[7] Lhote met and befriended a French soldier named Charles Brennans who had discovered rock paintings and engravings in a remote, uninhabited zone on the edge of the Sahara desert, while on an exploratory mission there in the 1930s.

The artwork was on sandstone cliffs in a deep wadi of a barren plateau known as Tassili-n-ajjer, and included depictions of elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, and strange human figures.

These images were presented in 1957 and 1958 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and were, in the opinion of the writer and politician André Malraux, "one of the most defining exhibitions of the mid-century".

[2][5] However, mainstream scientists regard the "great Martian god" and other rock art figures of Tassili as representations of ordinary humans in ritual masks and costumes rather than extraterrestrial lifeforms.

[2] For instance a dance scene that Lhote discovered in 1956 can be attributed on stylistic grounds to Neolithic hunters who lived in the area (which was then fertile) around 6,000 to 8,000 years ago.