I once, for a few hours in 1976, I believed that life had been found on Mars. I’ll explain in a second but I thought it ironic when I saw this story this morning:
In the summer of 1976, the summer I turned 16, I was with my family visiting friends on the southern New Jersey coast. I got up one morning and I was informed by one of our hosts, a kid a couple years younger then me, that he had just seen on TV that the Viking probe on Mars had found life! It was a fact, he assured me. Well, in the pre-internet, pre-CNN days, such things weren't always instantly verifiable.WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have found alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist is theorizing.
The Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life, so they didn't recognize it, a geology professor at Washington State University said.
Given that I had a predisposition to wanting to believe there was life on Mars and my lack of verification means, I went around for a few hours mulling the awesomeness of there being life on Mars. At some point that day, I did catch some news and immediately noticed there was no life on Mars story. Surely that would have been the top story. I, of course, felt stupid and wanted to beat the crap out of the twerp who misinformed me. Still, it was sort of fun believing the story to be true, even if for only a short while. Now it turns out, it may have been true afterall.
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