Life on Mars

The NASA announcement on 28 September 2015 that water existed on Mars millions of years ago as salty oceans, and has been filmed flowing and sculpting the planet’s surface today, is one of the great scientific discoveries of the century. Flowing water is considered essential for life to flourish and vastly improves the prospect that it will have occurred on Mars – perhaps just as microorganisms that lived when the Red Planet was more hospitable or that even survive in hardy pockets today.

The revelation came on the same day that another red planet filled our skies amidst the prophecies of doom that such astronomical events often bring. But this celestial showpiece was the first of its kind in our age of mass communication and was snapped by millions on their mobile phones and posted on social media. That prelude to the news from Mars was simply a ‘blood Moon’ taking place while our satellite was at its closest possible distance and coinciding with a total lunar eclipse – a rare combination neatly appropriate for the historic revelations that followed.

Confirmation that water once existed as oceans on Mars and oozes from underground or sublimates today was no shock to anyone following the remarkable explorations of the Martian surface from orbit and the Curiosity laboratory that has been wandering the planet for several years. It has been sending back extraordinary ‘selfies’ as it probes the rock and soil and does spells of lengthy mountaineering. The geology of Mars has been unwrapped bit by bit and has pointed towards this day since what looked like flowing rivulets were filmed on mountain slopes in 2011.

That Mars had at least one salt-filled ocean, and quite possibly life within it, is of vast importance to our understanding of the Universe; it also increases our expectation that such worlds must be numerous if two formed independently in one small Solar System. There is also the bigger question of the Martian apocalypse that struck possible life inside that early ocean around 3.2 billion years ago, causing the water – then thousands of metres deep – to all but vanish or go underground, threatening the very existence of any organisms it spawned. But, of course, for those interested in UFOs the questions go beyond such science. What does it mean for us to know that we may not be alone in this small corner of the Galaxy? Especially when we’re talking about distances that we have already bridged without any need for the science fiction concepts that we necessarily project onto aliens coming here from other solar systems.

The answer might not be what you were expecting, or that some were declaring within moments of the NASA announcement as vindication of everything from alien contact, government cover-ups, the fabled ‘face on Mars’ and pretty much every other simulacrum seen in photos from the surface of the Red Planet and interpreted on the net as levitating spoons or rabbit-like creatures.

These artefacts are all merely rock formations viewed in the harsher planetary light of Mars and via non-Earthly geological weathering processes within an alien atmosphere. This tricks the pattern-making centres of the brain into turning such formations into what we want them to be: so we see them as longed-for evidence that we are not alone in the Universe and hope that what is out there might arrive to enlighten us or save us from our human indiscretions like the Cosmic Cavalry.

Sadly not: any life on Mars today is constrained by the battering it takes from deadly Solar radiation, because billions of years ago Mars lost its protective magnetic shield – something which the Earth happily retains. Today’s Martian life will be no more than bacteria or primitive organisms: it will still be an extraordinary discovery, but the chances any Martian life will be taking control of a spaceship and heading for Earth is next to zero.

Of course, Mars has long been the alleged source of numerous UFO encounters. One occurred in February 1954 according to Flying Saucer From Mars by Cedric Allingham. He supposedly saw a hovering disc as he walked near Lossiemouth in Scotland, though his photo looks unconvincing and the occupant was way too human to be very convincing: a tall  man who communicated in English via sign language. After some revelations about water flowing in canals on the surface, Allingham then met a fisherman called James Duncan who had seen the whole thing from a nearby hill. Yet subsequently Duncan could not be traced to back up this story and Allingham ‘died’ soon after publication of the book.

In UFO research, the Allingham case is widely believed to be a hoax involving someone knowledgeable about the Solar System. Some have even claimed evidence that its author was the famous astronomer and TV presenter, Patrick Moore – a noted expert on Mars. In 1986, while making a UFO documentary for the BBC, I got Patrick to agree to appear with me after we had worked together on a previous BBC venture. I asked him off the record if he would publicly deny his alleged involvement in the book and he got very upset, made remarks about crackpots and pulled out of the documentary on the spot. I was never sure which way to take this response, as Patrick did possess a wicked sense of humour. Ironically, I was going to reveal that a witness had come forward who had met the otherwise  mysterious James Duncan. Duncan said he had refused to be involved in promoting the Allingham book because it had exaggerated the truth into a Martian landing when all that was seen was an unexplained object.

Most Martian UFO contacts date, like Allingham’s, from at least 50 years ago when space exploration was in its infancy and our expectations of life on Mars were greater than today. With the gradual erosion of hope of finding those canals or a population of humanoid inhabitants, Mars ceased to be the go-to world for UFO origins. The home planet of the more recent UFO visitors has slipped ever outwards into the distant reaches of the cosmos, and today the idea of a Martian abducting someone in their flying saucer would look about as archaic as the 7am commuter train to Waterloo arriving to pick you up behind a wheezing old steam engine.

So the increased prospect of life on Mars is most likely completely irrelevant to the question of whether UFO encounters really involve alien visitors. It does, though, make it all but certain that worlds with flowing water are widespread in the Universe, and that if life has indeed emerged twice in our tiny sample of nearby worlds, then – given the numbers out there – advanced intelligent life must exist somewhere. It might even have visited us…which is not, of course, the same as saying that it has.

And yet there is one more possibility to consider, one that writer Nigel Kneale speculated about brilliantly in his 1958 story for the BBC, Quatermass and the Pit. Neale understood fortean topics well and wove many insightful ideas into his stories, such as the ‘stone tape’ theory of timeslips in which structures like old houses can record an event and replay it afterwards like a video signal.

In his 1958 story Kneale describes in terrifying detail the discovery of a spaceship buried beneath the London Underground. It unleashes horrific visions of an alien race of insect-like creatures that spread a psychic contagion, unleashing memories dormant within our shared unconscious. These memories have been there for millions of years, because this now long-dead race of Martian insects in fact came to Earth and engineered the human race into existence. Our latent recall of this race of insect-like demons was inherited across generations within our primitive brains.

Intriguingly, modern alien abduction witnesses often report, via hypnosis, images of small insect-like beings as their captors. Maybe Kneale was right and insect entities did exist in the early Mars environment and burrowed underground when their then habitable planet faced its looming apocalypse – although such ‘bugs’ were probably not building and flying spaceships, of course.

However, spacefaring Martian insects are not crucial here, because rocks from Mars reach Earth as meteorites all the time. This debris has been ejected from the planet by cosmic collisions, which are more common there due to the thin Martian atmosphere. In 1996, tests on a small piece of Mars discovered in Antarctica controversially implied that it had carried microbes here from that planet.

So who knows? Perhaps Martian DNA from a time when more advanced bug life existed there reached our still primitive world in this same way to play a role in terrestrial evolution. Interestingly, life on Earth did leap forward around this point in time and – much later – led to the appearance of humanity. Perhaps some Martian DNA was sprinkled onto our atmosphere via a massive impact of a chunk of Mars and we were, as Kneale suggested, (though accidentally) ‘engineered’ by long dead Martians.

Kneale’s story is, of course, just that – but he may have identified a grain of truth at a time when astronomy was much less open to the theory that life on Earth could have been seeded here from outer space.

Humans do seem to have been obsessed with the whole idea of life on Mars, as stories from HG Wells’s War of the Worlds to Allingham’s ‘true’ adventure suggest. Curiously, a common theme in many such science fiction (and some UFO) stories has been of the Martians facing disaster as water disappeared from their world causing them to head for Earth. This was long before these recent scientific revelations, which makes such tales seem almost prescient – not about Martian cities and canals, perhaps, but about the ancient ocean that vanished from the Red Planet.

Could it be that something deep in our psyches has a primitive awareness of our ancient biological link to such Martian seeds? Does it well out through our imagination and in ‘real’ alien contact stories, seeking to express a broad awareness of truth via a host of colourful, mythical tales? Perhaps we have known all along where part of us comes from, and soon we will fly our spaceships there to dig up the evidence in fossil form – and finally reveal that our ancestors really were Martians.

JENNY RANDLES PONDERS THE IMPLICATIONS OF SIGNS OF FLOWING WATER ON THE RED PLANET