Martians Kayoed

That expert star-gazer, Dr. Walter S. Adams '98, director of the Mount Wilson Observatory of the Carnegie Institution, is reported to have made up his mind—there is no life on Mars. Until 1934, he had given both Mars and Venus the benefit of his doubt. But now, having assured himself that Mars lacks both free oxygen and water vapour, without which life as we know it cannot exist, he has thereby thrown the canals and great irrigation ditches of Astronomer Camille Flammarion out of the window of the universe. No superman engineers stalk the planet. Fear of a Martian invasion, long nurtured by fiction and such experts of make-believe as Orson Welles, has been laid once and for all.

Of the threat of Venus to man, however, Dr. Adams' opinion was not reported.