A wide gulf exists in our imagination between the Spiritualism of the nineteenth century and the post–WWII era of UFOs and interplanetary visitors. One bears the gothic sheen of the Victorian era, with its séances and table rappings, its belief in a “Summerland” where the dead repose peacefully and happily, ready to reach out to us from beyond the grave and offer us solace and wisdom. The other is a world of futuristic chrome and light, of mysterious objects in the sky, of men from Mars and Venus stepping out of spacecraft to offer us friendship and untold technological advances.
...Sara Weiss’ book Journeys to the Planet Mars, first published in 1903, a strange bridge between these two eras. Weiss, a St. Louis housewife, was in her mid-fifties when she began to have otherworldly visions and gained the attention of the Spiritualist community. A 1901 St. Louis Dispatch article describes how Weiss had a series of visions during a convalescence, when “people in the spirit world” visited her and dictated a treatise on the planet Mars and its fauna. As part of these sessions, her guides helped her draw a series of images that depicted various flowers of Mars, which were reproduced in the Dispatch’s article...