We won't even get into ghosts of Mars

I've been going through old Scientific Americans gathering material for that essay on attitudes toward technology. This letter from 1908 discussing plan to signal martian civilizations caught my eye. I did a bit more digging and found the original article.

As we've mentioned before, the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th was a period when people displayed a stunning flexibility, open-mindedness and in some cases, gullibility. We tend to focus on the naysayers who got it wrong ("Man will never fly." and company), but I'm coming to the conclusion that it was far more an age of belief than skepticism, whether it was a question of technological marvels or ghosts or men from Mars.