A Man, a Plan, a Canal—Mars!

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 twentieth 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, you know, 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 nineteen o seven, 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 mister 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 I 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. Perceval, graduated from Harvard, like all the men in the family did. He was the eldest son and he had a lot, 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 …