Seeing Red

Kirk Baird

Monday, Aug. 25, 2003 | 9:26 a.m.

"At most, terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space ... intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us."

Opening narration from the book "War of the Worlds."

Mars fun facts

Saturn gets the press for its rings, Jupiter for its size, Mercury for its relation to speed and Pluto because of the Disney connection. Meanwhile Uranus has made us snicker like teenagers.

But when it comes to capturing our imagination, Mars is unmatched.

For one, the Red Planet is the most Earthlike in our solar system. It has seasons and polar caps, clouds and an atmosphere, a high temperature of 50 degrees in some areas, and there might be water lurking just below the desolate, rocky surface.

It's also the only planet we know of other than our own that is capable of sustaining life whether billions of years ago or even now, in primitive form.

On Wednesday, Mars will be at its closest point to Earth in 60,000 years when mankind was still living in caves. The next time Mars will be closer is the year 2287.

"Mars is a beguiling place," Jim Garvin, NASA's lead scientist for Mars, said in a phone interview from NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. "The fascination stems from human nature. Every time we've looked at it with telescopes and now spacecraft, it's given us a changing face."

Of particular interest is the mysterious "Face on Mars" as photographed in July 1976 from Viking Orbiter 1.

Appearing to feature eyes, nose, mouth and even a helmet of hair, some believe the face is proof an intelligent species once lived on Mars, or at least visited the planet. Others simply dismiss the feature as a trick of light and shadow.

"I always remind people to look at images of Earth. We see many things that upon first examination, appear mysterious. Then we go there and see for ourselves that it's simply Mother Nature," Garvin said. "You have to keep an open mind -- but we haven't been there enough to know how these things have been made."

This isn't the first time the possibility of life on Mars has been the center of controversy.

In 1877 Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, attempted to map Mars. He referred to the streaks on Mars as "canali." The term was incorrectly translated to English as "canals." Thus began a longstanding myth that Mars had a planetwide system of irrigation -- alleged proof that an advanced race was just a planet away.

This misconception continued well into the 20th century, even after astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard reported in 1894 that, after careful examination, he found no evidence of canals on Mars.

More recently scientists from the Johnson Space Center reported evidence that a Mars meteorite, called ALH84001, contained microfossil and chemical evidence of ancient Martian microbes.

Their findings, however, are a source of raging controversy in the scientific community.

"There are those who think they found the telltale sign of biological activity. Others say no, that they're misreading and over-interpreting," Garvin said. "Unless we go there and bring the right rocks back -- maybe with people instead of machines -- we're never going to know."

But the possibility of life on Mars is, ultimately, what makes the Red Planet so appealing to science-fiction writers as well as the general public.

Mars attacks

Legendary science fiction writer H.G. Wells first explored the possibility of extraterrestrial life in 1897 with his watershed novel, "War of the Worlds."

Detailing an invasion by a technologically advanced group of aliens who hope to escape their dying world, mankind is nearly wiped out by the marauding Martians. Ultimately, however, they're done in by everyday germs.

The book was later adapted into the infamous 1938 radio drama, co-written by Orson Welles and performed by The Mercury Theater. Welles' Halloween broadcast sent many listeners into a state of panic as they heard reports of their world being reduced to rubble by the Martian onslaught.

In 1953 the book was also adapted into the sci-fi classic "War of the Worlds," starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. The movie featured then-state-of-the-art special effects, which hold up surprisingly well to this day.

Probably most memorable, however, is the only scene in which a Martian is visible. The alien slowly reaches out to grab an unsuspecting Robinson, who screams in terror at the sight. Meanwhile an ever-alert Barry throws an axe into the Martian, sending the creature running off screaming in pain.

Fifty years later Robinson still laughs at the design of the alien: a large, brown doughy torso/head with three eyes colored red, blue and yellow and long, spindly arms with three suckers for fingers.

"I couldn't figure out how these intelligent beings got all the way across the universe with three suckered fingers," she said in a recent interview from her home in Los Angeles.

When the film was released, however, the alien served its purpose, giving the audience a jolt of fright.

"In 1953 it was pretty scary. We were lovely, unsophisticated people who frightened easily," she said. "I supposed that Martian was a little frightening to some people."

Martian evolution

Which made it all the easier for Hollywood to portray the Martians as either evil invaders or monstrous creatures -- and sometimes both -- in such films as "Rocketship X-M" (1950), "Flight to Mars" (1951), "Devil Girl From Mars" (1954) and "The Angry Red Planet" (1959), which featured a giant rat-bat-spider creation that would make Ed Wood blush.

While movies continued to treat the Red Planet as a launching point for intergalactic villains, literature took a more cerebral approach. In Ray Bradbury's "Martian Chronicles" series, published in 1951, Martians are wise, benevolent beings with Earthlings cast in the role of greedy invaders.

Other authors followed Bradbury's lead.

Martians are strange

In 1961 Robert Heinlein published "Stranger in a Strange Land," which concerns the sole human survivor of the first manned mission to Mars. The survivor is raised by Martians, only to return to Earth as an alien of his own species. The novel does what most great science-fiction does best: offer commentary of present-day society through another time or place.

And in 1993 Kim Stanley Robinson published "Red Mars," the first in her well-regarded, three-book series on the colonization of Mars and subsequent efforts to make it Earthlike.

As writers began treating Mars more seriously, cinema's view of the planet also changed.

With 1964's "Robinson Crusoe on Mars," for example, Hollywood offered a serious, other-worldly adaption of Daniel Defoe's 17th-century classic, complete with an alien named "Friday."

More recent films have run the gamut from the deadly serious "Mission to Mars" and horrific "Ghosts of Mars" to the action-oriented "Total Recall" and the sci-fi spoof "Mars Attacks."

"The movies reflect Mars very differently than how I would portray it. And that's fine, that's the way movies should work," Garvin said. "Of course, Mother Nature always does it better than the movies."

And it's cheaper, too.

Garvin said for the cost of making a blockbuster film, such as the $125 million spent on "Hulk," NASA could fund a mission to mars.

And ultimately, he said he hopes NASA achieves its goal of having a man walk on Mars.

"Going to the moon was almost unimaginable for human beings and an engineering breakthrough," Garvin said. "Mars is a thousands times further from Earth. It's a whole other class of exploration.

"It's like we're starting 500 years ago in the Renaissance days and Columbus ... It will be the greatest expedition in that time of history. The question is, who wants to lead this legacy?"

In the meantime, the Martians can only wait. And watch.com