The “true believers” of the “Life on Mars” cult will never give up, no matter how much evidence accumulates that Mars is a dead rock in space. The except below from our recent “Blood Moon” article explains the history of how Percival Lowell created the “Life on Mars” hoax in the 19th century. Lowell’s “work” inspired the science fiction writers of his generation, including H.G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and even C.S. Lewis, and still persists a century after being debunked.
Mars has been shown over and over again to be a barren, lifeless desert. I for one am SICK AND TIRED of a lifetime of these so-called “news” reports from NASA and other “objective” scientists who just can’t let it go. The Viking lander in 1976 proved that the soil of Mars is more sterile than a terrestrial surgical suite. After much fanfare and media hype, the so-called “Mars rock” of 1996 was shown to be contaminated by terrestrial bacteria. Yet the quest never ends for the Mars faithful and hope springs eternal.
The “elephant in the room” never mentioned by Mars devotees is that the Red Planet lacks a magnetic field like the Earth’s, which provides terrestrial life with protection from the hard radiation of space. Any Martian “life as we know it” would be destroyed by this radiation. Any humans presuming to settle on Mars would soon be dead from radiation poisoning, or at least die a slow death from cancer.
There is a mountain of evidence that Mars is inhospitable to anything that we can recognize as biochemical life. So whether or not water is currently flowing or has ever flowed on Mars is completely irrelevant. The persistent brainwashing propaganda from NASA and elsewhere in mainstream science springs from a longing and yearning to demonstrate universal darwinism, in the hope of disproving the existence of a Creator.
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The Great Moon Hoax came and went, and is only remembered today as a minor historical footnote. Another piece of foolish 19th century propaganda was much more successful, and still thrives today… the cult of “Life on Mars.” This ludicrous notion was first propagated by Percival Lowell, a wealthy astronomer who founded his own observatory in Arizona.
Lowell misconstrued the term “canali” used by the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli to describe certain features observed telescopically on the surface of Mars. Based on negligible evidence, Lowell wrote three books, starting in 1895, in which he constructed an elaborate storyline of alleged Martians that carved “canals” over the planet’s surface, to conduct water to save their dying civilization.
It’s a matter of history that Lowell’s “canals of Mars” were utterly debunked, shown to be an optical illusion, and Mars proven to be devoid of an alien civilization. But Lowell sold a lot of books along the way, and he inspired a loyal following that persists to this day. H.G. Wells was inspired by Lowell’s “work” to write his “War of the Worlds” in 1898. Forty years later, another Wells by the name of Orson did a radio performance that outdid the Great Moon Hoax of the previous century in inadvertently misleading the public.
The “Life on Mars” hoax has persisted over the last 120 years, and keeps turning up like a bad penny. Most notably in recent times was the famous “Mars rock” hoax of 1996, in which a meteoric fragment, regarded as originating on Mars, was discovered to have traces of bacteria, presumed to be of Martian origin. As I expected at the time, this “evidence of alien life” was eventually proven to be due to bacterial contamination here on Earth. But in the face of all evidence, the Mars devotees remain just as undeterred as the “Blood Moon” enthusiasts. Many professional scientists, including NASA researchers, hold a type of religious faith for the promise of life on Mars. For this reason, this hoax will probably never die out, at least not anytime soon.
