The Colorado Martian

by Brian Dunning
March 31, 2026

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Now, first of all, I’m well aware that not a single person listening to this honestly suspects that there might be any truth to a story as silly as the millions-of-years-old petrified corpse of a Martian being found, still encased in its sarcophagus, in a mine in Colorado way back in 1864. There would be no point in my telling such a story here, and no point in debunking it for debunking’s sake either. The wild phenomenon we’re looking at today is not the story itself, but the very fact that the story exists. And since it’s on Skeptoid, you should know that there’s something special about the story. There’s a reason we’re going to talk about it today; in particular, a relevance to some of today’s stories that you might not have expected, and that give us additional insight into other strange things we hear. And as with so many stories on Skeptoid, that insight comes to us from a familiar source: context.

In broad strokes, the story goes that in 1864, while the Civil War raged in the east, oil prospectors in Colorado came upon a giant Martian meteorite. They cut it open and found the sarcophagus of a small Martian humanoid inside, all petrified and mineralized. The story got its start in June of that year, not in Colorado, but in a French newspaper (my own translation follows):

We have just received from Richmond the following correspondence, which fills us with profound astonishment. We publish it with all due reservations, although we do not for a single instant doubt the respectability of our correspondent.

A party said to be prospecting for oil, but oddly mining on the side of a mountain, came across what they described as an aerolite, or a rocky meteorite, buried in the mountain’s paleozoic strata. Over the course of 15 days they got it separated out, and it was enormous: 45 yards on its greatest diameter and 30 yards on its smallest.

Good fortune rarely comes alone. A second discovery was to follow the first, and its importance is such that, at the very hour when we write these lines, it still keeps the intelligent portion of the country in a state of excitement.

They then began to bore into the meteorite. They stated that the outer four yards showed fusion melting from its high-temperature descent through Earth’s atmosphere, countless millennia ago. Finally, at twenty yards in, they broke into a void, from which a jet of “irrespirable gas” greeted the workers. Then, over the course of ten days, they widened the borehole until two men could be lowered into the void.

At the base of the shaft, the two explorers related, we came upon the amphora, embedded horizontally in the ophite; the drill had struck it and partly dislodged it. About two yards lower down our feet came to rest on a metal flooring that echoed dully and seemed to be set into the rock. Above it and to the left, but too deeply sunk in the rock to be detached, we made out several metal amphorae with kinds of staffs in yellow metal.

They then spent three days trying to dislodge the metallic floor, which they were finally able to move aside:

The onlookers could not repress a cry of astonishment. Before their eyes they had a rectangular space one yard deep and two yards wide, very clearly cut in the granite. The void was almost entirely filled with calcareous concretions, with sorts of stalagmites that sparkled in the lamplight. In the centre there stood out very sharply the form of a man of very small stature, as though wrapped in a calcareous shroud. He was lying full length and measured scarcely four feet. His head, slightly raised, was lost in a cushion of calcium carbonate, and his legs also disappeared beneath the calcareous casing.

With much effort they were able to remove the sarcophagus containing the small man and examined him more thoroughly:

The head came out almost intact: no hair, the skin smooth and wrinkled, turned to the state of leather; the skull triangular; the face like the blade of a knife; a kind of proboscis starting almost from the forehead, serving as a nose; a very small mouth with only a few teeth; two eye‑sockets from which the eyes had no doubt been removed, for the cavities were filled with calcareous concretions; very long arms reaching down below the thighs; five fingers, the fourth much shorter than the others. The general appearance was slender. The skin, calcined here and there, must no doubt have been yellowish red. They are now busy making a cast of this strange inhabitant of the interplanetary worlds, and before long we shall be able to send drawings of it.

According to the account, carvings on the metallic floorplate depicted (for some reason) a rhinoceros, a palm tree, the Sun, and the planets of the solar system — Mars being depicted larger than the others. It was determined that an asteroid impact on Mars blasted this piece of the planet into orbit, from where it eventually found its way to Earth, and fell as a meteorite.

This is not actually as far-fetched a scenario as you might think. We do have plenty of bits of Mars here on Earth. We know of about 825 lbs (374 kg) of it, but there is undoubtedly much, more more. It’s in the form of meteorites, which — just as the Colorado sarcophagus story goes — blasted up ejecta from the Martian surface, some of which exceeded escape velocity and became little asteroids. A few of these eventually get captured by Earth’s gravity well and crash here as meteorites. The largest one we’ve found is 54 lbs (25 kg) and was found in the Sahara Desert in Niger. It’s not known when it fell to Earth, but the surface weathering is minimal so it’s thought to be not all that long ago.

Now it’s one thing to look at science-based flaws in the story of the Colorado Martian and to conclude that it was probably a fake story, and that’s easy enough to do and constitutes a satisfactory debunking, if that’s what you’re after. Of course the story is fake. If we wanted to we could expand on such points as:

• An actual hypersonic superbolide would have undergone complete fragmentation upon impact; none of the structures inside could have survived intact as described.
  
  
• If such a relic from Mars had been found, then our modern explorations of the planet should have found far more extensive evidence of their civilization.
  
  
• No corroborating reports exist at all — an impossibility considering the significance, alleged safe and complete recovery, and massive size of the find.
  
  
• Louis Figuier wrote in a 1923 volume of The Scientific and Industrial Annual that the language describing the composition of the meteorite in the newspaper article had been lifted from an actual geochemical report in which Claude‑Auguste Cloëz analyzed an actual meteor months before the article appeared.
  
  
• Henri de Parville, the once-anonymous author of the original French newspaper piece, expanded his story into a novel the following year, An Inhabitant of the Planet Mars (1865).

But we could go on like that all day, and illuminate nothing. Pointing out the flaws in the story misses the far more important point, which is — as with so many of our topics here on Skeptoid — the historical and cultural context in which the story took place. The Colorado Martian yarn was not an outlier. Its 1864 publication was smack in the middle of an age when such stories were a popular fad. The infamous Cardiff Giant was “found” in 1869. Huge skeletons said to be from Biblical giants were being discovered about every week. Mark Twain, in his role as history’s most savage critic of human folly, later wrote of this same period:

In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to running wild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One could scarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries of this kind. The mania was becoming a little ridiculous. I was a brand-new local editor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil... I chose to kill the petrifaction mania with a delicate, a very delicate satire. But maybe it was altogether too delicate, for nobody ever perceived the satire part of it at all. I put my scheme in the shape of the discovery of a remarkably petrified man.

He published in the October 4, 1862 edition of Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise an account of the discovery of a petrified man:

I depended on the way the petrified man was sitting to explain to the public that he was a swindle. Yet I purposely mixed that up with other things, hoping to make it obscure — and I did. I would describe the position of one foot, and then say his right thumb was against the side of his nose; then talk about his other foot, and presently come back and say the fingers of his right hand were spread apart; then talk about the back of his head a little, and return and say the left thumb was hooked into the right little finger; then ramble off about something else, and by and by drift back again and remark that the fingers of the left hand were spread like those of the right.

Astronomical hoaxes were in the mix as well, showing again that Parville’s Martian Mummy did not emerge from a vacuum. In 1835 the Great Moon Hoax took place in New York, yet it was still spreading throughout Europe for 10, 20 years later. In this, author Richard Adams Locke published a hoax that astronomers saw bat-winged humanoids, unicorns, and lush lunar civilizations on the Moon. This prompted the 1853 publication of William Whewell's Of the Plurality of Worlds which sparked a worldwide debate on whether other planets were populated. This drove spinoffs and books of all kinds about life on Mars, on Venus, on the Moon, and elsewhere — complex civilizations and cultures which primed the world to eagerly accept the Martian Mummy in Colorado.

The story is remembered today not because it was good, or accurate, or unique, or wonderfully well written, or groundbreaking. It is remembered because it was a square in a quilt of tall tales and petrified men and extraterrestrial cultures that characterized that part of the nineteenth century. Like so many yarns we hear today, and will hear tomorrow, its real substance lay not in the story itself, but in how it fit within the context of the era’s pop culture.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning