DISCOVERING THE RED PLANET

Sometimes the dream is a nightmare. Mars has always had an ominous mien in myth and culture. Ancient civilizations regarded the planet as a malevolent agent of war and apocalypse. Similar myths emerged around the world.1 In late Babylonian texts, Mars is identified with Nergal, the fiery god of destruction and war. To the Greeks, Mars was Ares, one of Twelve Olympians and the son of Zeus and Hera. His attendants on the battlefield were Deimos and Phobos, terror and fear, and his sister and companion was Eris, the goddess of discord.2 Ares was an important but an unlikeable character. In Roman hands he morphed into a virile and noble god, one who facilitated agriculture as well as war. The third month of our year honors him and the time when winter abated enough that Roman legions could begin their military campaigns. In legend, Mars aban­doned his children Romulus and Remus and the twins went on to found the city of Rome.3 The mystique of Mars may have been enhanced by its retrograde motion: the fact that every few years it twice reverses its direction of motion among the stars.4 All exterior planets show this behavior, but the reversal is more dramatic for Mars than for Jupiter and Saturn. It’s curious that such a modest speck of reddish light could exert such power (plate 1).

Fast forward nearly two thousand years and Mars still exerts a grip on the imagination. It’s the night before Halloween, on the eve of World War II. Families across America are settling around the radio to hear “The Mercury Theatre on the Air,” a weekly pro­gram directed by the young Orson Welles and featuring him and

a talented ensemble cast. Listeners are enjoying salsa-inflected or­chestral music from a hotel in New York City when the announcer breaks in: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we interrupt our program of dance music to bring you a special bulletin from the Interconti­nental Radio News.”5 There’s a news report about unusual activity observed on the surface of Mars, then back to the music. A few minutes later the announcer breaks in with additional information about Mars. More music. The next interruption has the announcer talking in breathless tones about a meteor that just landed in New Jersey. A little later, on the scene, there’s horror in his voice as he describes creatures emerging from the meteor, which is in fact a spaceship. The Martians begin using a heat ray to incinerate by­standers, and as the announcer describes the engulfing flames, his voice is cut off in mid-sentence. Welles deliberately scripts several long seconds of silence, or “dead air,” to increase the tension and the verisimilitude.6 In New Jersey and elsewhere around the coun­try, people panic and many load their belongings into cars to es­cape the menace.7

To the modern ear, Welles’s broadcast has the tone of cheesy, B- grade science fiction. But this was a younger, more innocent world, worried about war and ignorant about the improbability of aliens actually visiting Earth. It was nearly twenty years before America would enter the Space Age. In fact, the story of invasion from Mars transcends particulars of time and culture. When H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, it was an instant classic. His words retain their evocative power: “Yet across the gulf of space, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, re­garded our planet with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.” More than a century later, when Stephen Spielberg adapted the book for a 2005 movie, the basic plot was unchanged.8 Fear of alien invasion taps into something deep in the human psyche, as primal as dreams themselves.