LIFE Magazine1935-2000

Sister of TIME and FORTUNE

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Green Bank Photos by Michael Rougier Autumn 1962

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Copyright 1962 Time, Inc.

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Copyright 1962 Time, Inc.

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Copyright 1962 Time, Inc.

Boris Artzybasheff: Inhabitants of MarsLIFE, September 24, 1956

Percy Greg's bearded Martials from Across the Zodiac (1880)

Copyright 1962 Time, Inc.

A FANCIFUL PREVIEW TO NEW FACTS

To imaginative men Mars is a world teeming with bizarre life. In this fanciful drawing Boris Artzybasheff compiles an anthology of Martian monsters. In 1758 the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, reported he had talked to Martians, who were gentle, holy people dressed in tree bark. At lower left they stand with a fluid fire they invented. Nearby are a furred and feathered couple suggested in 1698 by Christian Huygens, who had discovered Syrtis Major (p. 38). At their feet cavort "little green men" of modern science fiction. Small, bearded Martians (left) with domesticated unicorns were created in 1880 by Writer Percy Greg. Warriors behind them were imagined by 17th Century Writer Bernardin de St. Pierre.

To give Martians light at night Writer Bernard de Fontenelle in 1686 dreamed up glowing mountains and luminescent birds. Soon after, Jonathan Swift and Voltaire prophetically chose an easier solution, moonlight from a pair of Martian moons (upper left and right).

After Astronomer Percival Lowell claimed Mars had artificial canals, others picked up his theme, adding graceful boats, cities, solar-powered pumping stations with huge mirrors and various styles of space ships (top). Sailing near the castlelike edifice at upper right are Martians invented by Olaf Stapledon. Ephemeral and cloudlike, they worship diamonds as symbols of rigidity, can turn into tentacled, many-eyed masses of jelly.

At left center are CS Lewis' penguin-otter-seal people who introduce themselves by barking "Hross." The glasslike plants behind them have their chemistry based on silicon instead of carbon, an idea used by various writers. The barrel-shaped monster in foreground is a food-pill-maker which spends its time gathering trash and converting it to food.

To the right of the plants are long-nosed half-ostrich people who leap 75 feet, land on their beaks.* In front are feathered Martians invented by HG Wells who also described a "low-gravity" forest (far right) filled with spindly animals.

Fancy will give way to fact next summer, after the 100,000 pictures of Mars taken this year are studied. An international symposium at Flagstaff will review the results, and these, one astronomer says, "may relegate to prehistory all earlier information on the subject."

Boris Artzybasheff: Inhabitants of the MoonLIFE, December 15, 1958

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