Martian Life: The NASA Cover-Up?

Geologist Mike Carr recalls the feeling in the Control Room when Levin's experiment yielded up copious quantities of radioactive gas. "I mean, we initially thought, my God, my God - there may be life there. And then, of course, it all kind of waned".

Ever since then, NASA's official line on the Labelled Release experiment is that it, too, discovered chemistry rather than biology. But Gil Levin absolutely refuses to take this assessment lying down.

His problems with NASA started, he explains, long before Viking even flew. "My problem is that I'm an engineer. I'm an engineer in a small company, and when my experiment began to work, NASA called me down and said, we have a problem. It looks as though your experiment might be selected - it looks awful damn good - and you're just an engineer. What's more, you don't have a Ph.D. - so how can you, if successful, go and talk to the National Academy of Sciences, go abroad to distinguished universities and report? So we want you to take on a senior investigator, and he will report it".

"I absolutely refused, and said, I'm not going to give up this experiment. I'll go get myself a Ph.D. So I went to school and I worked - did both full-time for three years - took all the sciences and got my Ph.D in engineering".

After the Viking landing, everything seemed to bode well for Levin's experiment. He recalls the excitement in Mission Control at the time. "When my experiment came up - it was about 7.30 at night - the results clattered out of the computer, and we saw this curve and were amazed. We'd tested the Labelled Release experiment hundreds of times on Earth, with thousands of different micro-organisms. We knew what those curves of response looked like, and here was one staring us in the face. We were astounded, and I sent out for a bottle of champagne".

CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises This panoramic view of Mars was the first picture taken by the Viking 1 Lander on 23rd July 1976. The large rock (centre) was dubbed 'Big Bertha' - but later renamed 'Big Joe' after howls of protest from feminists.

No experiment can be validated without controls, so Levin's team decided to 'kill off the bugs' in their sample by heating it to 160 degrees. "We waited, and finally the computer started spitting out again", recounts Levin. "There was zilch. A flat control line".

But Levin's problems were just about to start. Results from the GCMS experiment began to come in shortly afterwards. It found many familiar chemical elements - including iron, silicon and oxygen. But there was absolutely no trace of carbon - the basic building block of life. How could Levin's experiment have detected life if there was no organic matter on Mars to make it?