With a hindsight made possible by four subsequent decades of scientific research, Schulze-Makuch and Darling commence their hunt for alien life on the planet Mars in 1976, when NASA first placed two Viking landers on the planet’s surface to test the soil for Martian microbes. Although the eventual scientific consensus would become that the landers’ life-detection mission proved a failure, the authors’ careful reconstruction of events demonstrates how, at the time, the actual experimental results were considered confusing and ambiguous.
“Taken as a whole, the early Viking data were perplexing,” says Schulze-Makuch. “Mars was giving definite signs of life, but these seemed to be mixed up with some sort of exotic chemical reactions.”
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