There was no question in the mind of Percival Lowell, the astronomer, after he finished his observations of Mars during the 1907 opposition, when it was that much closer to Earth. The vast skein of mechanically constructed canal systems that he envisioned traversing the red planet had, he believed, unmistakably grown around the Antarctic regions.  “After the melting of the south polar cap had got well under way, canals began to make their appearance about it,” Lowell had just told the editors of the journal Nature, in London, according to the special cable dispatch on the front page of The New York Times.  “It is a direct sequitur from this that the planet is at present the abode of intelligent constructive life,” he continued. “I may say in this connection that the theory of such life upon Mars was in no way an a priori hypothesis on my part, but deduced from the outcome of observation, and that my observations since have fully confirmed it. No other supposition is consonant with all the facts here.”  Actually, many other suppositions were consonant with the conditions that Lowell believed he was seeing from his observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz.  While the magisterial 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica found Lowell’s theory of “sufficient interest” to mention in passing — “that lines frequently thousands of miles long, each following closely a great circle, must be the product of design rather than of natural causes” — it noted that Lowell’s critics found the visible evidence far from dispositive.  By the time of Lowell’s death in 1916, his theories about the Martian canals and their creators had been discredited. As The Times noted gently in a valedictory editorial, “The present judgment of the scientific world is that he was too largely governed in his researches by a vivid imagination.”  But now that scientists have found evidence of flowing water on Mars, perhaps it’s time to let our imaginations loose again.
In 1907, The Times published as front-page news an assertion by Prof. Percival Lowell that he had discovered intelligent life on Mars.