Just this past week, some sharp-eyed observers of images from the Curiosity rover were convinced that they’d spotted a mouse on the planet’s surface. As Redditors pour over the grainy, zoomed-in photo, they are unwittingly participating in a long history of humans speculating on Mars life—either through science or fiction. At the tail end of the 19th century, Percival Lowell, an amateur astronomer and Boston Brahmin, published Mars, a popular account of Martian geography, including, most notably, canals presumably built by some advanced civilization.  His book was non-fiction but it launched Mars in the popular Western imagination. Subsequent explorers who reached the Red Planet found flourishing societies of all sorts of Martians—some humanoid, some less so.

Read the article “How We’ve Been Thinking of Martians” on atlasobscura.com.