hoax of 1835 was entirely a fictional event, the question of life on Mars remained scientifically reputable for a much longer time. For one thing, Mars is much farther from Earth, making it much more difficult to image. In addition, the diameter of Mars is twice as large as the moon, making the planet more Earth-like. Polar ice caps were observed on Mars as early as the middle of the seventeenth century and studied in some detail by William Herschel (the father of John Herschel of moon hoax fame). In fact, speculation on the question of life on Mars (especially intelligent life) reached a fevered pitch in the late 1800s.

  Perhaps the best place to start our story is with French astronomer Camille Flammarion. He was a popularizer of science, although his readers were equally likely to be academics as members of the educated general public. His first book La Pluralité des mondes habités (The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds) was published in 1862 and put forth the idea that there were many inhabited worlds in the universe. He was not the first to suggest the idea, but he was among the first to suggest that extraterrestrials might be truly alien, as opposed to mere variants on humans. In two of his books, he proposed several exotic species, including sentient plants.

  His book Astronomie populaire was published in 1880 and translated into the English Popular Astronomy in 1894. The book is full of speculation about extraterrestrial life, both lunar and Martian, and sold more than 100,000 copies in French. His 1892 book La Planète Mars et ses conditions d’habitabilité (The Planet Mars and Its Conditions for Life) supported the idea of Martian canals built by an advanced civilization.

  Flammarion was not the originator of the idea of Martian canals. That distinction came from Italian scientist Giovanni Schiaparelli. And to understand that tale requires that we learn some basic astronomy.

  The orbital period of Mars is 687 Earth days, and its orbit is also highly eccentric, ranging from 129 million mil
es to 155 million miles from the sun. Consequently, about every two years Mars and the Earth are relatively close at opposition. This term means that Mars was opposite the sun and thus could be seen directly overhead at midnight. When the Earth’s orbit is taken into account, about every 15 years the two planets are especially close. Because of these astronomical factors, the years 1877, 1892, and 1909 were especially auspicious for viewing Mars, as it appeared to be about twice as wide than it did in more pedestrian years.

  While astronomers had watched Mars for millennia, it was in 1877 that the Martian chronicles heated up, for that was the year that Giovanni Schiaparelli reported observing “canali” on Mars. Canali is an Italian word that means “channels,” but it was mistranslated into English as “canals.” And “canals” has an important implication. It means an artificially dug water course. In an era when the Suez Canal had recently opened (1869) and the digging of the Panama Canal had begun (1881), it is inevitable that the word would excite the imaginations of people who heard it. In the 15 years between the oppositions of 1877 and 1892, there was speculation on the nature of the canals and even bitter disagreement on whether they existed at all. The telescopes of the day were typically refractors and consequently were relatively small. It was rather difficult to clearly resolve features on Mars, and so the question of whether canals were observed was necessarily a subjective one. While observations in subsequent years were not under the optimal conditions of 1877, other astronomers also reported seeing canals at observatories across the world. Others didn’t and the debate raged within the astronomical community.

  The question of artificial canals on Mars was a pressing one, and astronomers looked forward to the next optimal opposition in 1892 to hopefully resolve the issue. Camille Flammarion’s 1892 book on Martian habitation and Schiaparelli’s 1893 La vita sul pianeta Marte—which literally meant Life on the Planet Mars—were timely. A budding scientist’s receipt of Flammarion’s book as a Christmas present had an unanticipated large impact on the debate on Martian canals and the awareness of the public of the question.

  Percival Lawrence Lowell was born into an affluent family in Boston, Massachusetts, on March 13, 1853. His family made their money in the Lowell textile industry, and he was a sixth-generation student at Harvard University. Lowell was a brilliant student and interested in science. At his college graduation in 1876, he gave a speech on the “Nebular Hypothesis” describing the formation of the solar system. After graduation and the obligatory tour of Europe, Lowell attended to his family’s business affairs and traveled extensively in the Far East, where he wrote several books about Japan that were well received back in the United States.

  In 1893, the year in which Schiaparelli’s provocatively named book came out, Lowell received the present that brought little green men to the public. After devouring Flammarion’s book, he decided to become a full-time astronomer and to focus on the planet Mars. In mid-January of 1894, the Boston papers reported that Lowell had decided to finance an observatory in Arizona. The location was selected because of its altitude and dark and clear skies. Flagstaff, Arizona, became the center of Martian research.

  Research began rapidly, for if they missed the 1894 opposition, the next favorable opposition was 15 years in the future. Lowell’s observatory went up quickly, and he turned his telescopes to Mars. Initially, he and his team used two temporary telescopes, one 12 inches and one 18 inches. He saw canals and lots of them. Eventually 183 canals would be reported by Lowell and his associates; the first article came out in late summer of 1894 (figure 1.2).

  This article not only described the canals he observed, but it went much further, revealing his underlying motivation. For, while traditional astronomers might want to understand Mars, it was clear that Lowell had already made up his mind. He was confident that he was seeing the signature of Martian civilization. Mars was thought to be an older and dying world, dry and increasingly desolate. He believed that the ancient civilization of Mars had built a vast network of canals to bring water from the polar ice caps to the mid-latitude and equatorial areas in an attempt to survive. Dark patches that were observed in the telescopes were thought to be oases in which pockets of Martians continued to eke out a harsh and desperate existence. Lowell detailed his ideas in three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1907), and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908).

  Lowell was not merely an amateur astronomer. He was a scion of a wealthy Boston family, charming when he wanted to be, and passionate about his interests. In addition to observing the heavens, Lowell moved in fashionable circles. His name and wealth gave him access to the movers and shakers of the day. He was invited to the “A-List” parties, where he would dazzle the attendees with his ideas on Mars. Publishers of newspapers and magazines who were in attendance knew a good story when they heard one. The stories showed up in print. Lots.

  Lowell has been aptly called the most influential popularizer of astronomy before Carl Sagan. Stories about him were splashed conspicuously across leading periodicals. For instance, on December 9, 1906, the Sunday edition of the New York Times ran a column about Lowell that took up well over 80% of the front page, with the title “There Is Life on the Planet Mars.” The author was rather taken by Lowell: “This discovery is due to the brilliant genius, the persistent energy, and the marvelous power in research of Percival Lowell.”

  FIGURE 1.2. Percival Lowell and his assistants catalogued many canals they believed they had observed on the surface of Mars. This 1905 drawing gives an indication to the extensive canal network he thought he found. Courtesy of the Lowell Observatory Archives.

  While Lowell’s fame in the popular press was high, there were many doubters in the scientific community. The situation was not one in which there were but two positions: canals and no canals. Some astronomers accepted canals, but as natural phenomena, while others accepted splotchy features on the Martian surface that changed over time and were taken to be seasonal vegetation variation. Astronomer W. W. Campbell reviewed Lowell’s book Mars and said, “Mr. Lowell went direct from the lecture-hall to his observatory in Arizona; and how well his observations established his preobservational views is told in his book.” Campbell accepted the canals as real features, but he found ridiculous the attribution of the features as evidence of intelligent handiwork. Campbell was also aware that the amount of water available in the atmosphere of Mars was exceedingly low and found the lack of water compelling evidence that there could be no civilization on the planet.

  The impact of Lowell’s advocacy can be measured in many ways, but perhaps the strongest is the appearance of stories of Martian civilization in fiction. Possibly the first occurrence would be H. G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds. During the late 1880s, Wells was trained as a science teacher, and he had written a biology textbook. However, in 1894 he joined the scientific journal Nature as a reviewer. Much of his writing served to translate the highly technical innovations of the Victorian era into terms familiar to the educated lay reader. His essay Intelligence on Mars, published in 1896 in the Saturday Review, speculated about life on Mars and how the inhabitants would cope with what he considered to be an older planet. Much of the article, including his conjecture that the Martians might move to another planet to survive, was found in his famous fictional work The War of the Worlds. He even incorporates the reports of a flash of light observed on Mars by an astronomer in 1894 (and published in the August issue of Nature) as the start of the book. As will be detailed in chapter 3, The War of the Worlds describes the invasion of Earth by Martians and their subsequent defeat by Earth microbes.

  Lowell is a central figure to the excitement about Martian intelligence, but he was neither the originator of the idea, nor did he resolve it. He was merely a true believer, articulate and enthusiastic, who excelled at communicating his vision. Indeed, Lowell never did really give up his beliefs, even when they were ruled out by better measurements.

  The year 1909 was when there was another particularly favorable opposition
for Mars and when Martian canals were ruled out, at least as far as the scientific community was concerned. The scientist who dashed the dreams of those who hoped it had been proven that mankind was not alone in the universe was Eugene Antoniadi, a Greek astronomer who gained some fame in later life as a scholar of ancient Greek and Egyptian astronomy. That Antoniadi was the one who resolved the debate came with some irony, as he worked at Flammarion’s observatory in 1894 and published his results in the journal of the French Astronomical Society, which Flammarion began. But such is the small world of professional astronomy.

  Antoniadi was able to see dark, irregularly shaped spots on the surface of Mars, but he concluded definitively that the canals themselves were “an optical illusion.” His result made it to the United States, where a new class of telescopes was coming online, the big reflectors. The 60-inch reflector on Mount Wilson was turned to Mars, and the director wrote to Antoniadi, saying, “I am thus inclined to agree with you in your opinion … that the so-called ‘canals’ of Schiaparelli are made up of small irregular dark regions.” Antoniadi continued to observe Mars, writing his own book La planète Mars in 1930. But in 1909 the astronomical world moved on.

  As is often the case in these situations, there were true believers who refused to accept the new conclusions. Until his death in 1916, Lowell maintained that those who failed to see the canals were mistaken and doing sloppy work. Further, he still had the ear of many of the leaders in the popular media. For instance, in the August 27, 1911, issue of the New York Times Sunday magazine, a splashy article entitled “Martians Build Two Immense Canals in Two Years” described two canals, each a thousand miles long and 20 miles wide that had appeared on the Martian surface. The possibility that these were natural features was ruled out in the article.