Martian Life: The NASA Cover-Up?

NASA has always denied that its Viking spacecraft discovered Life on Mars in 1976. But the truth may be very different…

It's an unlikely place to be searching for evidence for life on Mars, we reflect, as we pull up at a light industrial estate in Beltsville, Maryland. Anonymous portakabin-style offices dot the flat landscape, enlivened by vigorous metal sculptures made from industrial spare parts.

On finding the right unit, a tall, gangly man in his seventies ushers us into the conference room. He is driven; he still has fire in his belly. "I'm Gil Levin, founder, President and CEO of Biospherics Incorporated. I was also a member of the Viking spacecraft team. On Viking, I was an investigator on the Labelled Release experiment. That's the one that got a positive indication for life on Mars - and has kept me in trouble ever since".

The dispute dates back to July 1976, when the first Viking lander settled down on the dusty-pink world with its salmon-pink skies. But there was nothing rosy about the Red Planet. It was bitterly cold, and almost airless. Drifts of fine Martian soil stretched for miles, as powdery as Antarctic snow. Rocks and boulders of all shapes and sizes littered the scene. Many were rough and volcanic in appearance, and some had small holes where gas had once bubbled through - like pumice.

The Viking 2 mission arrived at Mars a couple of months after its twin, and both landers continued to perform flawlessly for many years. Each returned weekly weather reports, analyses of the Martian atmosphere, wind-speed readings, and thousands of pictures of the surface of Mars in all its moods.

Stunning though the images undoubtedly were, it was the life experiments that captured the imagination of the world. Each lander carried a miniature laboratory, the size of a wastepaper basket, to perform the life-detection experiments on the surface by remote control. Nothing as sophisticated had ever flown to another world.

With its 10-foot-long arm, each Viking lander fed soil samples into its laboratory to be tested. There were four main experiments. Three looked at biological or chemical reactions with the soil, and one - the GCMS - broke down the soil into its basic atoms.

Two of the experiments gave negative or inconclusive results. Any reactions that took place, agreed the researchers, were down to chemistry rather than biology. But the third experiment had everyone sitting up and taking a considerable amount of notice. It was the Labelled Release experiment of 'sanitary engineer' Gil Levin.

CREDIT: Hencoup Enterprises Lift-off of Viking 2 atop a Titan/Centaur launch vehicle on 9th September, 1975

Levin explains his technique. "It's very simple. The standard method of culturing micro-organisms is to put them in some kind of nutrient soup, and wait several days until they start multiplying and you can see them. My technique simply added radioisotopes to those nutrient compounds. This meant that as soon as the micro-organisms started metabolising them, they would expire radioactive gas - which would be detected much more quickly than waiting around for a visible bubble. So the whole thing reduced about two days of waiting for evidence of life to about 15 or 30 minutes".