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The Man Who Dreamed up a New Moon for Mars

Ferox doesn't exist, but that didn't stop photographer Nicolas Polli from documenting the journey to visit it.
  • 01
    In June 1944, two geologists in the Swiss Alps unearthed a black, 125-pound meteorite that turned out to be from Ferox, Mars’ third moon. At least, that’s what photographer Nicolas Polli would have you believe.
  • 02
    *The Forgotten Files: A Journey to the Hidden Moon of Mars 1976–2010* is an archive Polli created containing hundreds of convincing, black-and-white photographs that depict scientific research, space missions, and even the alien surface of Ferox itself. And it’s all completely fabricated.
  • 03
    Polli developed the idea a couple years ago, as images increasingly began fueling the spread of hoaxes and fake news across the web. Desiring to better understand how people critically evaluate imagery online, he picked a topic most people know little about—the celestial bodies orbiting Mars—and started inventing his own facts. (“It’s very easy to fake something about space,” he says.)
  • 04
    Polli steeped this tale in scientific-sounding jargon and wrapped it all up in a convincing visual identity: more than 300 archival-looking images he shot over six months in 2016. "Since it looks like what I’m saying, people trust it, because they have clichés about how certain things should look in a certain era and period in history,” he says.
  • 05
    He recruited friends and family to serve as actors, dressing them in white suits and directing fake experiments in and around his studio in Lausanne, Switzerland.
  • 06
    He even collaged together Google Earth images of the Swiss Alps and real photos of Mars to simulate the kind of images a satellite or rover might capture of its rugged, extraterrestrial landscape.
  • 07
    And though Polli throws in clues the images aren't real—an anachronistic pair of shoes here, a surprising lack of safety gear there—he still gets contacted by folks hoping to get in touch with IEMS. "Today we’re bombarded by images and information, and we trust almost everything because we don’t have time to get too deep into the information," he says.
  • 08
    IEMS never existed, but if it had, its story would have ended like this: On August 6, 2008, an IEMS probe accidentally landed in a deep crater on Ferox, more than 20 miles off course. It couldn’t get out—a $2.5 billion mistake that effectively halted the search for life on Mars' third moon. Polli's fake archive brilliantly illustrates this tragic tale, stirring the imagination as much as any sci-fi TV show or film ... BS or not.

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Laura Mallonee is a writer for WIRED covering photography. ... Read more
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