Talk about fake news: In 1907 a New York Times banner headline declared, “There Is Life On the Planet Mars.” Upping the ante the next year, the stodgy Wall Street Journal claimed “proof” of “conscious, intelligent human life” on our red neighbor.

A decades-long cultural phenomenon is revisited in the “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the Century America” by science writer David Baron. He explores how a society on the cusp of reality-piercing scientific advances — global radio communications, X-rays, Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity among them — bought into what in hindsight seems downright silly.

The idea of life on other planets had been orbiting the public imagination ever since the realization that the Earth wasn’t alone in the solar syst

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