“Lowell always said that the regularity of the [Martian] canals was an unmistakable sign that they were of intelligent origin. The only unresolved question was which side of the telescope the intelligence was on.”
— Carl Sagan, Cosmos
“Canals on the Planet Mars,” read the headline of The Times of London of April 13, 1882, in response to an announcement by the director of Milan’s Brera Observatory, Giovanni Schiaparelli, that he’d seen a network of stripes on the surface of the planet Mars. He called them canali, Italian for channels, but journalists saw an opportunity to pique the public’s interest with the mistranslation “canals.” Schiaparelli’s claim prompted European and American astronomers to aim their telescopes at Mars’ tiny disc to see the markings for themselves. Most said they saw no lines. Even with the best telescopes of the age, Mars usually appeared blurry and indistinct. That changed when a close approach of the planet in summer of 1892 gave Frenchman Camille Flammarion an opportunity to check Schiaparelli’s map.
Flammarion was something of a Renaissance man: astronomer, philosopher, writer and lecturer. If intelligent beings on Mars had built a vast network of canals, he was just the man to confirm it. His obsession with alien life started at age 20 with his first book, The Plurality of Inhabited Worlds. Later, The New York Herald ran his op-ed, “How to Talk with the Folks on Mars.” Thus primed, in 1892, Flammarion said that he could see Schiaparelli’s lines, which, he mused, might be a gigantic semaphore — Martians signaling to us across millions of miles of empty space. (He presumably discounted the canal hypothesis, since Martian engineers would presumably design canals to follow the natural topography of the land, not arrow-straight per Schiaparelli.)
In any event, Schiaparelli and Flammarion were mere amateurs when it came to Mars madness. Full-on Martian craziness arrived in the person of Percival Lowell (1855-1916), Harvard University class of 1876. Heir to a vast family fortune, Lowell was an unhappy businessman who, in his late 20s, left the U.S. for Japan, partly to avoid the repercussions of breaking his engagement to the daughter of a Boston banker. (Future president Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “… your conduct has been such as only a mean-spirited and cowardly blackguard could be guilty of.”)
Several years later, after the engagement ruckus had died down, Lowell returned to the U.S. and promptly became obsessed with Mars, building an observatory outside Flagstaff, Arizona, on what became known as “Mars Hill.” His observations there, starting in the summer of 1894, soon became the stuff of legend. Canals, bordered by wide strips of vegetation, bringing water from the poles to the dry equatorial regions! Double canals! Oases! Clearly Mars was inhabited by, not just intelligent beings, but by beings who had learned to live in harmony with each other, and therefore far more advanced than Earth’s bickering humanity.
This was the stuff of Lowell’s books and lectures, and for over a decade, the public lapped it up. If things looked grim on planet Earth, Mars and the Martians could show us the way out of our petty nationalism, poverty and unhappiness … if only we could communicate with our sister planet. Proposals to do so, by semaphore, by newly developed radio, or even by telepathy, abounded.
Lowell’s flights of fancy, given voice by the yellow press of the day, came crashing down in August of 1909, when the top astronomers of the day convened at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. Despite earlier individual attempts to dismiss Lowell’s observations (invisible to astronomers using much better telescopes than his), this was the first time scientists en masse had condemned him. “It’s the veriest rot,” declaimed the Society’s president. Newspapers soon followed, Lowell’s delusions now being the stuff of mockery instead of awe. Seven years later, Lowell would be gone, his fantasies dying with him.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) is indebted to David Baron and his new book, The Martians, which deals delightfully with this topic.
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2026.