Suddenly the top began moving, rotating, unscrewing, and Ogilvy feared there was a man inside, trying to escape. And with faint sounds of movement coming from within. It was thought to be an ordinary falling star, but next day there was huge crater in the middle of the Common, and Ogilvy came to examine what lay there: a cylinder, thirty yards across, glowing hot…. Journalist: Then came the night the first missile approached Earth. “The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one – but still they come!” “The chances of anything coming from mars are a million to one” he said He was convinced that there could be no living thing on that remote forbidding planet. Ogilvy the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. A flare, spurting out from Mars – bright green, drawing a green mist behind it – a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. It was another missile starting on its way.Īnd that’s how it was for the next ten nights. As I watched, there was another jet of gas. Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling towards us were the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us.Īt midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars and sped towards Earth. No one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Journalist: No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space.