martians on earth -- 7/8/26

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Today's selection -- from The Martians by David Baron. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the world became obsessed with Mars:

"New York City, already a global metropolis, grew ever busier, taller, and more interconnected. The colossal Williamsburg Bridge stood nearly complete, its great span linking the Lower East Side with Brooklyn, while workers burrowed a subway beneath the grid of Manhattan streets. Overhead, a new wedge-shaped marvel of a skyscraper, the Flatiron Building, offered a God's-eye view of the impressive sprawl. In a quieter area a few blocks away, near Gramercy Park-that tranquil, private enclave for the upper class–evening services were about to begin at a church frequented by the city's elite. It was a mild Sunday in the spring of 1903, and a well-groomed young man entered through the main door. Little noticed, he quietly strode up the aisle, approached the altar, then solemnly bowed and turned toward the pews. ‘Listen, ye mortals of Earth,’ he proclaimed in a loud and cultured voice. ‘I am a messenger from Mars, the first ever sent by our glorious ruler to the mean inhabitants of this lowly planet.’ Stunned parishioners looked on as the unknown caller lifted a prayer book. ‘Hear the message,’ he boomed. ‘I will read it to you.’ As the self-professed Martian was about to continue, the sexton rushed forward and asked the visitor if he might finish the sermon outside. The man complied. He bowed again, walked slowly out of the church, and vanished into the night.

“This incident was hardly unique. Later that year, a woman in St.Louis brought tidings from the red planet. Her Earth name was Sara Weiss, though she claimed to go by Gentola on Mars, a world known by its inhabitants as Ento. She said she had traveled there many times–not physically, but as a disembodied soul–and she wrote a book describing the wonders she had found: iridescent cities, flying machines, exotic flowers, and a people as righteous as they were handsome. Gentola's guide on these journeys, himself a spirit, asked her to relay a message to two scientific men of Earth–Camille Flammarion and Giovanni Schiaparelli–who were ‘inclined to believe that the Entoans (Marsians) have resorted to irrigation.’ ‘Gentlemen,’ the message read, ‘I assure you that the surmise is entirely correct.’

“Other earthlings were asserting their own personal connection to Mars. A man from Boston said his soul spent a month on the planet while his body was meditating at a Buddhist monastery in India. A British clerk insisted that he received telepathic messages from a Martian woman named Silver Pearl, who spoke ‘with a slight foreign accent.’ These claims did not evoke universal ridicule. Mystical experiences were common at this time, when spiritualism was enjoying its own popular craze. Seances drew enthusiasts with the zeal of a religious revival. Ouija boards and ghost stories enthralled the masses.

Martian Landscape by Hélène Smith

“Belief in the paranormal, already widespread since the mid-nineteenth century, had gained credence from recent advances in physics. The discovery of X-rays and radio waves revealed a hidden world filled with unseen forces, which made plausible that some form of invisible energy might explain thought transference, clairvoyance, and similar phenomena. (As a prominent medium explained, ‘Telepathy is nature's wireless telegraphy.’) To test the idea, scientists held experimental seances. Dabbling in this effort were astronomers, including Flammarion and Schiaparelli, but a more concerted campaign was waged by psychologists.

“Théodore Flournoy, a psychology professor at the University of Geneva, spent several years studying a Swiss woman who reportedly traveled to Mars when in a trance. She worked as a salesperson in a silk shop by day, claimed psychic abilities, and did volunteer duty at seances in her off hours. To protect her identity, Flournoy gave her an alias–Hélène Smith. Confident, with dark and intelligent eyes, she exhibited grotesque behaviors when she fell into a hypnotic state; she groaned, cried, laughed, genuflected, shivered violently, and lapsed into Martian tongue. ‘Ané éni ké éréduté cé ilassune té imâ ni bétiné chée durée,’ she uttered at a seance in the winter of 1897. She later translated to her native French: ‘C'est ici que, solitaire, je m'approche du ciel et regarde ta terre.’ (‘It is here that, alone, I bring myself near to heaven and look upon the Earth.’)

“Professor Flournoy took notes at the sessions and analyzed the Martian language–its phonetics, grammar, syntax. He found it all too familiar. ‘The order of the words,’ he discovered, ‘is absolutely the same in Martian as in French.’ What is more, the alphabets of both languages comprised nearly identical sounds, and many Martian words, when compared with their French equivalents, contained the same number of syllables. (Métiche was Martian for monsieur; médache for madame.) Flournoy argued that Martian, ‘in spite of its strange appearance and the fifty millions of leagues which separate us from the red planet,’ was nothing more than ‘disguised French.’

“It was clear to Flournoy that Hélène Smith had never traveled to Mars, but he did not consider her a fraud; she made no money from her psychic performances, her trances appeared genuine, and she seemed convinced of the reality of her astral journeys. Those journeys, Flournoy concluded, were hallucinations concocted by her own mind to escape a dissatisfying life. This dreamlike adventure–what he called a ‘romance of the subliminal imagination’–was a phenomenon worthy of study in its own right. The unconscious mind was just then being explored by other scientists and medical doctors, notably Sigmund Freud, who plumbed the abyssal depths of the self, beyond the sunlight of our awareness, where he found repressed memories. Flournoy's Martian-speaking psychic showed that those dark places also held a vast reservoir of creativity that can weave convincing fantasies to trick us into believing falsehoods we crave to be true. A historian of psychiatry would later remark that this mythmaking aspect of the unconscious, the so-called mythopoeic unconscious, is a force that has wielded ‘terrible power–a power that fathered epidemics of demonism, collective psychoses among witches, revelations of spiritualists.’ It is, in other words, a power that can unleash delusions that spread from person to person: social contagions.”

author:	David Baron
title:	The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America
publisher:	Liveright
date:	Copyright 2025
pages:	130-133