A wide gulf exists in our imagination between the Spiritualism of the nineteenth century and the post–WWII era of UFOs and interplanetary visitors. One bears the gothic sheen of the Victorian era, with its séances and table rappings, its belief in a “Summerland” where the dead repose peacefully and happily, ready to reach out to us from beyond the grave and offer us solace and wisdom. The other is a world of futuristic chrome and light, of mysterious objects in the sky, of men from Mars and Venus stepping out of spacecraft to offer us friendship and untold technological advances.

And yet, these two worlds are closer than they first appear. Spiritualism, which truly began in 1848 with the Fox Sisters — teenagers Maggie and Kate — who found that they could communicate with the ghost of a man who’d died in the New York farmhouse they were living in, was always primarily a medium for women. As Ann Braude explains in her Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, the movement “became a major—if not the major—vehicle for the spread of women’s rights ideas in mid-century America.” Rather than focus on hierarchy and doctrine, Spiritualism revealed the invisible divine to housewives, seamstresses, and anyone else who professed to have “the gift” through direct and personal revelation.

And while many of the famous figures of the post-war UFO era were men — from the pilot Kenneth Arnold, whose sighting of nine silver objects over Mount Rainier in 1949 began the UFO craze, to George Adamski, who claimed to have met with a blond-haired, silver-jumpsuited man from Venus in the California desert — women played an outsized role as well, often borrowing from the same playbook of Spiritualism.

In 1954, for example, an Illinois housewife named Dorothy Martin found herself one day writing in another person’s handwriting, ultimately realizing it belonged to her dead father. Initially channeling him from beyond the grave, she soon found herself in contact with extraterrestrials from the planet Clarion who warned her of a catastrophic flood and urged her to gather up a group of followers who would be saved by UFOs the night before the disaster.

Further evidence of this continuum can be found in Sara Weiss’ book Journeys to the Planet Mars, first published in 1903, a strange bridge between these two eras. Weiss, a St. Louis housewife, was in her mid-fifties when she began to have otherworldly visions and gained the attention of the Spiritualist community. A 1901 St. Louis Dispatch article describes how Weiss had a series of visions during a convalescence, when “people in the spirit world” visited her and dictated a treatise on the planet Mars and its fauna. As part of these sessions, her guides helped her draw a series of images that depicted various flowers of Mars, which were reproduced in the Dispatch’s article (and which can be seen in the gallery below).

The whole book followed two years later, just before Weiss’ death in 1904. Framed as a series of dialogues, it begins with beings from Mars but gradually folds in famous dead people who also act as guides, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Giordano Bruno, and Charles Darwin among them:

Madame, will you bear from me a message to the peoples of your native land? Yes? Then I thank you.
Children of earth's most favored land — children of America, I, Giordino Bruno, once a citizen of sun-kissed Italy, greet you.
Rejoice unceasingly that freedom of thought and speech are yours. Guard jealously this priceless blessing which through centuries of bloodshed, torturing flames and agony unspeakable has become your heritage.

Weiss identified herself as a Spiritualist, and the invocation of dead historical figures fits well within that tradition, but her book also anticipates the work of UFO contactees like Martin by turning its focus away from the past and toward outer space. Of course, her work, too, had precedent: 1900’s From India to the Planet Mars, an account of Martian communication via séance, and the collective delusion, in the late nineteenth century, that Mars was covered in alien aqueducts.

The wider occult fascination with Mars may have been simply because Summerland had proved increasingly elusive. Spiritualism had been a massive force in popular culture for over half a century, but had made little gains in proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that life after death existed. It would continue to be a major force for the first few decades of the twentieth century, but Weiss’ book also makes clear that Spiritualists were beginning to move their goalposts, past the Earth itself and out toward the planet and the stars.