The eminence from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich wanted to reassure his audience with light humor. “You may sleep quietly in your beds,” said Edward Walter Maunder at a meeting of the British ...

At the turn of the 20th century, the "Mars Craze" reached a fever pitch, fueled by tales of intelligent canal-building Martians and the tantalizing possibly of contact between planets. Newspapers ...

In 1906, the New York Times ran the headline, “There is life on the planet Mars.” It was based on the work of Percival Lowell, a professor who was convinced Mars contained a series of irrigation ...

In The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America, science journalist and best-selling author David Baron offers a completely true look at America’s ...

Percival Lowell, a 19th-century American businessman and astronomer, had a pet theory: that a careful look through a telescope revealed that intelligent life exists on Mars. Skeptics cried not enough ...

Organic compounds found in Mars rocks are too abundant to rule out the possibility of Martian life in the red planet’s history, NASA scientists say. In March of 2025, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered ...