Martian Lore #4

One morning in 1996, in President Bill Clinton's daily briefing, he was told that scientists had for the first time in history discovered compelling evidence for life on Mars. The story began with a meteorite recovered from the Allen Hills Ice Field of Antarctica. It had been determined over the years that the rock was one of a dozen or so known meteorites of Martian origin. An asteroid or comet had hit the Red Planet a glancing blow and sent the debris flying into space, and eventually some of this was pulled into the Earth's gravitational field, and fell as meteorites.

Since then, scientists studying the rock had found it to be more and more interesting. Researchers had found in it traces of carbonate -- a mineral that crystallizes in the presence of water. Water of course being a key ingredient for life. They also found miniscule traces of biogenic material -- material formed when microbes interact with their surrounding environment. Most strikingly, an electron microscope revealed tiny structures inside the rock, structures that appeared to be the fossilized remains of Martian microbes. Looking like tiny segmented worms, the fossils were about 1/100th the width of a human hair, and were 3.6 billion years old.

White House Press Secretary George Stephanopoulos released the story to a bemused press corps, and the evening news later disseminated the news to a bemused world. It didn't cause much of a stir, except in the scientific community, where an impassioned debate began over the interpretations of the findings. Some said terrestrial contamination could account for the carbonate and the biogenic materials, others pointed out that the fossils were a hundred times smaller than the terrestrial bacteria they resembled, and could possibly be crystallizations of minerals in the rock. And that was it. The argument reached a stalemate. There was no way of determining the veracity of the findings one way or the other with any absolute certainty. To do that would require a trip to Mars itself and the recovery of similar fossils.

So people by and large forgot about it, and they went back to their human lives. But maybe thinking in the backs of their minds, that there could be more -- more evidence, more clues, more pieces of the puzzle considerably closer at hand. Patiently waiting beneath the permafrost, in the ice fields at the bottom of the world.