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Wednesday, November 12 at 6:30pm

Book signing to follow talk from 7:30-8:15pm

$12 for Adults, $8 for Students/Youth/Military/Seniors

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A mere century ago, Martians were thought to be real—not fictional—creatures. “Mars is inhabited by a highly civilized and intelligent race of beings,” proclaimed��Alexander Graham Bell after astronomers discovered what looked like irrigation canals on the red planet. When Nikola Tesla, in 1899, set up an experimental laboratory in Colorado Springs and detected radio signals that he believed came from Mars, an all-out craze swept society. You could read about the Martians in��The New York Times, hear of them in Sunday sermons, and see them depicted on the Broadway stage. Biologists debated whether the aliens were winged or gilled. Inventors devised schemes for communicating with Mars. Philosophers and theologians proposed questions Earth might ask its older, wiser neighbor.

Best-selling Boulder author David Baron spent seven years investigating this strange case of mass delusion. In his fast-paced, highly illustrated talk—filled with period photographs and depictions of the putative Martians themselves—he reveals what the episode says about the human mind: The fallibility of our senses, the power of belief, and the lure of sensationalism. It is a tale both cautionary and uplifting. Although the Martians never were real, the excitement about them was genuine and world-changing, for it sparked a new genre called science fiction and helped launch us into space—toward Mars.
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, an award-winning journalist and broadcaster, is author of��The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. A former science correspondent for NPR and Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress, he has written for the��New York Times,��Wall Street Journal,��Washington Post, and other outlets. His popular TED Talk, about his passion for chasing solar eclipses, has been viewed more than two million times.

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