Moon Over Barsoom

The full moon and Mars...together again

Well, August 27 has come and gone, and of course, once again, Mars did not appear in the sky side-by-side with -- and as big as -- the full moon. That particular urban legend -- which showed up this time on Facebook -- has been orbiting the Internet for ten years now, proving once again that when it comes to astronomy and outer space, people can be really stupid.

Here’s where it started: in 2003, Mars was in opposition, and due to the influence of Jupiter on its orbit, it was about to come within a little over 34.6 million miles of Earth, closer than it had been since 57,617 B.C. An e-mail was circulated about the phenomenon along with a photo that showed Mars and the full moon side by side at the same size. In the text was the sentence, “At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.” Since the idiot writer didn’t use a coma after the word magnification, most readers totally dismissed the whole first part of the sentence and only read, “Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.”

This more or less validates the 20th century linguistic philosophic notion that nothing can intrinsically be understood using language since every word spoken is open to interpretation. And being a dumb-ass that can’t read certainly enhances that notion, although I doubt Ludwig Wittgenstein would have put it that way. That’s a shame, too, since if he had, it would have been a great deal easier to stay awake in linguistic philosophy.

I’m thinking that it never occurred to most people that in order for Mars to appear in the sky as large as the full moon, it would have to be a helluva lot closer to us than 35 million miles away. Since Mars is roughly twice the size of the moon, and the moon is about a quarter of a million miles from us, Mars would have to be twice that distance to appear the same size as the full moon, say, half a million miles away. Unfortunately, were the Earth and Mars that close to each other, the gravitational pull would literally pull the surfaces of both planets apart.

I wonder how that would play on Facebook?   

Of course, I shouldn’t scoff at anyone just because they believe everything they see on the Internet or read

Heroes, monsters and babes!

four arms? No? Well then, did I also mention that the women were all beautiful, red, scantily-clad BABES?

I should have, ‘cause this, unlike the Mars H.G. Wells envisioned and Orson Welles scared the crap out of everyone with, was a Mars that was definitely worth going to.

H.G. Wells wasn’t the first person to describe a Martian. Percy Lowell, the man that inspired him to write The War of the Worlds, did a pretty good job of reasoning out what the denizens of the red planet might look like in his 1895 book, Mars. Percy thought the Martians would be extremely tall, really strong, but not particularly warlike. Another author of the era who was also inspired by Lowell took this to heart…sort of.  Like Wells, he was just enough of a fan of Lowell to believe in the possibility of the Martians Percy postulated.

But that’s the adulation ended.

This guy wasn’t an English gentleman, a scholar, scientist or a teacher as was Wells. He was the son of a Civil War veteran that graduated from the  Michigan Military Academy the same year Lowell published Mars. He was bent on a military career but he failed the West Point exam. So he enlisted in the army anyway and wound up in the 7th U.S. Cavalry at Fort Grant in the Arizona Territory. Unfortunately his career was cut short when military doctors diagnosed him with heart difficulties serious enough to drum him out of the service. So he wound up working as a hand on his father-in-laws farm.

But that didn’t last long.

This guy was a science fiction fan. Not just any science fiction, mind you, but the stuff they printed in the pulp magazines of the time. It was a pastime that would change his life.

After reading a bunch of the pulps, he reasoned that “If people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those (pulp) magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten,” he said. “As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so that any I chanced to read in those magazines.”

Edgar Rice Burroughs

His name was Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he lived up to the claim. In 1912 he wrote his first story which was serialized in a pulp magazine called The All Star Stories. It was called Under the Moons of Mars. Five years later it was published as a hard cover book under the title A Princess of Mars.

A Princess of Mars was the first in a long series of novels set on Mars. These weren’t, however, about a super advanced species of extraterrestrials launching an ill fated invasion of the earth. Instead, Burroughs’ books were about an Earth man who accidentally invades Mars and ultimately becomes its warlord. Part the Lone Ranger, part Wolverine with a whole lot of Superman thrown, this strange man is a dark-haired, six-foot two-inch immortal who can’t remember a childhood, but has memories of always being around 30. As the book begins, it’s 1866 and our hero, a Civil War Veteran from Virginia, has struck out to the Arizona Territories along with a former confederate soldier pal named Powell to look for gold. They find a vein of gold-baring quartz forth a million at least. But before they can do much about it, Powell is killed by Apaches and, alone, our hero is forced to flee into the dry mesas. Wounded himself, he crawls into a cave filled with a strange, fragrant mist. He looks up into the night sky and sees the red planet Mars shining down on him. Despite his wounds, he feels as if the god of war himself is beckoning him forward. He faces the planet, spreads his arms, and feels himself being pulled towards it. The next thing he knows, John Carter is standing on the surface of Mars.

Okay, this sounds like a fairly unlikely means for interplanetary travel. But you never know. Maybe that

Carl Sagan and John Carter

year Mars was in close opposition bringing it so near that it looked as big as the full moon. And because it was that close, the gravitational force grabbed hold of John Carter and whisked him away through space. You never know. I tried the John Carter maneuver once. And I wasn’t the only one either. In a question and answer session about the Viking Landers in 1976, Carl Sagan, the JPL astrophysicist who spearheaded Viking for NASA, told how he was a fan of Burroughs and John Carter, and how he was so fascinated with Mars -- which the Martians called Barsoom -- that he tried the John Carter maneuver as well.

“I didn’t think it would work,” Sagan told reporters. “But you never know until you try.”









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A Little Belief Goes a Long Way

The cold, dry, rocky plains of Mars

A little belief can go a long, long way even if what you believe isn't even true. Case in point: We know now that Mars is a cold, dead, dry world that may have warmer, wetter and capable of supporting some sort of life in the long distant past. But we only know it because for centuries we were trying to prove the exact opposite.

Not that long ago many people -- and even scientists -- believed that not only was Mars capable of

supporting life, but that it was already inhabited by intelligent beings who had built an elaborate planet-wide canal system to bring water from the Martian pole to the arid desert areas of the planet. And while most of these ideas were later proven to be nothing but fantasy, there was a lot of sympathetic agreement at the time that intelligent life on Mars was a distinct possibility.

H.G. Wells

Herbert George “H.G.“ Wells was one of them. Greatly influenced by opinions of American astronomer Percival Lowell, he wrote the now classic science fiction novel, The War of the Worlds in 1898. Trained as a scientist himself, Wells was a big believer in technology. In fact, a futurist, he thought that all of mankind’s problems could and ultimately would be solved through it. However, it was also clear to him that an over dependence on machines would sooner or later leave people more or less physically helpless. A big fan of Huxley and Darwin whose notion of evolution was still a point of extreme controversy during the Victorian age, Wells depiction of the Martians he created for War of the Worlds was as

Wells' Martians

much a speculation on the possible evolution of human beings as it was a speculation of what advanced forms of extra-terrestrials might be like. Wells’ Martians were big brains with hands. The hands sported overly extended fingers closely resembling tentacles. They didn’t need legs because they rode in all sorts of different machines. This might sound absurd. But all you have to see today is some fat-ass rich guy riding on a Segway instead of walking to start wondering if maybe H.G. had a point.

Martian tripods

Taking into account that Wells was writing during the low tech horse and buggy era at the end of the 19th

century, he came up with some pretty cool Martian technology. His best was the Martian fighting machine. This was a walking tripod with a metal hood on top that carried a Martian driver. Each space cylinder that landed carried enough materials to build three of them, and all of the tripods carried standard equipment such as heat rays, tubes for dispensing a heavy-duty poison gas called “black smoke,” and dangling arms that resembled their tentacle-like fingers for grabbing stuff. Some of the tripods were also equipped with large baskets big enough to carry the poor Earthlings the Martians would catch, and then later use for food.

The tripods were like Flash Gordon’s spaceship or Commando Cody‘s rocket suit. They were beautiful impossibilities that couldn’t possibly work, but were so cool you had to love them. Funny thing is that no two artists seemed to be able to agree on what a tripod actually looked like. Of course H.G. described them. But those descriptions were certainly open to interpretation. Some were ultra cool. Some looked

Is this a water tower, or a MARTIAN?

like boilers standing on legs. When my son was a little kid, he thought that all the water towers in town were actually Martian tripods. So I’d sing “Ooo Laa!” which was the sound the tripods made and the poor little tike would freak out.

To this day I can’t look at a water tower without seeing a Martian standing there.

The War of the Worlds has never been out of print since it was first published in 1898. That’s a long run for a novel. Part of the reason is because of the cool stuff, including the monsters, the tripods, the heat rays and so forth. But another part is because its so scary. I mean, really. Strange, scary-looking monsters land in an odd spaceship and start frying anyone who comes near to them before climbing out of the pit in some juggernaut machine that can’t be stopped. Attempts to fight back prove futile and ultimately all you can do is run for your life. Two other novels I can think of that have also never been out of print, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, work on the exact same levels. Nobody likes the unknown. Nobody likes being helpless. Nobody likes being out of control. Unless, that is, it’s in a story and then people love it.

One reason The War of the Worlds worked so well is because it seemed plausible at the time and played

 on certain fears. Playing off of the works of Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percy Lowell’s descriptions of the mysterious canals and outrageous conclusions popularized the notion of Mars as an older world with sentient beings running around on it. Further, Darwin’s theories of evolution seemed to support the idea of an older species evolving into a superior one. Add to these trendy notions a certain superstitious and unreasoning but wide-spread popular fear that New Year’s Eve 1899 would herald the apocalypse (and you thought that Y2K was an original idea!). Since Great Britain was at the height of it’s ruthless imperialist military power, it seemed the only thing that could bring her to her knees was an invasion by even more ruthless imperialists with better technology and superior weapons. And to the superior-minded, stiff-necked Brits of the Victorian age, that would be the apocalypse.     

Another reason The War of the Worlds was so effective is because of the attention to detail that H.G. put into the work. He figured that since the Martian’s were on Earth on a mission of conquest, of course they’d land in England since it was -- at the time -- the most powerful nation on the planet. Their ultimate target would therefore be London. So he landed them outside London in a country town called

The British army bites the dust

Woking where the Martians could land, establish a beachhead, organize and then executive a coordinated attack. In order to write about this blitzkrieg, H.G. actually mounted a bicycle and launched off on the journey he imaged his Martians would take, making detailed notes on each location -- all the way down to where canon emplacements would be made and which cottage would be burned and so forth -- as he went. The result supposedly scared the crap out of his friends, but provided an amazingly convincing narrative.

When the book came out, first in serialized form and then as a hardcover novel, it was a hit with both

The Woking Station Martian

audiences and critics. But did anyone believe it?  Science fiction was a brand-new genre. They don’t call Wells its father because it was already around when he set pen to paper. So you can bet there was a good amount of people who were confused by it all. Most of The War of the Worlds sounds factual. And it all happened in real towns that were exactly like his descriptions -- before the Martians incinerated them, of course. So much of it happened in the town of Woking, that an artist named Michael Condron made a 23-foot tall sculpture of a Martian fighting machine and placed it in Crown Passage near the Woking Railway Station where it stands today. Is this a case of art imitating life? Did anyone really believe the events of The War of the Worlds were an actual possibility? 

The answer to that came 40 years later, and it came with a vengeance.

Orson Welles

On Sunday night, October 30, 1938, a 23-year old actor/director named Orson Welles took to the microphone to begin the latest episode of his weekly radio show, The Mercury Theater on the Air. Welles was already a popular radio personality having gained notoriety from roles such as The Shadow, which he played opposite Agnus Moorhead. But The Mercury Theater wasn’t just another radio show. It was Wells’ brainchild, a weekly hour-long drama series showcasing classic novels such as Alexandre Dumas’ Count of Monte Cristo, Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Considered too “high brow” by some critics, the show was not the highest rated on the air. Nonetheless, due mostly to Welles popularity and influence, The Mercury Theater had gained a prime time Sunday night eight o’clock slot on the CBS radio network.

 Mercury Theater presented straight-forward radio dramas that tried to remain as faithful to the novels they were based on as time allowed. But the October 30th show was different. For Halloween, Orson wanted to do something totally different. So he produced The Mercury Theater’s adaptation of H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds. And the way he did it was a total deviation from anything that had been done on the radio before.

New York City 1938

The Mercury Theater’s War of the Worlds wasn’t set in Victorian England, but, rather, in present-day, 1938 New York. And instead of a sand pit near Woking, the cylinder falls on a farm near the fictitious town of Grover’s Mill in New Jersey. But these weren’t the significant changes. Those were provided by the brilliant script written by Howard Koch and re-written and revised by Welles himself that changed the story from a first-person narrative into a series of radio news bulletins that at first break into and then take over a fictitious “program of dance music,” as the announcer says, “featuring Ramon Raquello and his orchestra broadcasting live from the Meridian Room at the Park Plaza Hotel in downtown New York City.”

Following the opening credits, Orson Welles began the show with lines more of less taken from the H.G. Wells novel. “We know now that in the early years of the twentieth century this world was being watched closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own,” Wells Began. “…Yet across an immense ethereal gulf , minds that to our minds as ours are to the beasts in the jungle, intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. In the thirty-ninth year of the twentieth century came the great disillusionment. It was near the end of October. Business was better. The war scare was over. More men were back at work. Sales were picking up. On this particular evening, October 30, the Crosley service estimated that thirty-two million people were listening in on radios…”

Up came the music of Ramon Raquello playing a tune called La Cumparsita. But not long after the orchestra began to play, an announcer broke in with the first news bulletin supposedly from the Intercontinental Radio News Service telling of the observation by astronomers of violent gas eruptions regularly occurring on the surface of Mars.

Edgar Bergan

Meanwhile, over on NBC, the majority of the Sunday night radio audience was listening to the opening monologue by ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and his dummy sidekick Charlie McCarthy, stars of the Chase and Sanborn Hour. This was the hottest show with the biggest ratings and the greatest audience on the radio at the time which meant there weren’t many people listening to the Mercury Theater’s opening. Instead, they were laughing along with Bergan and McCarthy.

What they didn’t know was that ultimately the joke would be on them.

The Chase and Sanborn Hour was a typical variety show. It opened with a comedy monologue from the show host and then segued into a skit or a song by it’s guest star. On October 30, the featured singer was operatic singer Nelson Eddy performing Song of the Vagabonds. Eddy’s baritone, operatic style wasn’t exactly a crowd pleaser so listeners began tuning away once he began to sing. And when they tuned in to CBS, they got what sounded like a whole series of authentic-sounding newscasts reporting on the unbelievable story that Earth was being invaded by an army from Mars.

It’s estimated that as many as a million radio listeners thought it was true. In fact, they bought into it

Anybody see a Martian?

hook, line and sinker. Panic and mass hysteria broke out, especially on the east coast. Police departments across the country were inundated with frenzied callers, some who swore they could smell the Martian’s “black smoke” and demanded gas masks; others who claimed they could see the bright flashes of the Martian’s heat rays going off on the horizon and wanted to know what to do about it. People in New Jersey were seen running from their homes with wet towels wrapped around their faces to protect them from the black smoke. Phones were ringing off the hooks at radio stations and newspaper offices, and tons of people jumped in their cars in an attempt to escape from the advancing Martians, totally jamming the roads. There were even rumors of the suicides of several people who could not face the fate that would be dealt by the Martian invaders. These, however, were never verified or proved.

And all this frenzy wasn’t contained to the east coast. Some of the worse hysteria happened in a town called Concrete, Washington on the west coast. So the story goes, at the same time as the Martians were reported charging through the countryside in their tripod fighting machines having just beaten the U.S. army in a fight at Grover‘s Mill, a transformer blew up on a power pole plunging the whole town of Concrete into darkness. Of course everyone thought it was the Martians. Some of the worst hysteria of all happened there.

My mother was seven years old on the night of the broadcast. The whole family lived in Los Angeles in 1938. While the rest of the family was listening to the radio, Mom said she was taking a bath to be ready for school the next day. Suddenly my grandmother burst into the bathroom in a frenzy. We had relatives in Buffalo, New York, and Grandma, so mom says, was panic stricken, screaming and whimpering about how the Martians may have gotten them. Mom said she could hear her sisters crying in another room, and the voice of one her brothers trying to comfort them. Cowering into the hot sudsy water of her bath, Mom said that poor old grandma scared the holy crap out of her that night.

Mom wasn’t alone. Orson Welles’ Martian invasion scared the crap out of a lot of people.

It’s hard today to believe that so many people could be gullible enough to fall for something like that. But there were several distinct reasons why it worked. Radio was an extremely popular form of entertainment and information at the end of the 1930s, but it was also a relatively new media. No one had ever aired phony newscasts before, so there

was no reason for the radio audience to think that they weren’t listing to something genuine. Add to that the fact that world tensions were running very high in the late 30s over the fear of another world war. So the idea of an invasion wasn’t far fetched. You might assume that the idea of Martians was far fetched, but even that wasn’t true. Most people believed in Percival Lowell’s canals, even if they had no idea who he was. The canals of Mars were almost part of the collective consciousness. Even if scientists and astronomers following Lowell pretty much disproved his theories, people still believed in the canals the same way they believed in other improvable places like heaven or hell. And if there were canals it only follows that there would be Martians to build them.

The Mercury Theater on the Air

But you can’t take anything away from Orson Welles, either. The day after the so-called “night that panicked America,” Welles was charged with calming a country angry at having been scammed. In a 1970s interview he said, “The next day there wasn’t a CBS executive to be found.” So when an angry press descended on the New York City CBS Network headquarters, Welles had to face them. “Personally,” he said in the same interview, “I thought it was funny as hell!”

In the official interview filmed by newsreel cameras on Halloween day, 1938, Orson Welles looks humble and relatively shocked that such a thing could have happened. But that was just him doing what he did best…acting. It’s doubtful he was shocked since there is almost overwhelming evidence that he planned it. Orson knew that his Mercury Theater was a ratings underdog. Hell, the show couldn’t even find a sponsor. He also knew the listeners patterns. He knew that Edgar Bergan fans would tune in for the monologue. He also knew that a lot of them wouldn’t stay for a singer like Nelson Eddy, whose big baritone voice sounded like hammered tin due to the technological level of the average speaker in even a high-end radio set of the late 30s.

So he also had to know that only a few people would hear the lead-in to the show. Since there was no sponsor, he didn’t have to pause for commercials. It was only required that he break for station identification once. And that wasn’t done until 40 minutes into the broadcast. He knew that if the script worked and he hooked his audience, it would be the best ratings grabbing trick or treat gimmick the world had ever seen. And Orson Welles would laugh all the way to the bank.

But there was something else, too, that Orson may or may not have counted on. As it turned out, people wanted to believe in Armageddon as much as they feared it. And, apparently, they felt the same thing way about Martians.

And as we know, a little belief goes a long, long way.

Next Time: Martians, Monsters, Astronauts and Heroes 

One Hint...THE WORST IS YET TO COME!

See you...Same Mars time, Same Mars Blog

 

  

  

Where are the Little Green Men?

As you probably know, Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. Some say she is our sister world. If she is, then she's a cold-hearted little bitch, all right. Mars is only a third the size of the earth. There is an atmosphere, but it's 95 percent carbon dioxide, which would make it great if you were a tree. It's also very thin, the equivalent of being about 26 miles above the ground on Earth. So the surface air pressure is next to nothing. What's that mean? Well, the surface temperature at the equator is about 64 degrees Fahrenheit, which isn't bad. Unfortunately, there's so little air, and the air pressure is so low the atmosphere won't hold the heat in. So about six inches off the ground the temperature drops to a few hundred degrees below zero. Which means that on Mars you could lie flat on the ground and comfortably hold a Popsicle by its stick but not a lot else. Well, then again, maybe not even that. Since the boiling point on Mars is below freezing, you would explode and so would the Popsicle. And that would really suck, especially if it was a cherry Popsicle.

So fucking what is the first question to come to mind, and it's a valid question to be sure. The place is so cold and so dry and so barren that if life ever did exist there, it would certainly be no one you would want to know.

Where are the little green men?

This is definitely not the Mars I grew up with. This is like the flying cars we still don't have. It's a promise no one made good on. There aren't little green men on Mars. Hell, there aren't even little green rocks on Mars, which is a heck of a lot different that what I was lead to believe growing up at the Torrance Drive in. When NASA, bloated with money from John F. Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon before the Beatles broke up, sent Mariner 1 up to photograph the Martian surface, they didn't expect the pictures its crude cameras sent back. They didn't get overhead shots of the Martian cities everyone was breathlessly waiting for. They didn't even get canals. Instead, they got a rust-colored version of the moon. In fact, they didn't even get that since Mariner carried a black and white camera.

Nobody wanted this Mars. Even Carl Sagan tried to turn a bleak situation around while brainstorming experiments for the Viking probes to perform once they'd landed on Mars. Sagan suggested smearing nutrients on the surface of the landers just before they shut down for the night. That way they'd be able to see the tracks the next day of any roaming night creature that might have wandered by to lick it off.

Carl Sagan with the Viking Lander

Let's face it, Sagan wanted monsters. He didn't want a dead desert planet anymore than we do. We want the Angry Red Planet. We want the mysterious world that mystified the ancient Romans, befuddled the likes of Galileo, Christian Huygens and Percival Lowell and inspired H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Orson Wells, Howard Koch, Ben Bova, Ray Bradbury, George Pal, Sid Pink, Joseph Samachson, Joe Certa, John Tucker Battle, Tobe Hooper, Brian De Palma, Tim Burton, Steven Spielsburg, John Carpenter, Nicholas Webster, Walt Disney, Frank Frazetta, Jeff Wayne and scores of other writers and filmmakers, including me.

Mars, the god of war

Who are these other guys? The ancient Romans gave Mars its name. They named it after their mythological god of war, mostly because the planet's reddish color reminded them of blood. But even after ancient astronomers pretty much established that Mars was a planet and not a war god jetting around in the heavens, everyone still knew there was something very odd going on, they just didn't know what it was.

Then, one day in 1608 a glass worker in Holland named Hans Lippershey made a couple of crude lenses, stuck them on either side of a tube and called it "The Dutch Perspective Glass for Seeing Things Far Away as if they were Nearby." A year later a young Italian scientist named Galileo heard about Lippershey's invention, studied the concept, improved the design and made his own version. Most likely finding Lippershey's name way to long, he called it a telescope instead. In 1610, Galileo turned his new instrument on the heavens with unbelievable results. The most Galileo saw of Mars was a small red disk. But he did note changes in the intensity of the brightness of the planet as it moved through the night sky, leading him to the conclusion that Mars was an outer world and that its orbit was anything but circular.

Christian Huygens

Nearly 50 years later another astronomer named Christian Huygens, using a much better telescope than Galileo's,  made a startling discovery. He actually saw features on the surface of the planet that would later be called Syrtis Major. But these dark markings were features he and a whole lot of others thought might have be man-like-creature-made.  Unlike Venus, which is hidden beneath a shroud of thick clouds, the surface of Mars could be seen and studied. So for the next couple of hundred years every astronomer with a telescope trained it on the red planet. When it was discovered that Mars had a polar ice cap and a thin atmosphere the assumption was readily made that it must have life as well.

This idea really caught fire 200 hundred years after Huygens when another Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli saw some other odd markings on the Martian surface which he took to be some sort of canyons or channels. In his published works, he called them canalis, the Italian word for channels. Then another astronomer, an American from Arizona named Percival Lowell, who was not quite so clever but was very rich, misunderstood the word, and thought Schiaparelli was talking about canals like they were digging in Panama at the time and jumped to the conclusion that Schiaparelli had seen Martian canals, probably built to bring water from the pole to the dry desert areas of the planet.

Lowell's Mars, rife with canals

Everyone credits H.G. Wells as the father of science fiction. But if not for the fact that he was actually being serious with his work, Lowell could have challenged Wells for the title. He build the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, and after studying Mars through the largest telescope that money could buy, published his first book, "Mars," in 1895 based on his observations. His book contained drawings of the more than 400 canals he claimed to have seen and mapped (and which most astronomers said he made up).  But in his book Lowell drew certain conclusions from his observations. Mars, he said, is smaller than Earth, so it has lower gravity, which would mean that it would also have a thinner atmosphere with lower atmospheric pressure meaning it was likely that water would leak away into space. Therefore water, he speculated, would be a precious commodity on Mars and would need to be moved to lower regions.

Percival Lowell in his observatory

His speculations didn't end there, of course. He also believed that the scarcity of water would have caused life to leave the Martian oceans sooner than it had on Earth, so the Martians would be more evolved than humans. They would have to be smarter than us just to be able to deal with the global ecological catastrophe they were facing. Not only that, but because of the differences in gravity and atmosphere, Lowell felt that the Martians would the three times taller, 27 times as efficient, and 81 times stronger than we poor puny Earthlings.

The only thing he didn't do was put them in blue suits with red capes. The sad thing about Lowell was that he wanted this to be true so badly that he was willing to distort the facts to prove it, sort of like Carl Sagan and his smearing peanut butter on the Viking lander to attract monsters idea. At least Sagan was being partially whimsical. Lowell wasn't whimsical in the least. And his detractors were probably right...he most likely did make up the canals he swore he'd seen.

H.G. Wells

Nonetheless, his book did set a tone, one that was followed by fledgling science fiction father Herbert George Wells, who had already dazzled readers with his first novels The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau and The Invisible Man.  Wells, like a lot of other people of the time, believed in at least the possibility of what Lowell purported, that Mars was inhabited, that its inhabitants were more advanced than us, and that Mars itself was in the final throws of global exhaustion. Much more of a futurist that Lowell, Wells tried to imagine what a much more evolved species of super intelligent sentient beings would be like. Based on his own knowledge of science, psychology and sociology, H.G. departed from Percy in several significant ways.

Wells' Martian

Percival conceived of a race of benevolent giants whose evolved sensibilities had taken them beyond the need for violence and war since all their efforts and intelligence was obviously needed in the effort to save their world. H.G. took an opposite view. Wells imagined the Martians as a bunch of ruthless, emotionless, unfeeling pirates more interested in taking over another world than saving the one they were on. He didn't see them as super strong humanoid giants, either. Instead, he thought of them as advanced, technological geniuses. Wells believed that technology and machinery would replace the need for physical strength. So, since all a Martian really needed was brains to think up the machines and hands to build them with, that's what Wells' Martians became; huge brains with hands. But they didn't have stubby little fingers and thumbs like humans. Martian fingers were elastic, fluid and elongated so that they appeared much more like an octopus' tentacles. And since H.G.'s Martians didn't have bodies, only had heads, they didn't have many organs either. So instead of eating and digesting food, Wells made them vampires that injected blood directly into their veins.

And these are the creatures that invaded the Earth in H.G. Wells classic tale The War of the Worlds. The story is fairly simple. While people of Britain go about their business, serene in the notion that the British Empire will never fall,  the Martians, who have been looking for a new crib since they've pretty much figured that Mars has had it, launch a devastating invasion taking them all totally by surprise. The first Martian spacecraft -- referred  to only as a "cylinder" -- sort of crash lands in the sand  pits of Horsell Common outside of town. Course, that sort of landing would have killed everything inside, but then again, take off would have done them in first. Not a lot was known about rocketry in 1898. H.G. took the same tack as Jules Verne did in his novel From the Earth to the Moon.  They figured that the only way you could get up enough speed to reach escape velocity was by firing a projectile from a gun, which is what the Martians did to get here. They fired their "cylinders" from some sort of huge cannon aimed at Earth from the Martian surface.

Oh well. Buy the premise, buy the bit, right?

Anyway, everyone things its a meteor until the end unscrews and drops off. When the first of the Martians crawl out, blinking in what to them would be the very bright sun,  everyone is terrified -- they are described as being as large as a bear, after all. The first thing the humans do is approach the open cylinder carrying a white flag hoping for a parlay. The Martians, who either don't know what this means or don't care, fry most of the spectators in the pit -- starting with the guys carrying the white flag -- with some cool tech they brought from Mars, the coolest of which is an invisible heat ray.

Now this really pisses everybody off. So the English army surrounds the pit. But before they can go Wellington on the Martians, the Martians pull off a little surprise of their own. Seems they brought enough stuff with them to build three -- count 'em -- three shiny metal fighting machines standing on tripods.

Watercolor painting of a Martian fighting machine

 
 Next time: More Martians, More Monsters and the Media Takes Over!

One word of warning: THE WORST IS YET TO COME!

SAME MARS TIME...SAME MARS BLOG