The Medium's Martian Language: Pronouns and Decimal System Identical to English
Sarah Weiss claimed to have traveled spiritually to Mars from 1892 to 1894 and compiled nearly 600 pages of records, but subsequent investigators discovered that the Martian language's pronoun system and decimal counting in her book were strikingly similar to English, suggesting the work was more likely literary creation than genuine extraterrestrial contact.
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Mars's canal maps were composites, never fully observed at once
19th-century astronomers, limited by telescope and photographic technology, could only glimpse tiny fragments of Mars's surface at a time. They stitched these scattered observations into one complete map for publication. The public saw a ‘canal network covering the surface’ that no observer had ever actually seen in its entirety; it was instead a composite illustration. Compounding errors in stitching, combined with ‘canali’ being mistranslated from Italian as ‘canals,’ created the widespread fantasy of Martian irrigation systems.
Percival Lowell built an observatory to seek evidence of Martian civilization
Starting in 1894, Percival Lowell dedicated himself to charting Mars and founded an observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona specifically to hunt for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial life. He published three books: Mars (1895), Mars and Its Canals (1906), and Mars as the Abode of Life (1908), which sparked ‘Mars mania’—newspapers competed with headlines like ‘Calls from Mars,’ and the fervor directly inspired H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds and Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars.
Contact with her dead friend triggered Sarah Weiss's automatic writing practice
Initially skeptical of spiritualism, Sarah Weiss's turning point came through a pact made with a friend, William Cox: whoever died first would attempt to contact the other. Years after Cox died of tuberculosis in Texas, Sarah was thinking of him one day when her right arm began trembling violently. Only when she picked up a pencil did the convulsions ease, as ‘Will Cox’ wrote itself on the paper. Her husband Adolph described how she would afterward darken a room, sit with pencil in hand, waiting to feel the tip move of its own accord—sometimes writing for hours until exhausted.
Her spirit guides included her own deceased son Bernard
Sarah's spiritual journey to Mars began in October 1892, shortly after she recovered from serious illness and was still grieving her son Bernard, who had died in 1890. Her guide was a spirit named Carl de Lester, said to have died two centuries earlier in Alsace; an Englishman named George Brooks monitored her body during the sessions. Later in the journey, Bernard's spirit reunited with her and sometimes took on the guiding role alongside Brooks.
The spirits guiding her were all celebrated dead scientists and writers
Sarah's ‘spiritual band’ was populated by famous deceased Earth scholars: Scottish geologist Hugh Miller, German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, English biologist Darwin, and novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The only member not from the 19th century was Giordano Bruno, a 16th-century scholar burned at the stake, who was the only Earth spirit to occupy an entire chapter and gave Sarah her Martian name, ‘Gentola,’ meaning ‘lady, friend, gentleness, loving-kindness.’
The utopian Mars contradicted itself with racist descriptions of Earth peoples
Humboldt told Sarah that Martian society had no class hierarchy, all labor was respected, and laziness was considered evil—he used this to criticize Earth's annual military spending on ‘mutual slaughter’ and its prisons, reformatories, and poorhouses. Yet elsewhere in the same book, Humboldt described Earth's polar populations as survivors of ‘another race’ destroyed by glacial catastrophe, not as direct descendants of early humans—language loaded with disdain and racial prejudice that directly contradicted the book's egalitarian claims.
The Martian language's structure perfectly mirrored English—revealing authorial bias
After Sarah's death, psychical researcher James H. Hyslop tried to verify the book's authenticity by comparing her automatic writing to her normal handwriting. He learned she had burned the original pencil manuscript, leaving only ink transcriptions—the two scripts differed so radically they barely seemed to come from the same person. More crucially, he noticed that in the Ento Martian language, both the pronoun system and decimal counting were base-10 and closely paralleled English throughout, a similarity suggesting the author's own linguistic habits were simply projected onto an alien language rather than representing genuine extraterrestrial contact. Hyslop ultimately declined to render judgment, saying such works resist final determination.
Mariner 4's 22 photographs definitively ended the Mars canal fantasy
By the 1910s, as telescopes and photography improved, most astronomers had already abandoned the claim that canali were artificial constructs, since sharper observations showed the lines to be highly irregular. Yet the idea of Martian life continued fueling science fiction, sustaining the ‘Golden Age’ from the 1920s through the 1950s. Finally, in 1965, the Mariner 4 probe flew past Mars and captured 22 close-range photographs revealing a crater-covered surface that appeared unsuitable for complex life—the definitive end of the canal illusion.
In their own words · checked verbatim
Photos of the moon taken in the 1880s and 90s show all kinds of craters and shadows and other surface features, while photos of Mars taken around those same years look more like smudgy blobs.
She said this shaking was relieved only after she got a pencil and the words, Will Cox, wrote themselves on a page through her.
with occasional brief interruptions, our journey to the planet, astronomically known as Mars, but to its inhabitants as Ento, which in the Ento language signifies chosen or set apart, extended from October 6th, 1892 to September 16th, 1894.
the heartbeats of your republic send a vitalizing current through all the peoples of our planet.
yearly expenditure of millions of money for the maintenance of armies of men engaged in murdering each other, and for the erection and support of prisons, reformatories, almshouses, and the like.
The story certainly is a wonder in its way, but it is about as interesting as a table of logarithms or a dictionary.
the difference between them is such that you would have to examine them carefully to notice they were written by the same person.
Figures
| US Naval Observatory Great Equatorial refractor | 26-inch (66-centimeter) aperture, 110-pound (50-kilogram) lens, world's largest refractor when put into service in 1873 | 2:04 |
| Asaph Hall discovered Mars's moons | 1877 | 3:07 |
| Percival Lowell began mapping Mars | 1894 | 6:10 |
| Sarah Weiss married Adolph Weiss | May 6, 1873; she was 39, he was 28 | 11:17 |
| Bernard Weiss (Sarah's son) | born 1854, died 1890 | 11:17 |
| Sarah Weiss's Mars spiritual journey | October 6, 1892 to September 16, 1894 | 17:24 |
| Journeys to the Planet Mars length | nearly 600 pages, including Ento language vocabulary | 25:38 |
| Sarah Weiss died | March 23, 1904, age 70, from stomach cancer | 28:45 |
| Mariner 4 photographed Mars | 1965, 22 photographs | 34:55 |
Glossary
- canali
- Italian for 'water channels'; mistranslated to English as 'canals,' triggering theories of Martian construction.
- automatic writing
- The spiritualist practice of claiming spirits control one's hand to write messages.
- Ento
- In Sarah Weiss's book, the Martian name for their planet, meaning 'the chosen ones.'
How to listen
History podcast listeners interested in 19th-century séance culture, the scientific history of Mars, or the origins of science fiction.
The listener mail segment starting around 35:58 is unrelated to this episode's topic and can be skipped.