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This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.

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The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily

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the only ones to the mysteries we will examine.

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Earth.

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Earth.

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The third planet from the sun.

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For uncounted thousands of years, men looked to the sky and wondered if they were alone.

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Finally, there were machines that could travel into space.

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Men walked on the moon, but found no sign there of other intelligence.

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But there are eight other planets moving around the same sun that kindled life on Earth.

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Could it have happened only on our planet?

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A spark that could evolve into intelligence?

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The winter of 1976 would see another great step in search of life on other worlds.

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The first sunrise for mankind occurred more than three million years ago.

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Long, long before there were men, the sun was an insignificant cluster of dust and gas.

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It wasn't long in the scheme of things before the gas and dust began to boil.

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Mass becoming energy, energy becoming mass.

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Other forces were at work as pressures built and the infant sun was at war with itself.

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Nuclear fusion, the same force at work in the hydrogen bomb, created the sun

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and has fueled it through the millennium.

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In the convulsion of birth, great mass and enormous energy must have been thrown off into space.

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The planets were the cinders left by this cosmic holocaust.

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The same process was at work throughout the universe.

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Uncounted stars, uncounted planets, uncounted possibilities for life.

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Probes have been sent into space and new mathematics invented to help understand the dynamics of the universe.

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Most of what is known about space has been learned only in the latter half of this century.

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It would be arrogant to suppose therefore that we've done more than begin to ask the right questions.

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Of course there's never been a shortage of answers. Before men had space probes and computers, they had imaginations.

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Georges Millier was a pioneering filmmaker.

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In the first quarter of the century that would see men actually walk on the moon, he created a vision of what that event might be like.

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The first half of the century was the first of the first.

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Essential to Millier's comic view of a landing on the moon was an encounter with aliens.

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Such encounters have been dreamed of with mingled fear and hope for a long time.

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Ironically, Millier's view of the return to Earth was not unlike a modern Apollo splashdown and recovery.

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Percival Lowell was one of many who contemplated the possibilities of life on other worlds.

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He was not a filmmaker but a man of science. Lowell's passion was something he saw on the face of Mars.

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Lowell came to Flagstaff, Arizona in 1894 to build an observatory.

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He hoped that the clear desert air would afford him a better look at Mars than any astronomer before him had been able to achieve.

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The 24-inch refracting telescope Lowell installed on the site was the most advanced of the day.

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When all was ready, Lowell trained his eye on Mars.

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The conclusions he reached about what he saw made him one of the most controversial scientists of the age.

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Arizona newspaper man George Hoyt has written a definitive biography of Percival Lowell.

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His research focused on Lowell's fascination with Mars and with the remarkable conclusions he made after long study.

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Percival Lowell thought that there was intelligent life of some form on Mars.

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He deduced this logically from the existence of what he thought were canals on Mars, lines of the same kind.

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The lines that he could see in the telescope, they were highly geometrical and he couldn't explain them in any other way except to assume that some intelligent beings had constructed these lines.

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Lowell's observatory is still in use today. Its creator died in 1916, having fired the imaginations of many and tasted the ridicule of others.

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Later research indicates that Lowell's canals were illusions, but the remarkable events of 1976 have proven the astronomer right on many of his other observations.

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He thought that Mars was in what he called a terrestrial stage of planetary evolution and that was the stage after the one that the Earth was in, which was the Terracquious stage.

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In short, the Earth had oceans. Mars, he thought, had already lost its oceans, but it did have oceans at one time. Mars was drying up, Mars was desiccating, and he coined the word desertism for what was happening to Mars, and he thought that it was also just beginning to appear on Earth.

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Lowell's observation about Earth's changing climate was profound.

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The forces at work in the solar system have a rhythm and a reason beyond the grasp of most men.

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Changes that are imperceptible from man's tiny window on the universe can have profound consequences.

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Lowell believed that some small shift in the orbit of Mars or some fluctuation in the sun's rays had gradually deprived Mars of life-giving water.

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He saw indications that the same processes were at work on Earth.

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Could it be that some Martian scientist was able to warn his people in time?

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At the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, scientists like Harold Klein are studying the similarities between Earth and Mars that Percival Lowell was the first to recognize.

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Well, it's very difficult to talk about the evolution of a planet like Mars without too much information.

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The general theory at present is that both Mars and the Earth were formed at the same time about five billion years ago.

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One would then postulate that at the beginning, when the solar system was created, Mars had a much denser atmosphere than it has now,

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and that in many ways it was much more similar to the Earth and perhaps, therefore, was conducive to the origin of life on that planet as we believe was the case on this planet.

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Water would have been essential if life on Mars was to develop as we know it.

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Gerald Soffin is a Mars geologist.

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The important thing to understand is that both planets were at one time hydrological planets.

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There were planets that had flooded amounts of water, and that that water, that simple molecule, dominated for a great period of time the course of the history of the planet.

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Now, there's no water on Mars today. There's no flooding water. There's certainly atmospheric water, and we now know the poles of Mars are water.

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So, somewhere along the way, Mars went one way, and the Earth went the other way.

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We're asking the question, if there is life on Mars, was it a separate event from the evolution of life on Earth?

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It's entirely possible that what we find on Mars, possible, not likely, is so close to our own that we've discovered, in a sense, the same event, the terrestrial life and the Earth life, because we're related to the same event that took place some time ago.

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Some time ago indeed.

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And the question remains, could the birth of the Sun some five billion years ago have given life to two worlds instead of one?

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That's right.

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Mission control, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the foothills above Pasadena, California.

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It is from here that an ambitious undertaking in space will be directed. The target is Mars, two hundred twelve million miles from Earth.

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Men have walked on the moon, but this journey to Mars will take eleven months. Too long for man now, but not for his machines.

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Copy, thank you.

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Man, the de-naught is in for two one five six zero two.

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Copy, thank you.

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A Titan Centaur lifts off from Cape Kennedy. It is August twentieth, nineteen seventy five.

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In the nose cone is a machine of ingenious artifice. It is called Viking.

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Men have learned to extend their intelligence beyond the confines of their fragile bodies into icy space and onto unknown worlds.

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The machine will go where men cannot for the present go.

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It will obey the commands of the scientists in Pasadena sitting at their computers thirty five miles from the surfing beach at Malibu.

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Roger.

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Roger, two one one three five zero eight three one three and four out of luck.

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The voyage itself is largely uneventful. Soon however, the command center at Pasadena will be alive with activity.

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Art, looking at the, I got the sheet here with me for the ranging for today.

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Okay.

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First range eight decimal two seven zero eight nine.

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Okay, how do the correlations go?

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Ten months from liftoff, Viking one enters the orbit of Mars.

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An instrument package descends to the surface and awaits instructions from Earth.

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Countdown.

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Now we chose Mars primarily because Mars is, I guess you would call Mars our true sister planet to Earth.

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The biology that we know in the universe is focused mostly on the Earth.

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That's the only life that we know our life.

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We terrestrial beings, we the trees and we the people.

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And our candidate for, for a search began with Mars.

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Eight decimal two seven zero eight nine.

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The first Viking lander is joined by a second six weeks later.

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With infrared sensors and special television cameras, men get their first close look at Mars.

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Nine seven second hour.

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Calibrate out the effects of the solar corona.

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Soil samples yield particularly fascinating results.

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The data from both landers can be interpreted as being due to living organisms,

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can also be interpreted from what we now know as being due to some kind of very active surface chemistry going on on the planet.

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In Pasadena, a mock-up of the Viking lander is used to rehearse every move the real lander would be required to make.

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The dexterity of the lander is amazing.

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Citing through television eyes, programmers on Earth trigger Viking to scoop up samples of soil or rock.

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Samples are dropped into a sifting mechanism that sorts particles for specific tests.

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Dr. Leslie Orgel points out that the tests are inconclusive.

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The experiments that we've done with the Viking on Mars this time doesn't give any evidence at all

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for any compounds left over from life in the past on Mars.

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But that doesn't of course mean at all that there wasn't any life on Mars.

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There may have been compounds there and they may have been destroyed.

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Well if you want to postulate a technological civilization on Mars which has died out,

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you would then also have to have some mechanism to cover up, cover over any sort of buildings or any sort of vast projects.

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It is conceivable that you might have had such a civilization which then got covered up by some cataclysmic events such as a massive Mars quake

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which completely covered over everything and that all the artifacts of your ancient civilization are unburied in some way.

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None of this is visible you see from our pictures now that we're taking from the Viking spacecraft

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which could see objects as small as about 15 yards or bigger in size.

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The Viking scientists believe that the Martian sky must at once resemble our own.

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Whether some natural catastrophe obliterated an ancient Mars civilization, we don't know.

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It seems however that Earth is not immune to the same forces that made Mars a desert.

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There are three schools of thought. Some believe a slight tilt in the Earth's axis is bringing on a new ice age.

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Others feel the Earth's climate is drying and the deserts are slowly encroaching on population centers.

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Another view is that men have so altered the natural environment, no one can predict the future.

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Tons of pollution pour into the air from the great cities of Earth.

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The problem has been only recently recognized and the effects of man's tampering can only be guessed at.

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Men have done worse things than pour smoke into the sky.

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It is possible that all of Earth may one day resemble the Southwest American desert.

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Mars looked much like this to the electronic eyes of Viking.

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The machines scanned the horizon and recorded no sign of intelligent life.

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It is unlikely that life evolving elsewhere in the universe would follow the same path as life on Earth.

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If that were to happen however, Mars would seem to be the likely host.

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The two worlds have much in common even now. Perhaps Viking didn't see all there was to see.

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Beyond that, could men recognize the works of a civilization radically different from his own?

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If there were Martians and they knew what was happening to their planet, perhaps they chose to abandon it.

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On Earth, men have been able to see the world through the eyes of the Earth.

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The Earth is a planet. Perhaps they chose to abandon it.

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On Earth, men have developed the technology to create orbiting habitats.

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Theoretically, these artificial worlds could be built on an immense scale in weightless space.

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They could provide a safe refuge for long voyages in space. Voyages to new worlds.

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It is not inconceivable that Earth once held the same promise and fascination for Martians that the red planet now holds for mankind.

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Viking may be a step in the return voyage.

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This is the beginning. This is really truly the beginning.

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Regardless of what happens next year or even a decade from now, we have started what will become an adventure of mankind in searching for not only the lowly forms of life, but eventually I think to search for intelligent life.

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This is one of the milestones in the course of human destiny to find cousins.

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It is the inevitable path of man's destiny that he will explore the heavens. We're only to not talk about the timetable.

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We'll adapt the environment to ourselves. We will change the atmosphere. We'll do what is called planetary engineering.

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It doesn't exist yet, but it will someday.

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For example, with all that water at the pole of Mars, there's no point in leaving it frozen there. We might as well melt it and form an ocean.

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And that's not so fantastic. It's possible to dream about things like that.

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It is also possible to dream that should we reshape the Martian landscape, we would be settling an old, old account. Perhaps they did as much for us once.

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If we, on the other hand, are unique in the universe, the time is approaching when we can spread our kind to the stars.

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Albert Einstein believed the universe was shaped like a saddle. By traveling in a straight line, one could eventually wind up where he started.

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With the universe, as with life, endings seem to merge with beginnings.

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Was the end of some undiscovered civilization on Mars the beginning of our civilization on Earth? Will our first steps on some dusky Martian plain be a homecoming?

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Only when we've been there can we prove or dismiss the notion that some calamity of nature or poverty of spirit can be found.

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For it has been observed that those who cannot learn from the past are condemned to relive it.

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Coming up next, in search of continues with an investigation of the claim that ancient aviators left traces of their visits in Peru.

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Then, 20th century with Mike Wallace probes the controversy surrounding the sieges at Waco and Ruby Ridge.