R. Michael Gordon’s: The Aftermath of the War of the Worlds (Part-3)

[PART 3]

GREAT WORKS ON MARS

In 1894 there was a good amount of interest in the other planets due to the fact that we had evidence of a great deal of activity on the surface of Mars as several witnesses had reported that “a great and powerful light was seen.” This light, which was reported in Nature magazine, should have caused us to at least wonder at what the cause may have been. Only a small number of “Mars Watchers” ever asked why this and other events on Mars were happening. Similar lights were seen in 1895 and again in 1897. We would later understand that this was visible evidence of the Martian’s extensive metal-casting operations on the surface in preparation for sending their war craft to Earth. There was no reason to have known this at the time with our limited abilities to scan the heavens. No one could have anticipated that the Martians were building an invasion fleet based only upon those observations (volcanic?). They were also constructing large sections of massive interplanetary “arks” built on the surface of Mars to be later rocketed into Martian orbit and subsequently assembled in orbit ready to transport a large portion of their planet’s population to Earth after humanity had been ‘neutralized’ (Ref: Martian Electric Document 42G44). The Martians would need to first “clear the way” for their colonization of Earth on a massive scale.

Taking up the work which Professor Schiaparelli had begun, Professor Lowell described what he had been able to deduce from his years of Martian observation. He wrote:

To begin by giving an idea of the phenomenon I will select a typical example, which happened also to be one of the very first observed by one – that of the great Phison. The Phison is a canal that runs for 2250 miles between two important points upon the planet’s surface. In this long journey it traverses some 6 degrees of the southern hemisphere and about 40 degrees of the northern. In 1894 the canal was first seen as a single, well-defined line – not a line that admitted of haziness or doubt, but which was as strictly self-contained and slenderly distinguished as any other single canal on the planet. A Martian month or more after it thus expressed itself; it suddenly stood forth an equally self-confessed double, two parallel lines replacing the solitary line of some months before. Not the slightest difference in the character, direction, or end served was to be detected between the two constituents. Just as certainly as a single line had shown before, a double line now showed in its stead. Out of the 437 canals so far discovered, only 51 have ever shown duplicity.

We could only wonder: How were we to understand a society from another planet probably thousands if not tens of thousands of years older and clearly much more technically advanced than our own? As late as February 1901 the director of the Harvard College Observatory in Peru, Edward Charles Pickering, reported he had been in contact with the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. The Arizona observatory had reported communications from Mars. Many looked at this report and smiled at how science could be so wrong! So simple were we in our understanding of off world events, so childlike in our knowledge of our true place in the universe. Even today we know next to nothing about our vast universe and much of the knowledge we do have has inadvertently come from the Martians.

Early in December 1900, we received from Lowell Observatory in Arizona a telegram that a shaft of light had been seen to project from Mars (the Lowell observatory makes a specialty of Mars) lasting seventy minutes. (Weapons test?) I wired these facts to Europe and sent out neostyle copies throughout this country. The observer there is a careful, reliable man and there is no reason to doubt that the light existed. It was given as from a well-known geographical point on Mars. That was all. Now the story has gone the world over. In Europe it is stated that I have been in communication with Mars, and all sorts of exaggerations have sprung up. Whatever the light was, we have no means of knowing. Whether it had intelligence or not no-one can say. It is absolutely inexplicable.

Pickering was soon recommending we set up mirrors to signal Mars. There would soon be no need for that! In short order communications – of a sort – would definitely be established between solar worlds by the Martians.

From my later notes …therefore in the future the people must be informed of all off world events no matter what they are. We must have an educated public in order to survive.

PREWAR WIRELESS TRANSMISSIONS FROM MARS?

No less an individual than the great electrical genus Dr. Nikola Tesla gave warnings of a sort when he discussed receiving radio transmissions from Mars. He reported a series of clicks on his new wireless device of groups of 1, 2, 3 and then 4 clicks. Earlier he had become convinced there were other forms of intelligent life in the vast universe and he regarded life on Mars as a “statistical certainty. Certainly the vast reaches of space contain many forms of intelligent life.” He was certainly on the cutting-edge of that way of thinking among many other areas. He had built very sensitive radio receivers for the time period and had pointed them towards the stars. With his old carpenter, Mr. Dozier, present, Tesla had tuned into a series of rhythmic noises on his new device. Knowing of no Earth based possibility for the energy waves Dr. Tesla immediately felt the transmissions could be coming from either Venus or Mars. With his knowledge of Morse code he felt this simple method could be used to communicate with other planets. Certainly Mars would be a good starting point for mankind on the cusp of the 20^th century to begin the work.

“It was some time afterward when the thought flashed upon my mind that the disturbances I had observed might be due to an intelligent control. Although I could not decipher their meaning, it was impossible for me to think of them as having been entirely accidental. The feeling is constantly growing on me that I had been the first to hear the greeting of one planet to another.” He would later be credited with hearing the first radio “noise” from Mars. Had he, by his wireless experiments, accidentally discovered life on a nearby planet? No one at the time had the answer.

Professor Holden of the University of California’s Lick Observatory was quick to undermine Dr. Tesla in the Press even though he had not even taken the time to discuss the matter with Tesla. Only later would we discover that the United States government had paid for his “research and opinion.” I would have enjoyed asking the good professor why he had done this work, but unfortunately Professor Holden did not survive the war. He had paid the price for such work.

Mr. Nikola Tesla has announced that he is confident that certain disturbances of his apparatus are electrical signals received from a source beyond the Earth. They do not come from the Sun, he says; hence they must be of planetary origin, he thinks; probably from Mars, he guesses! There is always a possibility that great discoveries in Mars and elsewhere are at hand. The triumph of the scientists of the past century are still striking proof, but there is always a strong probability that new phenomena are explicable by old laws. Until Mr. Tesla has shown his apparatus to other experimenters and convinced them as well as himself, it may safely be taken for granted that his signals do not come from Mars.

Tesla continued in an interview with the Philadelphia North American. He stated, “…intelligent beings on a neighboring planet would be much more scientifically advanced than men on Earth.” The Press attacks continued however despite their complete misunderstanding of the facts. The Pittsburgh Dispatch would report on 23 February 1901,

The Press at large has of late been having a good deal of fun with Nikola Tesla and his predictions of what is to be done in the future by means of electricity. Some of his sanguine conceptions, including the transmission of signals to Mars, have evoked the opinion that it would be better for Mr. Tesla to predict less and do more in the line of performance.

Never one to lower himself to argue with lesser beings Dr. Tesla taking the much higher road of discourse would only say, “I think nothing can be more important than interplanetary communication. It will certainly come some day and the certitude that there are other human beings in the universe, working, suffering, struggling, like ourselves will produce a magic effect on mankind and will build the foundation of a universal brotherhood that will last as long as humanity itself.” Despite his good intentions and “universal” thoughts Dr. Tesla would soon change his mind when “interplanetary communications” by way of a Martian invasion came to Earth. However, he would never stray from his opinion that contact with other intelligent life forms, certainly not as warlike as the Martians had become, would greatly benefit mankind. These were high hopes indeed. Many of us could agree with that hope which has yet to be fulfilled at least in the whole.

Even H. G. Wells took part in the debate when he mentioned Dr. Tesla in his new book The First Men in the Moon published just before the 1901 Martian invasion. (It was interesting timing to be sure.)

Briefly, [he] informed me that Mr. Julius Wendigee, a Dutch electrician, who had been experimenting with certain apparatus akin to the apparatus used by Mr. Tesla in America, in the hope of discovering some method of communication with Mars, was receiving day by day a curiously fragmentary message in English which was indisputably emanating from Mr. Cavor in the moon.

There was of course no Mr. Cavor on, or for that matter in the moon, but that did not in any way detract from the men in the moon story line which included ant-like creatures – the Selenites who resided in below ground lunar caverns. Mr. Wells further extended his remarks on Mr. Tesla’s work in receiving wireless messages from Mars, as pleasant fiction began to melt together with new facts from well off of this world. Only later would our thoughts turn to the interesting possibility that the moon might make a very nice advanced base for the Martians.

The reader will no doubt recall the little excitement that began the century, arising out of an announcement by Mr. Nikola Tesla, the American electrical celebrity, that he had received a message from Mars. His announcement recalled attention to a fact that had long been familiar to scientific people, namely: that some unknown source in space, waves of electro-magnetic disturbance, entirely similar to those used by Signor Marconi for his wireless telegraphy, are constantly reaching the Earth. Besides Mr. Tesla several other observers have been engaged in perfecting apparatus for receiving and recording these vibrations, though few would go so far as to consider them actual messages from some extra-terrestrial sender. Among those few however we must certainly count Mr. Wendigee.

Adding to this ongoing debate came word that the well-known and well-respected scientist Lord Kelvin (William Thomson) had about the same thoughts as Dr. Tesla and the fictional Mr. Wendigee. Kelvin was certain individuals from Mars as well as other “older planets” had come to Earth many times in the past (he would eventually be proven correct) and further that they had reported back to their respected planets that the men of Earth “Are not ready for us yet!” (Humanities’ brutality towards itself was his primary reasoning.) With a smile he added, “Possibly they guide his [Tesla’s] development; who can tell?” He further added that New York City with its population of over four million was the “most marvelously lighted city in the world” and “Mars is signaling to New York!” By this time many were at least convinced that Mars was indeed inhabited by a highly advanced race of beings that must be well united to achieve such advanced workings able to be seen from deep space. Yet, as a people we did nothing to prepare ourselves to meet with this new advanced race of beings. When later questioned about his statement concerning Mars Kelvin would only say, “What I really said was that the inhabitants of Mars, if there are any, were doubtless able to see New York, particularly the glare of the electricity.” It would not be long before that glare would be doused by a high-energy beam controlled by the deadly ‘hand’ of a Martian.

Kelvin had earlier been noted for his view that the Earth had been steadily cooling since its formation and could be no more than 400 million years old. This seemed a bit over the top at the time and he famously revised his top figure to no more than 40 million years old! The Martians would have a few words to say about that as well. They knew the Earth was as ancient as Mars and much older than we could ever conceive at the time.

OTHER AERIAL EVENTS FROM ANCIENT TIMES

Well before the many sightings around the world during the 1890s we had known of strange craft in our skies; alien beings walking among men and events which defied explanation were long a part of mankind’s storied history. From mythological tales, ancient folklore and legends of old many people believed our skies (the heavens) have been the realm of entities superior to man. Many ancient traditions speak of inhabitants from other worlds coming to Earth from Venus or Mars or other unnamed planets (others?). Researchers would eventually discover more than 900 individual and very detailed reports of such events dating from just before the war all the way back to the most ancient of times on Earth. Indeed, many ancient philosophers such as Luceretius and Anaxagoras would teach that the universe they could conceive of was filled with inhabited worlds. They were much more open to the possibility than we ‘modern men’.

The ancient Tibetan books of Tantyua and Kantyua speak of prehistoric machines flying in Earth’s skies writing about glowing “pearls in the sky.” Yet even then the knowledge of off world visits was not to be spread to the masses as these ancient reports were secret and expressly forbidden to be given “to the people for fear they would not understand.” To tell the people meant death. I can tell you now this is the same philosophy government’s claw onto today. From Ramayana c.300 B.C.E. we could read, “When morning dawned, the god Rama, taking the celestial car… stood ready to depart. Self-propelled was the car… It was large and finely painted. It had two stories and many chambers with windows… It gave forth a melodious sound as it coursed along its airy way.”

The famous Indian poems from c.400 B.C.E. of Mahabharata and Ramayana report “disk-like flying machines” called Vimanas. These aerial Vimanas are later reported to be powerful ships of the air with “light weapons” which destroyed the ancient city of Varanasi with fires from above.

From the well respected Roman writer Pliny in A.D. 100 would come, “In 66 B.C.E. in the consulship of Gnaeus Octavius and Gaius Scribonius a spark was seen to fall from a star and increase in size as it approached the Earth, and after becoming as large as the moon it diffused a sort of cloudy daylight, and then returning to the sky changed into a torch; this is the only record of this occurring. It was seen by the proconsul, Silenus, and his suite.” In 216 B.C.E. “ships were seen in the sky over Arpi, Italy 180 Roman miles east of Rome a round shield was seen” and at Capua “the sky was on fire from an air ship.” While in 99 B.C.E. “a round object like a large globe or shield (depending on the observer) flew from west to east.” And in 90 B.C.E. in Umbria, Italy “a globe of golden fire fell to Earth and then rose into the sky and obscured the disk of the Sun.”

I kept asking myself: Did the writers of such reports themselves understand? Did they have direct knowledge of Martians? Did they have contact? Time has perhaps caused ‘modern man’ to forget or toss aside our ancient ways and knowledge as if we were removing an old coat and were looking for a new one only to discover too late that the old had done the job much better than the new.            

One of the earliest written accounts of mysterious events in the near heavens above comes from 1460 B.C.E. Lebanon. The event was of such importance that it was actually carved in stone on a stele honoring Pharaoh Thutmosis III. It reports as battle was engaged with the Nubians a very bright object came out of the northern sky to position itself above the massive Nubian army.

[The star] positioned itself above them as though they didn’t exist, and then they fell upon their own blood. Now [it] was behind them [illuminating] their faces with fire; no man amongst them could defend himself, none of them looked back. They had not their horses, as [the animals] had fled into the mountains, frightened… Such is the miracle the [god] Amon did for me, his beloved son in order to make the inhabitants of the foreign lands see the power of my majesty.

Clearly it was the Egyptians who were favored (if that is the proper term) by “the gods” which came from the skies above. Again and again history would repeat this favored view. Were these ‘gods’ always from Mars? Evidence of an advanced civilization visiting Earth many years in the past and extending their visits up to modern times was all around us, but we failed to fully understand.

There was even a well documented “aerial-light” report from none other than Christoffa Colombo (Christopher Columbus). Colombo, it would appear, saw an unidentified flying object one clear night as he sailed on his first voyage to America. While patrolling the deck of his flagship the Santa Maria (originally the Galician) at about 10:00 p.m. on 11 October 1492 Colombo thought he saw “a light glimmering at a great distance.” He hurriedly summoned Pedro Gutierrez, “a gentleman of the king’s bedchamber, who also saw the light. After a short time it vanished only to reappear coming out of the sea several times during the night, each time dancing up and down in sudden and passing gleams.” These men with wide experience on the seas were both fascinated and greatly concerned. What did this mean? The dancing light first seen four hours before land was sighted has never been explained. Nor would he be able to explain the “great ball of fire he and his crew saw crash into the ocean” on his second voyage. He did however report the event to his sister in a letter which also spoke of the “four” ships he commanded on his first voyage to America. History seems to have forgotten his sighting of the “dancing light” along with his forth ship the Augusta seen in the far background of the famous painting of Colombo’s discovery fleet and mentioned in that historic letter to the great navigator from his sister. Powerful men of means seem to change much of inconvenient history at a whim. That power was soon to be challenged.

And of the great ships of the seas how many of those which set sail throughout history never to be seen again came to their destiny not by nature or man, but by the brutal reach of a Martian tentacle?

When looked at closely there seemed to have been a rather interesting wave effect or cycle of sightings of strange aerial craft in the skies every two years (26 months) or so seemingly increasing as our Earth made its close approaches to Mars. As the planet moved away sightings seemed to diminish. We took no notice nor made any connection between the strange craft seen in our skies and the planet Mars at the time. We have now learned to keep this in mind.

INTELLIGENT LIFE ON MARS?

Before the war scientists and astronomers certainly had a good deal of evidence that intelligent life as we knew it ‘could’ exist on Mars with many features seen such as the vast areas of vegetation visible from Earth that changed with the seasons and the polar ice caps; not to mention the now well known canals. But we could not have known the Martians were becoming overcrowded on Mars due to limited areas now available for habitation on their dying world. We could not have known they were facing inadequate food and water supplies at all levels as habitable areas continued to be lost on the surface. The Martians could see the inevitable end of their ancient civilization was well within sight. They could also see the Earth!

Hundreds of years before any real facts about life on Mars had been gathered man had myths and legends about “the red planet.” The ancient Sumerians viewed Mars as the bringer of destruction and carnage whereas the Chaldeans around 1000 B.C.E. saw Mars as the “master of battles” and named it Nergal. One such myth spoke of the Martians destroying their civilization in wars amongst themselves which led the survivors (or perhaps the losers) to come to Earth to teach mankind the ways of war. To the Greeks the planet was Ares for the wars it would bring but it is to the Romans that we turn to for the name ‘Mars’. Mars thus became the god of war with its combined shield and spear as its symbol! Was the fable that the Martians had gone from planet to planet eons in the past based upon some great truth of their movements as invaders always seeking new worlds to ‘inhabit’ or just a myth? We would soon learn at times myths do indeed have some seed of truth at their cores.

Just before the war astronomer Garrett P. Serviss published Other Worlds. “From the time of Sir William Herschel (Friedrick Wilhelm Herschel) the almost universal belief among astronomers has been that these gleaming polar patches on Mars are composed of snow and ice, like the similar glacial caps of the Earth, and no one can look at them with a telescope and not feel the liveliest interest in the planet to which they belong, for they impart to it an appearance of likeness to our globe which at first glance is all but irresistible.” Mars it would seem was calling to us even as Earth was calling the Martians. The fates had destined that we should meet. The Martians decided it would be as enemies. As for Herschel, it is not recalled if he believed in men from Mars but the moon was another thing altogether. He viewed the habitability of Earth’s moon as “an absolute certainty.” During mid-1900 Mars displayed quite a few very white spots on its surface which lasted short durations. Some felt that this was an attempt to signal the Earth and several workers at the glass attempted to place some type of message to the on-and-off white symbols. Less esoteric astronomers felt the bright spots were simply very large water clouds forming and dissipating in the Martian atmosphere probably very near the surface. But because these types of bright white spots had not been seen for many years and we knew, or at least we thought we knew, the atmosphere did not have a great deal of water vapor the debate on their origin and meaning would continue. That was of course until the Martians “dropped by for a little visit.”

Again from Professor Serviss we could read of canals and the possibility of an ancient Martian race well in advance of humanity.

Whether the theory that the canals of Mars really are canals is true or not, at any rate there can now be no doubt as to the existence of the strange lines which bear that designation. The suggestion has been offered that their builders may no longer be in existence. Mars having already passed the point in its history where life must cease upon its surface… Mars is, perhaps, at a more advanced stage of development than the Earth. If we accept this view then, provided there was originally some resemblance between Mars’ life forms and those of the Earth, the inhabitants of that planet would, at every step probably be in front of their terrestrial rivals, so that at the present time they should stand well in advance.

Incredible as it may have seemed we even had a small sample of very tiny primitive Martian life found here on Earth. (I have been lucky enough to see some years later what is called a “micro-photograph” of this amazing creature.) In 1899 a group of geologists had been surveying possible oil fields in the Middle East when one of their team members spotted a strange rock on the floor of the desert. (It was later designated M99-004) The rock, broken open by what appeared to be a substantial impact on the desert floor was reddish in color and clearly showed signs of being exposed to heat on its surface – probably while it entered Earth’s atmosphere. Later close examination under the microscope revealed tiny worm like structures barely visible (not unlike the barely visible canals on Mars using a telescope of high quality). The rock itself bore a strong spectral resemblance to recently completed spectral analysis of Mars. Clearly we had a Martian rock on Earth that had been somehow blasted off the surface of that planet, probably many millions of years ago, only to be found in the desert. By 1900 we understood there was or had been at the very least primitive life on Mars and we were also able to say we could hold this fossil of ancient Martian life in our hands! The general public knew nothing of this at the time. It was said the public had “no need to know of such things.”

We were comfortable and relaxed – the world was, for the most part, at peace. And for those few areas where fighting and border disputes were ongoing there would be little news about what was referred to as “small brush wars.” During the 1890’s as we enjoyed our ‘teas’ and our coffees we could read of the scramble for power and control in Africa by Germany, Great Britain and other European nations. The rush to carve up Africa had been started by the arrogance of Leopold II of Belgium with his personal claim of an area around the Congo River in 1879. Somehow he had forgotten to ask the local people if it was alright to ‘acquire’ what amounted to an area much larger than his native Belgium. Needless to say, the locals took a very dim view of his ‘claim’. Was this the same mindset of the Martians?

There was of course the ongoing rush for China ‘trade.’ There were gold, diamonds, oil and other natural resources to be plundered by the hand of man in China as in other “undeveloped areas”. It was said there was nothing to really worry about by civilized men. We were such fools. We ‘civilized’ men of Earth were comfortable in our knowledge that we were masters of this world and all we surveyed. It would become a hard blow to the mind of man as the knowledge that not only are we not alone in the vast universe, but we were being threatened by a powerful and technically superior life form we could not begin to understand. How were we to survive? How could I? Thus, even though we had seen and learned a great deal as the human story of progress continued on, interplanetary war came to Earth as if we had been wearing blinders and did not understand what was to come. Ungovernable panic, death and terror would soon hold millions in their grasp. Only later would we be forced to see with crystal clarity the brutality of interplanetary war. What name given to this battle for the Earth, if any, would come from the Martians we may never know. Surviving men of Earth would call this “The War of the Worlds”.

“The War of the Worlds”

“Then came the night of the first falling star. It was seen early in the morning,
rushing over Winchester eastward, a line of flame high in the atmosphere.”

A witness to the first Martian cylinder falling to Earth.

During the fall of 1901 as interplanetary war was already speeding steadily towards our Earth several astronomical observers saw the launch of numerous Martian war machines (on the sunlit edge of the planet) even though their true purpose could not have been known to those on Earth at the time. (Massive volcanic eruptions perhaps?) Many however, thought that whatever this meant they seemed to be “aimed at the Earth.” “Several explosions of what appears to be hydrogen gas moving at great velocity. Like a jet of blue flame shot from a cannon.” This observation was not too far from the truth as the Martians were firing their cylinders not unlike the fictional tale penned by Jules Verne as he used his moon cannon to launch his imaginary crew to the moon from the coast of Florida. With all that had been witnessed in and around our skies before these observations of Mars we still did nothing to prepare ourselves. Yet the question must be asked: What if anything could we have done to prepare? What little we did have in the way of planetary defense was ground-based and far from adequate to do the job. Humanity had no overall plan, nor the needed equipment to defend this planet. One witness at the glass would state:

Hundreds of observers saw the flame that night and the night after about midnight, and again the night after; and so for ten nights, a flame each night. Why the shots ceased after the tenth no one on Earth has attempted to explain. It may be the gases of the firing caused the Martians inconvenience. Dense clouds of smoke or dust, visible through a powerful telescope on Earth as little gray, fluctuating patches, spread through the clearness of the planet’s atmosphere and obscured its more familiar features.

I recall in my younger days viewing Mars with my small Gregorian telescope, assembled from various parts I could bring together for the work. But alas, my simple instrument would not be up to the task. I had not been able to see the famous canals, nor even the polar ice. In disappointment I would turn my “grand instrument” to our moon and upon its surface found a whole new world.

The Martians (both As and Bs), for all we could understand in later years, had developed on Mars, even though some would come to believe they must have traveled to Mars from another world; one we have no information about and about which no Martian has ever spoken. There is as yet no evidence of such a move beyond our simple understanding that life, at least intelligent life, would be difficult to establish on such a barren cold wind-swept world such as theirs. It was both Charles Darwin and Alfred R. Wallace who independently showed that natural selection within the environment dictates the most efficient form of life for any particular area of that environment be it on Earth or even Mars. Yet, if this is true how do we place the Martian As on such a desolate environment as Mars, 140 million miles from the Sun, and how could they have advanced once their proto-species had developed? There is no opposing thumb – no apparent fine grip of a Martian A. The Martians appeared to be physically very primitive by Earth-based biological standards. Yet there they were. How had they come to that level of understanding? We would later come to believe that if we could not defeat their powerful machines then perhaps our only hope lie in defeating them. In the end, war by man or Martian is always a very personal prospect.

As for the Martian Bs or Grays, as they are now best known, they do have an opposing thumb as well as three fingers, but they were clearly not superior to the Martian As who have no such digital advantage. If theories of convergent evolution are correct then the Grays would have developed on a world with similar characteristics as our own at least when it came to general environmental conditions, which clearly no longer exist on Mars – if they ever had!

For more than a few millennia the Martian surface had been cold beyond what we on Earth could long endure, yet the hearty Martians continued to use its desiccated surface albeit on a much limited basis than they had surely been able to use much earlier. Martian documents would speak of great oceans which filled the great plains of Mars now lost to space and time by the relentless solar winds which have impacted its ancient surface before time was marked by the Martian mind. Now however, with resources dwindling, the Martians knew they had to leave their planet or succumb to the inevitable end of their ancient civilization. That much at least we could understand.            

Perhaps with a good deal of apprehension they surveyed the solar system for a new home, but there was not much hope beyond. They could not migrate to any of the outer planets for these worlds are even colder than Mars. Impacted by a cooler set of rays from the distant Sun, the gas giants of Jupiter (the brightest of the planets in their sky), Saturn, Uranus and Neptune could not welcome the Martians for none have solid surfaces upon which to land. Even the planets beyond that we knew nothing of could not suit their needs. Looking at the moons of these giants also gave no relief as their surfaces were hundreds of degrees colder than Mars and without even a whisper of an atmosphere, save Saturn’s large moon Titan, where, we would learn from Martian documents, frozen methane snows fall on methane oceans, cold enough to kill any known life form in less than a second. Neither man nor Martian could survive there.

The minor planets in the asteroid belts between Jupiter and Mars held no atmospheric gases, so weak were their gravities, as they held no hope, no possible new worlds for colonization. They would need to look elsewhere.

With scientific instruments we could barely comprehend the Martians had looked inwards towards our local star. The Martians had tracked the closest ‘visible’ planet to the Sun – Mercury – which baked its desiccated surface at over 700 degrees F. It has no atmosphere. They could not survive there (Ref: Martian Electric Document 62P01). Venus, the brightest planet in our sky, seemed to offer a possible home even though its orbit was one third again closer to the Sun than the Earth. (On 26 March 1859 Dr. Lescarbault in France spotted an object transit across the face of the Sun which was closer than Mercury. He called it Vulcan, but that was the only reliable observation of the small intra-Mercurial planet. Only later would its existence be confirmed by Martian documents which had fallen into our hands.)

In 1686 author Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle would write of Venus in his Conversation on the Plurality of Worlds and perhaps put a favored view about Venus the Martians may have shared at the time. “I can tell from here what the inhabitants of Venus are like; they resemble the Moors of Granada; a small black people, burned by the Sun, full of wit and fire, always in love, writing verse, fond of music, arranging festivals, dances and tournaments every day.” This was of course only pleasant fiction. However, he would also write, “Behold a universe so immense that I am lost in it. I no longer know where I am. I am just nothing at all. Our world is terrifying in its insignificance.” Perhaps he had stumbled upon the true reason why much of mankind seeks religion so patently. If one feels weak and insignificant in the universe the myths provided by religion can be the one mental blanket required for survival. It can also be a prison from which one may never escape. Are humans not so very complicated or different than Martians in their journeys through life?

The Martians would later discover that even though Venus seemed a bright new inviting world its soft yellow cloud cover did not hide a lush forest or jungle inhabited by intelligent and playful beings (as many of our scientists had also speculated), rather their studies (from captured Electric Documents Ref: Martian Electric Documents 698B4 and 465H49) revealed a hellish landscape of volcanoes, tremendous atmospheric pressure and temperatures at its surface nearly 850 degrees F. The Martians knew they could not ‘move’ there.

No – of all the worlds that moved around the Sun only the Earth could continue to support their ‘civilization’. Only the blue/green Earth with its lush coverage of vegetation could be taken and transformed to support the Martians; so on they came not as explorers or refugees or perhaps even simple fellow beings seeking a new home across the interplanetary border. They came as thieves in the night as they crawled out of their machines ready to kill and steal whatever they could from the inhabitants of Earth. They never considered setting up a Martian Embassy to exchange diplomatic documents nor did they truly learn to speak to us in any of the Earth’s major languages so contemptuous were they of our species, our laws, our nations and our traditions. They were not about to speak to the inhabitants of Earth and request the possibility of immigrating to this new world for the new life they so desperately craved. I have no doubt that if they had asked mankind would have made room for these beings. No – these were invading enemy aliens who spoke a truly foreign and very deadly language. To “civilized” Earth they would bring only the murderous brutality and disrespect of the infectious invader. They would bring nothing to our world but disease and death.

The fact they began their attacks on a limited basis, setting up their attacks slowly and deliberately, mostly ignoring humanity, seemed to indicate they really felt no need for such caution as they systematically destroyed everything they came into contact with – everything human at least. They showed no fear of mankind who had set up nations with laws and traditions many of which called for helping those in need dating back thousands of years. Humans, who had spent so long developing their world, simply needed to be cleaned out of the Martian’s new home! It truly was as simple as that. We had developed little of value to the Martian point of view – save only the planet itself. They had planned for hundreds and perhaps thousands of years. The invaders were not interested in becoming human, they were only here to force planet Earth to become Martian even though Mars had become a failed planet with a failing brutal society. They would even bring the Red Weed intending to fully infect our home world.

[END OF PART 3]

Copyright © R. Michael Gordon, 2020

[Next week: Part 4: How did it all begin?]