Amateur astronomers have seen intelligent life on Mars

When publishing an article, Lowell thought about retouching the images to make the canals appear more clearly to readers. However, he abandoned the idea, because the magazine, Centurydid not approve of the revised images.

Frustrated by his lack of recognition, Lowell sought help from his contacts within the East Coast scientific elite.

Lowell soon unleashed the big guns in the form of friends like Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the American Museum of Natural History, and William Edward Story, professor of mathematics at the National Academy of Sciences.

Meanwhile, Lowell sent astronomer David Beck Todd to the Andes, all expenses paid, to take a series of photographs of the Martian surface.

The expedition to the Andes received a lot of media attention, but Todd also failed to pick up the channels of the Red Planet. Despite this, he said, the channels appeared, among other things, in an article in the monthly magazine worldwide: “Basically everyone who looked into a telescope saw the canals. Apparently even the bats flying over the pampas were singing: 'Canale, canale, canale.'”

He attacked astronomers

Over time, Lowell's populist and pushy methods began to provoke established astronomers.

“Lowell is doing astronomy as a science a great disservice,” astrophysicist George Ellery Hale wrote in a letter to his colleague William Wallace Campbell, who was director of the prestigious Lick Observatory.