In
1974 the National Academies of Sciences, tired of all the hype around the coming Viking Mars mission that was to find life on the Red planet... there was zero doubt really !!
Published that little paragraph in a report that nobody red, of course - neither Carl Sagan nor NASA.
The twin Vikings landed on Mars on July 20, 1976 amid a storm of NASA and Sagan PR.
And guess what happened next ?
Exactly the above.
1 experiment (Levine) "we found life !"
2 experiments (Oyama, Horowitz) said "NO"
and then... Biemann experiment found no organics.
End result:
- Such had been the immense hype,
- Such had been the huge cost of Viking ($4 billion from the era, = ten billions today)
- Such was the controversy between the four scientists
That
- the next Mars lander had to wait
21 years, and 1997
- the last of the surviving scientist, Levine, still claims he has find life (in 2019: 43 years after !)
- we still have no clear cut idea of what did the freakkin' Viking ovens and scoopers exactly found or processed (!)