Our correspondent writes with some charm, however what he writes is almost laughable in its twisting of history and previous findings and suppositions.

There were two Vikings. Viking 2 landed almost as far north as Phoenix, and there was routine frost deposition at the Viking 2 site. Viking 1 landed nearer the equator. The biology test results from both were nearly identical, which in some ways didn't make sense, as conditions at the two sites appeared to be quite different.

The absence of organics in the Viking test samples has been a puzzle for decades of course, though the most commonly accepted explanation has been that any organics in the soil -- which had been theorized to be abundant whether or not there was biology, thanks to rains of carbonaceous meteorites -- were zapped by the hypothesized oxides and superoxides that must be in the soil.

Phoenix has found no such thing. Oops.

Well, no. It's just as well to claim it's the alkaline soil that eliminates the organics. That way we don't need all those exotic species of oxides and superoxides that were hypothesized for so many years.

But there hasn't been any test for organics yet. So we still don't know. And as for biology, it won't be possible to tell for certain no matter what results eventually come from the Phoenix experiments.

So if anything, there is no vindication or refutation theories of biology or the absence thereof on Mars, nor will there be any time soon. There is instead more mystery, more of a conundrum. At least Oyama's superoxide hypothesis rests on little more than supposition which hasn't yielded to experimentation.

We're almost right back where we started from.