99% Invisible - A Man, a Plan, a Canal—Mars!

Episode Date: March 10, 2026

How one wealthy, amateur astronomer convinced the world Martians were real. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of 99% Invisible ad-free and a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 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 vaudeville skits. There were songs about the Martians in Tin Pan Alley music. There were Martians in advertising. There was a Martian in the comics, a guy named Mr. Skygack, 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 speculation seeping into public discourse, and it's 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 Percival Lowell, and he's sort of the engine powering this idea of life on Mars. Could you talk about who Percival Lowell was?

Well, so Lowell was an interesting man psychologically. Now, obviously, I never met him, and I'm not a psychoanalyst. But, you know, he clearly had a big ego and a fragile ego. So Percival Lowell came from one of the most prominent families in New England. The Lowell's of Massachusetts were incredibly wealthy, were big philanthropists, were big in the culture of Massachusetts and the United States. Percival 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. But 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 a, 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 Skaaparelli, 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 assumed to be oceans and light areas that were thought to be continents. But Scapparelli also saw these fine lines crisscrossing 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, canale 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. They were a mystery.

No one knew what these lines that looked so straight that they seemed artificial might be. And it was Percival Lowell 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 Lowell 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. But 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 is kind of a mistake in science. Yeah. And Lowell, 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 stay-of-the-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 Lowell, 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. It 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 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 oh I saw some lines and you draw those and then you stare some more and you see 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 at 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 is sort of hypnotic. You just, 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 the 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 fine astronomer named Andrew Ellicott-Douglas, A.E. Douglas, you know, 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 Percival 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. You know, there were astronomers at other observatories with excellent telescopes who didn't see the lines. And even Scaparrelli 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, you know, when you have one astronomer saying, I don't see them and 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. He had 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 over. overseen by Lowell's very father,

Lowell was invited to speak about Mars to the Lowell Institute, which actually had its lectures in a room, 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, you know, 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 onto 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 Nicola Tesla. So how does he fit into all this? So Nicola Tesla was a genius who changed the world. He also was an eccentric guy. And in 1890, 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 1890 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 natural electromagnetic radiation like from lightning. And Tesla one night, alone 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. 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 flat out say that you probably would have gotten wrapped up in this craze around Mars, too. So 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 up in the Arctic are working together with those on 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 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. it is like, well, if we had evidence of that, it would be so like earth-shaking to everything we believe. It would upend 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. 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 Christ came to Earth to save our souls, did Christ go to Mars too? I mean, that seems to be stretching things. But actually, no, theologians and clergy were able to incorporate these ideas and not really, they didn't feel that it undermined their beliefs.

And if anything, they found ways for it to amplify their beliefs. This would just even more worlds, 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 Marsan 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 period.

Because I first went into a thing, this is just, this is a rollicking good tale. Can you believe it that at that time people really believed that they 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. Well, you would think we would ask them practical questions about building canals or, or maybe how to improve on the airplane of the Wright brothers.

Because surely the Martians are far in advance of us when it comes to motorized flight. No, the questions that 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, Lowell's 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.

Yeah, so among the anti-canalists, 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 Antich Canalis 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 of the... in an experiment where he took a map of Mars, and where there were canals, he erased the canal, 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, from 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,

Loew called it derisively, the small boy theory of the lines on Mars, which he said, well, how can you trust these Greenwich schoolboys 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.

drawing canals. Right. And so in fact, and what Mondar, 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 there were some details

but we weren't seeing them clearly. And he said, when we get even in 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 Lowell. 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 Eugène Michel Antoniati. He was originally from Greece. And Antoniati had made these maps of Mars crisscrossed 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, Antoniati 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. You were 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, is this wobbly object in the telescope, comes in and out of focus. Mars was sitting dead still. He could see the planet's 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 were there where he was supposed to see canals. Instead, he saw very, very, very, natural-looking features.

So Antoni, 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. Even people who supported him began to just drop off very quickly, including Scaparelli, who was the first person to describe canals on Mars. Exactly. So 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. Wow. 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, which speaks to his stubbornness, to his ego. And I think sometimes at 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 diluting

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 its its own power was creating illusions. So I don't think I'm giving anything away to say there are no Martians. He never were canals on Mars. But as that idea started to gain some traction toward the end of Lowell's life, he never gave an inch. He claimed 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 kook and a stubborn man.

But, you know, I gather from your book you do have charitable opinions of Lowell and his legacy. Could you describe 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, generally remembered as one of the great blunders of science. And it was. It's 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. You'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 world today and our. 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, you know, built a reputation around skepticism on vaccines. You know, most in the scientific community think this is bunk. You know, the very, the 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. has 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. I mean, there's also this compulsion of having these ultimate, wealthy, privileged insiders casting themselves as renegade outsiders to orthodoxy. What is, what is, why is that narrative so compelling? That's a good question.

But, but I guess what I would say is a lot of folks in this, in this situation, cast themselves as skeptics. And 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 on to 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 move 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 Percival Lowe. Well, David Barron, thank you so much for talk with me. I just had a blast reading your book and a blast talking to you through. It was so much fun. Well, Robin, it was my pleasure.

And with a last name like yours, I figure it was bound to be that I would come on your show. Makes sense to me. 99% Invisible was produced and edited this week by Joe Rosenberg and Jason DeLeon. Mixed by Martin Gonzalez, music by Swan Rial. Kathy 2 is our executive producer. Kurt Colstead is our digital director. Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Barube, Emmett Fitzgerald,

Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lay, Lashamadon, Kelly Prime, Jacob Medina Gleason, Tallinn and Rain Stradley, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% of his logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Serious XM Podcast Family, now headquartered six blocks north, in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown oakland california you can find us on all the usual social media science as well as our own discord server there's a link to that as well as every

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