Long before NASA was established in 1958, before JFK’s impassioned speech about the space race, and before any of the Apollo missions or space shuttle successes and disasters, Percival Lowell devoted much of his career and considerable fortune to trying to prove that Mars hosted intelligent life. Viewed through his telescopes, the ancient, baleful Red Planet was about the size of a dime. Lowell believed he was seeing a network of canals on its surface. Therefore, he declared, Mars holds intelligent life. It is not necessarily like human life, he emphasized, but it is intelligent enough to build canals.

Percival Lowell était exceptionnellement riche, instruit et rêveur. Il a voulu voir des canaux sur Mars (après avoir mal traduit le mot canali employé par l’astronome Giovanni Schiaparelli), des canaux fait de mains (de tentacules ? de pseudopodes ? de glyphurs ? de blozoungim à pointes ?) martiennes.

Source : The Boston Globe.