Positive Results Showed Life on Mars

So why did we ignore the Viking experiments?

It’s a curious story. A test sent to Mars during the 1976 Viking missions revealed positive signs of life. The test was duplicated on a different part of the Martian surface using several different strong controls. Having been carefully formulated by a group of scientists, the experiment itself was to reveal signs of microbial life on an extraterrestrial surface. No false positive nor false negative had ever occurred over the many thousands of instances the test had been run, and no scientist has been able to step forward since the Viking tests took place to provide conclusive evidence that would disprove their results. Yet it’s what happens next that is perhaps the most shocking part of the story.

Nothing. No follow up missions in the past 45 years bothered to repeat the experiment to provide more data. In fact, no experiments since Viking had bothered to even search for life on the Martian surface. It wasn’t until last year’s Perseverance mission that NASA once again sent specialized equipment to search for microbes on the Red Planet. So there it was: exciting results in the 70’s told us alien life exists and these remarkable results were pushed aside, never revisited, and — seemingly right after the missions — funding for the experiments ran out. Theories then surfaced trying to…