TEXT # 1

The earliest known instances of the word "Martian", used as a noun

instead of an adjective, were printed in late 1877. They appeared nearly
simultaneously in England and the United States, in magazine articles
detailing Asaph Hall's discovery of the moons of Mars in August of that year.
The next event to inspire the use of the noun Martian in print was the
International Exposition of Electricity, which was hosted in Paris in the year
1881. During the four months of the exhibition, many people visited to
witness such technological marvels as the incandescent light bulb and the
telephone. One visitor came away wondering what kind of world such
innovations might engender in the next 200 years. Writing anonymously,
s/he assembled some speculations in an essay titled "The Year of Grace
2081", which enjoyed wide circulation. The Martians enter the story late in
the narrative. During a rest from international conflict on Earth, humans
begin telecommunicating with Martians. "After a brief period passed in the
exchange of polite messages", says the essayist, humans will decide to war
with the Martians on some pretense of honor. The war that results is
cataclysmic:
[Humans] will unite all their energies for the fabrication of
mammoth engines which will discharge oceans of water,
metal and fire right into the face of Mars. In return, the
Martians will pelt them with aeroliths weighing three
thousand tons, which will chip whole mountains off the
Himalayas and make a big hole where Mont Blanc now
exists.
W. S. Lach-Szyrma's novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds (1883)
was previously reputed to be the first published work to apply the word
Martian as a noun. The usage is incidental; it occurs when Aleriel, the novel's
protagonist, lands on Mars in a spacecraft called an "ether-car" (an allusion
to aether, which was once postulated as a gaseous medium in outer space).
Aleriel buries the car in snow "so that it might not be disturbed by any
Martian who might come across it."
Fifteen years after Aleriel, H. G. Wells' landmark novel The War of the
Worlds (1898) was published by William Heinemann, Ltd., then a relatively

new publishing house. The novel was revised numerous times, and has since
been translated into many languages. In the story, the Martians are a
technologically advanced race of octopus-like extraterrestrials who invade
Earth because Mars is becoming too cold to sustain them. The Martians'
undoing is a fatal vulnerability to Earth bacteria.
In his book Mars and Its Canals (1906), astronomer and businessman
Percival Lowell conjectured that an extinct Martian race had once
constructed a vast network of aqueducts to channel water to their
settlements from Mars' polar ice caps, Planum Australe and Planum Boreum.
Lowell did not invent this Martian canal hypothesis, but he supported it. The
belief that Mars had canals was based on observations Giovanni Schiaparelli
made through his reflecting telescope. Although the telescope's image was
fuzzy, Schiaparelli thought he saw long, straight lines on the Martian surface;
some astronomers came to believe that these lines were structures built by
Martians. This idea inspired Lowell, who returned to the subject in Mars As
the Abode of Life (1910), in which he wrote a fanciful description of what this
Martian society may have been like. Although his description was based on
almost no evidence, Lowell's words evoked vivid pictures in his readers'
imaginations.
One of the people Lowell inspired was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who
began writing his own story about Mars in the summer of 1911. The story is a
planetary romance in which an American Civil War veteran named John
Carter is transported to Mars when he walks inside a cave on Earth. He finds
that Mars is populated by two species of warring humanoids, and he
becomes embroiled in their conflict. In February 1912, an American pulp
magazine called The All-Story published Burroughs' story as the first
installment of a serial novel, which the editor titled Under the Moons of Mars
(retitled A Princess of Mars in subsequent editions). The book was the first in
Burroughs' Barsoom series.
Although the noun Martian can describe any organism from Mars,
these and later works typically imagine Martians as a humanoid
monoculture. Martian, in this sense, is more like the word human than the
word Earthling. (Few writers describe a biodiverse Mars.) In science fiction,
Martians are stereotypically imagined in one or more of the following ways:
as alien invaders; as humanoids with a civilization that resembles one on
Earth; as anthropomorphic animals; as beings with superhuman abilities; as
humanoids with a lower intelligence than humans; as human colonists who

adopt a Martian identity; and/or as an extinct race who possessed high

intelligence.

Reference:
Martian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian

(2016).

Retrieved

from

TEXT # 2
There is a giant Martian worm that burrows into the Red Planets soil,
says a group of alien life enthusiasts who compared two NASA pictures of the
same place on Mars surface one supposedly with and the other without a
giant worm burrowing below the surface.
Tyler Glockner, who works at SecureTeam10, an organisation that
claims to check through reports of alleged UFO sightings and alien
encounters and publish just those that are considered interesting or with
compelling evidence, is the video narrator.
Tyler is convinced that the new NASA images prove inconclusively that
there is life on Mars, and not just microorganisms, but also larger creatures.
SecureTeam10 has posted a video on YouTube which compares two
images taken from the Mars Rover camera of the same spot on the surface.
One shows a location with a long cylindrical creature, while the other shows
an empty place. This means the creature has moved, Tyler adds.
Many alien life hunters, especially the more impatient and imaginative
ones, believe that the mega-giant worm either burrowed through the soil and
is now under the ground, or travelled across the surface over land and then
burrowed below. Tyler is certain it wiggles up through the dirt.

NASA, which often refutes such claims, says these types of occurrences
can always be explained later by a number of factors scientific factors
which are attributed to the environment.
On the video, Tyler says:
You are looking at the dirt here on the Martian surface theres nothing
there and in the very next image we see this worm looking object moving
through the dirt. This thing is wiggling up through the dirt whatever it is.

Reference: Cruz, V. (2016). Giant Martian Worm Proof of Alien Life Say
Extraterrestrial Enthusiasts. Retrieved from
http://marketbusinessnews.com/giant-martian-worm-proofalien-life-say-extraterrestrial-enthusiasts/137932

Text # 3

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings

and some are treasured for their markings-they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properites of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside -a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film

to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves -in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Reference: Raine, C. (1979). A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.

Retrieved from
http://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/poetry/poems/ma
rtian.html