The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America

"There Is Life on the Planet Mars" - The New York Times, 9 December 1906.

The New York Times headline was no joke. In the early 1900s, many believed intelligent life had been discovered on Mars. The Martians -a bizarre tale reconstructed through newly discovered clippings, letters and photographs-begins in the 1890s with Percival Lowell, a Harvard scion who was so certain of his Mars discovery that he (almost) convinced a generation of astronomers that grainy photographs of the red planet revealed meltwater and an intricate canal system, declaring "there can be no doubt that living beings inhabit our neighbouring world" (The New York Times ).

So frenzied was the reaction that international controversies arose. Tesla announced he had received Martian radio signals, biologists debated whether Martians were winged or gilled and a new genre called science fiction arose. While Lowell's claims were debunked, his influence sparked a compulsive interest in Mars and life in outer space that continues to this day.