The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
David Baron
Liveright
August 2025
In a better universe – where HBO is never called Max, everyone can agree on which prestige show we should watch, and The Walking Dead has never happened – a late season of Julian Fellowes’ The Gilded Age series would work details from David Baron’s The Martians into multiple episodes. Incredible as it sounds, for about 15 years, a good-sized slice of the American public—including many upper-class denizens who frequented the theater and lecture halls for edification and improvement—was not just convinced there was intelligent life on Mars, but desperately wanted it to be so.
Baron’s The Martians opens on this description of a New York dinner party thrown in 1907 by “legendary hostess” Mamie Fish:
Between courses, a dweller from the Red Planet materialized through scarlet draped and boomed to the bewildered guests, ‘Mortals, I am here to tell you the things we know of you on Mars.’ Though unable to speak English, he was said to converse with partygoers by means of a so-called mystiscope, a device that helpfully enabled translation.
What was unusual about this elaborate party trick was how unremarkable it was. At that point, the country was several years into a bona-fide mania for Martians. The aliens were the basis of hit theater shows, a constant source of wildly illustrated speculations in newspapers, and the subject of fervent speculation. Starting in the early 1890s, discussion on the subject tended not towards whether there were intelligent beings on Mars but what kind of intelligent beings they were.
According to Baron’s The Martians, the progenitor of this fad was not an American but Camille Flammarion, a Frenchman whose multi-hyphenated occupations (“astronomer … starry-eyed prophet … scientist, philosopher, lecturer, journalist, and novelist”) made him well-suited for firing people’s imaginations. Or starting a cult, which to some degree, he did.
A giddy fantasist with his own observatory in a chateau outside Paris, Flammarion published books and articles about a galaxy that rippled with non-human life. At the same time, Flammarion’s floridly fun writing (imagine Jules Verne collaborating with George Méliès and fired with the spirit of a tabloid newsman) was sparking people’s spirits; other astronomers were noticing dark spots on the surface of Mars. Several, like Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, also spotted what appeared to be straight-seeming lines. These suggested canals, which meant intelligent life.
A central figure in Baron’s story, what happened after that initial flare of interest in Schiaparelli’s canales is Percival Lowell. The Harvard-educated Boston Brahmin scion of a textile fortune, he did more than almost any other person to fan the flame of Mars mania. Despite all the benefits of his elite class (a cousin of Theodore Roosevelt, best man at Edith Wharton’s marriage), he had grown bored with the family business and reinvented himself as a traveler and interpreter of Japanese culture before catching the Flammarion and Schiaparelli virus.
By 1895, Lowell had built his own observatory in Arizona and was delivering lectures about what he believed to be evidence of “a global irrigation system” and “an ancient and superior culture” on the red planet. Scientists mocked his findings as the romantic imaginings of a dilettante. Magazines and newspapers, however, pounced, sensing a public eager for some romance.
Astronomy writer Agnes Clarke suggested an explanation for the popularity of Lowell’s vision:
At the close of this nineteenth century, after so many poignant delusions, amid the wreck of so many passionate hopes, men cherish the vision of other and better worlds, where intelligence, untrammeled by moral disabilities, may have risen to unimaginable heights.
People were eager to look up and dream. The Victorian world they inhabited was rife with possibilities but also fear of the unknown. While a smart, popular history of a mania,The Martiansalso provides a vivid sketch of turn-of-the-century America, where “science had banished” the religion, superstitions, and “enchanted beings” that once pervaded people’s conception of their world, replacing them with “existential disorientation”. New inventions and media were adding more disorder to the already chaotic Industrial Age.
Prefiguring the current era, it was a time when men of bombastic confidence, whether industrial tycoons or wizardly inventors like Nikola Tesla, were reshaping the contours of life. Like certain contemporary innovators, Tesla had a penchant for rash declarations, such as this one Baron notes him making on New Year’s Eve 1900: “Brethren! We have a message from another world, unknown and remote.”
Despite the best efforts of Tesla and other believers, like all fads, the Martian craze petered out. By 1909, a growing chorus of astronomers, using improved photographs of Mars that showed some “streaks and splotches” on the planet’s surface but no straight canals, started turning the tide of opinion against Lowell and his fellow dreamers.
Baron hits the right tone in The Martians for this kind of tale. Lightly mocking without being denunciatory, he appears very familiar with and not overly worried about his country’s habit of occasionally getting all too worked up about things.
Despite the implacable stubbornness of the Mars dreamers in the face of tut-tutting scientists, The Martians fails to find a dark side to this craze. While fantasizing about magical, benign creatures beyond the heavens might not have been the most productive response to societal churn, class strife, and economic disruption, at least it was not destructive.