Conjectures that the universe could be inhabited by many other creatures besides man visited the best minds on Earth as early as the fourth century AD, if not earlier. And the point here is far from the religious postulates about the Creator and the life created by him. Scientists already then understood that outside our Earth there may be other worlds inhabited by intelligent creatures. However, it was not until the Victorian era that there was first reliable evidence that aliens were interacting with humans. We are talking about the famous Swiss artist and spiritualist Helen Smith, who claimed to be in contact with the Martians.
Helen Smith communicating with the Martians
Helen was born in 1861 in the commune of Martigny. In 1894, when she was 33 years old (it is noteworthy that this is the age of Jesus Christ), the woman declared that Mars, Moon, Venus and other celestial bodies of the solar system were inhabited by humanoids, thereby shocking European scientists and ordinary people. According to the Swiss, she visited the Red Planet for five years, falling into a trance and transferring her consciousness millions of kilometers away from her body. This, they say, was taught by the Martians themselves, who chose Smith as a kind of ambassador from Earth. Helen not only talked about her travels outside our "blue ball", but also gave circumstantial evidence of these words. The woman's stories were very believable and had many interlocking details.
The surrounding people considered Helen a person with an absolutely healthy psyche. Doctors, on the other hand, put our heroine with various disappointing diagnoses: hysterical hallucinations, pathological lies, the replacement of reality with fantasy, and so on. Nevertheless, Mrs. Smith herself firmly believed that she was a genius medium, capable of making out-of-body journeys to the Red Planet, where the aborigines were always glad to see her. Falling into a deep trance, the woman quickly began to draw mysterious symbols on paper. She said they were messages from aliens written in Martian language. Subsequently, the spirit willingly translated them into the Swiss version of the German language. For this Helen received the nickname "muses of automatic writing."
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What the Red Planet looks like through the eyes of a spiritual man
After each session, our heroine began to paint Martian landscapes and the inhabitants of a distant planet themselves. Fortunately, being a good artist, Mrs. Smith could depict on paper in all its glory what she allegedly saw with her own eyes. In Helen's visions, the inhabitants of the Red Planet moved above the ground in wheelless carriages, throwing down sheaves of sparks. The Martians live, they say, in houses that look like huge birdhouses. At the same time, the sky there has a yellow-green color, and there are many pale purple lakes around. Children of aliens are raised in special homes. Having visited one of them, the woman saw huge halls, hung with cradles with babies. The children were fed with yellowish milk obtained by milking outlandish seal-like animals.
The woman wrote that, despite their technological superiority over people, the inhabitants of the Red Planet lead a very simple life and consider themselves an integral part of nature. Many millions of years ago, they learned to live in peace with each other and stopped all civil strife. On Mars, there is no crime, disease, natural and man-made disasters, war and genocide, hunger and poverty. Aliens are unfamiliar with the concepts of hatred, lies, envy, jealousy, resentment, and so on. It is an advanced society without politics, religion or any division into social classes. According to Smith, life on the Red Planet is like a real paradise, but there is nothing for people to do there, since our race is very primitive. The only reason the Martians showed all this to Helena is to make the Earthlings understandwhat kind of society we could create on our Earth if we were to eradicate our vices.
A traveler to Mars or a skilled hoaxer?
Professor Theodore Flournoy, a psychologist at the University of Geneva, thoroughly examined the woman and even wrote a book about it in 1899. Unfortunately, the scientist called the Swiss travels a ridiculous invention, and the "Martian language" - a primitive forgery fabricated by Helen in order to gain fame. The professor determined that these letters were very similar to French, which Smith knew very well. The psychologist found out that our heroine was a dreamy and lonely girl in childhood, who was passionately fond of fairy tales, adventure literature and drawing. Flournoy suggested that the artist consciously or subconsciously invented this colorful world, inspired by childhood experiences and her own fantasies.
Despite the fact that the people of science did not believe Helen, there were many other individuals who considered her words to be true. So, in 1900, a certain Mrs. Jackson, who was a wealthy American, began to sponsor the artist so that she continued to make her metaphysical journeys to Mars, as well as record and paint everything that happens there. Helen Smith died in 1929 in Geneva. Interest in her life and work has not faded away to this day. Many mystics, esotericists and even ufologists believe that the woman actually made astral travel to another planet, and it is not necessary that it was Mars, most likely, the aliens deliberately distorted this information (it is not yet known why). At the same time, her paintings with images of extraterrestrial beings, plants and landscapes are very popular among surrealists and collectors.
Daniil Myslinsky