The cover of the July 1959 issue carries a photograph of Mars taken by Dr. E. C. Slipher at the Bloemfontein Observatory in South Africa in 1956. It is the only issue in the UFOIC’s run devoted to a single planet, and it arrived at a moment when Mars was front-page news in Australia for reasons that had nothing to do with science fiction.
The lead article, reprinted from the Sydney Daily Telegraph of 27 May 1959, was written by Dr. S. T. Butler of the School of Physics at Sydney University. “Martians May Have Big Moons in Orbit” presented the argument, recently revived by Russian scientists, that Phobos and Deimos might be artificial satellites. Professor Sedov of Moscow University, the man who had announced the successful launch of Sputnik, brought the theory to Sydney while passing through on his way from Antarctica. The case rested on three anomalies. First, the moons are abnormally small and close to the Martian surface: Phobos orbits just 3,700 miles up, within the estimated extent of the Martian atmosphere. Second, both travel in equatorial orbits, unlike the moons of other planets whose orbital planes vary by twenty or more degrees. Third, they revolve in opposite directions, Phobos making three complete orbits per Martian day while Deimos makes less than one.
Butler laid out the evidence for Martian life with the care of a physicist addressing a lay audience. The atmosphere contained water vapour and oxygen. Clouds had been observed. Polar ice caps waxed and waned with the seasons, and in the areas not covered by ice, colour changes “may be taken to be indicative of some sort of vegetation.” Infrared radiation measurements from the surface showed “characteristic features that can be associated with plant life.” His conclusion: “Life exists there. There seems every prospect that life exists there.”
If the moons were natural, they would still serve as convenient space stations. But if they were artificial, “put up by Martians,” the three anomalies “would become much more plausible.” Butler allowed for a darker reading: “It could be that their race has long been extinct, and that the two moons simply remain as evidence of their one-time existence.”
The same issue reprinted Stephen Constant’s London dispatch for the Sydney Morning Herald (23 May 1959) on the Tunguska spaceship theory. A Moscow expedition was working in the remote forest where, on 30 June 1908, a colossal explosion had devastated a forest area seventy miles in diameter, registered on seismographs in London and Washington, and illuminated the night sky across the south of England. Three establishment scientists (Kukarkin, Krinov, Fesenkov) said it was probably a meteorite but “cautiously use the word ‘phenomenon’ instead.” Professors Alexander Kazantzev and B. Liapunov insisted it must have been a rocket or ship from Mars.
Kazantzev’s evidence had accumulated over years. The explosion produced a mushroom-shaped cloud. People living near the site died of an unknown illness with symptoms matching radiation exposure. A Soviet expedition found iron particles “which are not part of a meteorite.” The explosion’s greatest impact was at some distance from the centre, “exactly like an atomic bomb explosion.” There was no crater, though meteorite craters elsewhere are often enormous (the Diable crater in Arizona is over a mile wide; the Chubb crater in northern Canada is twice that; aerial photographs had revealed another Canadian crater four hundred miles in diameter). Several expeditions reported: “NO METEORITE EVIDENCE AT ALL.” A Soviet aerodynamics expert, Manotskoy, calculated that the object had been braking as it approached, with a final speed of about one to two kilometres per second, far slower than the thirty to sixty kilometres per second typical of meteorites.
The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised on 12 May 1959 under the headline “THE RETURN OF THE MARTIANS.” The American National Academy of Sciences had convened on 30 April and described a “sober consensus of opinion” supporting the probability of life on Mars. Soviet scientist Dr. L. Saklovsky had proposed that Phobos and Deimos were artificial satellites placed in orbit “by intelligent beings who inhabited the planet two or three thousand million years ago.” Martians might still be “living in an underground civilization , and breathing ‘artificial oxygen.’” The editorial’s closing barb: the Americans seemed content with algae, while “some Russians appear to be intent on discovering a race of Marxists ‘gone underground.’ For is not Mars the reddest of all planets?”
The issue included a note on Jonathan Swift. In Gulliver’s Travels (the Voyage to Laputa, 1726), Swift described Mars as having two satellites, specifying their orbital distances and periods. Asaph Hall discovered the actual moons in 1877. Swift’s estimates proved remarkably close to the observed values. “It goes without saying that this is an amazing scientific prediction. Swift was an educated man and was well versed in astronomy of the day.”
A 1941 article from TIME’s science section, reprinted in the bulletin, reported that two hundred scientists at the Yerkes Observatory had concluded the moon’s craters were volcanic, not meteoric. The Soviet discovery of a volcano in the Alphonsus crater in November 1958 had confirmed this theory. Dr. R. E. Dickhoff of New York, inventor of “one of the first space-helmets” and author of The Coming of the Martians, contributed a verse: “The time has come, the author thinks, / To speak of many things, / Of Rocketships, of Space Patrol, / And Saucers without wings.”
The July 1959 Mars issue documents a specific moment in the history of the planet’s public reputation: the weeks when Soviet claims about artificial moons and crashed spaceships overlapped with American scientific consensus on the probability of Martian life, and a Sydney university physicist treated the artificial-satellite hypothesis as a question worth putting to his colleagues rather than to the tabloids. The subscription price was still two shillings.
