Sara Weiss was a St. Louis housewife in her mid-fifties when, during a convalescence, “people in the spirit world” began visiting her and dictating a treatise on Mars and its fauna. Her 1901 interview in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran the drawings her guides helped her make — Martian flowers, captioned in the Martian language. The book followed in 1903, a year before she died. Colin Dickey’s PDR piece reads it as the bridge between two eras we usually keep separate: Spiritualism’s séances and Summerland, and the post-war world of spacecraft and men from Venus.

Why the two are closer than they look:

  • Spiritualism began in 1848 with the Fox sisters and, as Ann Braude argues in Radical Spirits, “became a major — if not the major — vehicle for the spread of women’s rights ideas in mid-century America.” Direct personal revelation, no hierarchy, no doctrine — open to housewives and seamstresses.
  • Weiss’ book opens with Martians and then folds in famous dead guides: Bulwer-Lytton, Darwin, and Giordano Bruno, who greets America with a warning to “guard jealously this priceless blessing” of free thought and speech won “through centuries of bloodshed, torturing flames and agony unspeakable.”
  • The 1900 From India to the Planet Mars had already routed Martian communication through séance, and the late Victorian era was convinced Mars was veined with canals.
  • In 1954 an Illinois housewife named Dorothy Martin channeled her dead father, then beings from the planet Clarion who warned of a flood and promised a UFO rescue — the same playbook, forty years on.
  • Dickey’s explanation for the migration: Spiritualism never proved an afterlife, so it moved the goalposts outward — past Earth and toward the planets.

The interesting part is not that Weiss believed it, but that her book sits on a continuum of women’s revelation the canon treats as two unrelated oddities. The famous contactees were mostly men — Kenneth Arnold, George Adamski — which has obscured how much of the tradition was women holding the pen, whether the voice on the other end claimed to be from the Summerland or from Mars.