All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
March 31, 2026 - Skeptoid
18:24
Skeptoid #1034: The Colorado Martian

The discovery of a Martian sarcophagus in Colorado in 1864: An oddball story, or consistent with the lore of the day? Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The 1864 Colorado Martian Corpse 00:07:22
It should come as no surprise that a century and a half ago, when newspapers were filled with tall tales, one story appeared that was perhaps taller than most.
It concerned the most surprising visitor to this planet, whose appearance both startled and amused, and at the same time slotted in perfectly with the legends and lore of the day.
And in our extended content for premium members, another tale from the same era, written half a world away by an author you know very well.
All of that and more is coming up right now on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's Hyperfixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The Colorado Martian.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Now, first of all, I'm well aware that not a single person listening to this honestly suspects that there might be any truth to a story as silly as the millions of years old petrified corpse of a Martian being found, still encased in its sarcophagus, in a mine in Colorado way back in 1864.
There would be no point in my telling such a story here, and no point in debunking it for debunking's sake either.
The wild phenomenon we're looking at today is not the story itself, but the very fact that the story exists.
And since it's on Skeptoid, you should know that there's something special about the story.
There's a reason we're going to talk about it today.
In particular, a relevance to some of today's stories that you might not have expected, and that gives us additional insight into other strange things we hear.
And as with so many stories on Skeptoid, that insight comes to us from a familiar source.
Context In broad strokes, the story goes that in 1864, while the Civil War raged in the East, oil prospectors in Colorado came upon a giant Martian meteorite.
They cut it open and found the sarcophagus of a small Martian humanoid inside, all petrified and mineralized.
The story got its start in June of that year, not in Colorado, but in a French newspaper.
My own translation follows.
We have just received from Richmond the following correspondence, which fills us with a profound astonishment.
We publish it with all due reservations, although we do not for a single instant doubt the respectability of our correspondent.
A party said to be prospecting for oil, but oddly mining on the side of a mountain, came across what they described as an arrow light, or a rocky meteorite, buried in the mountain's Paleozoic strata.
Over the course of 15 days, they got it separated out, and it was enormous, 45 yards on its greatest diameter, and 30 yards on its smallest.
Good fortune rarely comes alone.
A second discovery was to follow the first, and its importance is such that, at the very hour when we write these lines, it still keeps the intelligent portion of the country in a state of excitement.
They then began to bore into the meteorite.
They stated that the outer four yards showed fusion melting from its high-temperature descent through Earth's atmosphere, countless millennia ago.
Finally, at 20 yards in, they broke into a void, from which a jet of, quote, irrespirable gas greeted the workers.
Then, over the course of 10 days, they widened the borehole until two men could be lowered into the void.
At the base of the shaft, the two explorers related, we came upon the amphora, embedded horizontally in the ophite.
The drill had struck it and partially dislodged it.
About two yards lower down, our feet came to rest on a metal flooring that echoed dully and seemed to be set into the rock.
Above it and to the left, but too deeply sunk in the rock to be detached, we made out several metal amphorae with kinds of staffs in yellow metal.
They then spent three days trying to dislodge the metallic floor, which they were finally able to move aside.
The onlookers could not repress a cry of astonishment.
Before their eyes, they had a rectangular space one yard deep and two yards wide, very clearly cut in the granite.
The void was almost entirely filled with calcareous concretions, with sorts of stalagmites that sparkled in the lamplight.
In the center, there stood out very sharply the form of a man of very small stature, as though wrapped in a calcareous shroud.
He was lying full length and measured scarcely four feet.
His head, slightly raised, was lost in a cushion of calcium carbonate.
With much effort, they were able to remove the sarcophagus containing the small man and examined him more thoroughly.
The head came out almost intact, no hair, the skin smooth and wrinkled, turned to the state of leather, the skull triangular, the face like the blade of a knife, a kind of proboscis starting almost from the forehead, serving as a nose, a very small mouth with only a few teeth, two eye sockets from which the eyes had no doubt been removed, for the cavities were filled with calcareous concretions, very long arms reaching down below the thighs, five fingers,
the fourth much shorter than the others.
The general appearance was slender.
The skin, calcined here and there, must no doubt have been yellowish-red.
They are now busy making a cast of this strange inhabitant of the interplanetary worlds, and before long we shall be able to send drawings of it.
According to the account, carvings on the metallic floor plate depicted, for some reason, a rhinoceros, a palm tree, the sun, and the planets of the solar system, Mars being depicted larger than the others.
It was determined that an asteroid impact on Mars blasted this piece of the planet into orbit, from where it eventually found its way to Earth, and fell as a meteorite.
A Unique Once-In-A-Lifetime Adventure 00:08:15
This is not actually as far-fetched a scenario as you might think.
We do have plenty of bits of Mars here on Earth.
We know of about 825 pounds, or 374 kilograms, of it.
But there's undoubtedly much, much more.
It's in the form of meteorites, which, just as the Colorado sarcophagus story goes, blasted up ejecta from the Martian surface, some of which exceeded escape velocity and became little asteroids.
A few of these eventually get captured by Earth's gravity well and crash here as meteorites.
The largest one we've found is 54 pounds, 25 kilograms, and was found in the Sahara Desert in Niger.
It's not known when it fell to Earth, but the surface weathering is minimal, so it's thought to be not all that long ago.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finished the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Now, it's one thing to look at science-based flaws in the story of the Colorado Martian and to conclude that it was probably a fake story.
And that's easy enough to do and constitutes a satisfactory debunking, if that's what you're after.
Of course, the story is fake.
If we wanted to, we could expand on such points as an actual hypersonic superbolide would have undergone complete fragmentation upon impact.
None of the structures inside could have survived intact, as described.
If such a relic from Mars had been found, then our modern explorations of the planet should have found far more extensive evidence of their civilization.
No corroborating reports exist at all, an impossibility considering the significance, alleged safe and complete recovery, and massive size of the find.
Louis Figuer wrote in a 1923 volume of the Scientific and Industrial Annual that the language describing the composition of the meteorite in the newspaper article had been lifted from an actual geochemical report in which Claude-Auguste Cloes analyzed an actual meteor months before the article appeared.
Henri de Pavila, the once anonymous author of the original French newspaper piece, expanded his story into a novel the following year, An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars, 1865.
But we could go on like that all day and illuminate nothing.
Pointing out the flaws in the story misses the far more important point, which is, as with so many of our topics here on Skeptoid, the historical and cultural context in which the story took place.
The Colorado Martian yarn was not an outlier.
Its 1864 publication was smack in the middle of an age when such stories were a popular fad.
The infamous Cardiff Giant was found, air quotes, in 1869.
Huge skeletons said to be from biblical giants were being discovered about every week.
Mark Twain, in his role as history's most savage critic of human folly, later wrote of this same period, In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels.
One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind.
The mania was becoming a little ridiculous.
I was a brand new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil.
I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire.
But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all.
I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man.
He published in the October 4th, 1862 edition of Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise, an account of the discovery of a petrified man.
I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle.
Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it obscure.
And I did.
I would describe the position of one foot and then say his right thumb was against the side of his nose, then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart, then talk about the back of his head a little and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger, then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the right.
Astronomical hoaxes were in the mix as well, showing again that Pavil's Martian mummy did not emerge from a vacuum.
In 1835, the Great Moon hoax took place in New York, yet it was still spreading throughout Europe for 10, 20 years later.
In this, author Richard Adams Locke published a hoax that astronomers saw bat-winged humanoids, unicorns, and lush lunar civilizations on the moon.
This prompted the 1853 publication of William Weewell's Of the Plurality of Worlds, which sparked a worldwide debate on whether other planets were populated.
This drove spin-offs and books of all kinds about life on Mars, on Venus, on the moon, and elsewhere, complex civilizations and cultures which primed the world to eagerly accept the Martian mummy in Colorado.
The story is remembered today not because it's good, or accurate, or unique, or wonderfully well-written, or groundbreaking.
It is remembered because it was a square in the quilt of tall tales and petrified men and extraterrestrial cultures that characterized that part of the 19th century.
Like so many yarns we hear today and will hear tomorrow, its real substance lay not in the story itself, but in how it fit within the context of the era's pop culture.
We continue with more on Mark Twain's Petrified Man in the Ad-Free and Extended Premium feed.
Skepticism Is The Best Medicine 00:02:43
To access it, become a supporter at skeptoid.com slash go premium.
A great big Skeptoid shout out to our premium supporters, including McKinna Seepeck, Chuck Villa, Kurt Steggy, and Atheist Addie from Australia.
Remember, we always do our best to publish any corrections, so if you find an error in any Skeptoid episode, come to skeptoid.com slash corrections to report it.
And if it checks out, I'll include it in an upcoming corrections episode.
Check out our 40-minute movie, Principles of Curiosity, that teaches the basics of scientific skepticism and critical thinking in a far-ranging journey that takes you from the depths of Death Valley to the highest points in space.
It's free on YouTube and at principlesofcuriosity.com.
Skeptoid is a production of Skeptoid Media.
Director of Operations and Tinfoil Hat Counter is Kathy Reitmeyer.
Marketing guru and Illuminati liaison is Jake Young.
Production Management and All Things Audio by Will McCandless.
Music is by Lee Sanders.
Researched and written by me, Brian Dunning.
Listen to Skeptoid for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or iHeart.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and mousse.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as $5 per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double-doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection