OFF: Planetary Alignments

[K Henderson]

>Can anyone confirm whether or not on May 5th? The Earth, Moon, Sun, Mercury,
>Venus, Mars, Saturn & Jupiter will all be aligned (in a straight line) for
>the first time in 6000 years. It's all of the ancient Gods lined up at the
>same time! Apparently, the astronomers and astrologers were jumping up and
>down and foaming at the mouth the last time we had a four planetary
>alignment in the early sixties which some say heralded "Flower Power"

Sun, Six Planets to Line Up
Matthew Fordahl, AP Science Writer

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Next month, the sun and six of the planets
will line up like cosmic billiard balls in a configuration
doomsayers warn could shift the Earth's poles, trigger earthquakes,
ruin the stock market and usher in the Age of Aquarius if anyone
survives.
        Astronomers are bracing for the May 5-16 alignment, too, but not
out of fear their observatories will crumble.
        They will be busy debunking the end-of-the-world predictions,
just as they did when the planets lined up in 1982, 1962 and about
every 20 years before that. They will have to do it again in 2020,
too.
        ``If people are determined to be anxious about something, I
think it would be a lot better if they were anxious about their
driving on the freeways,'' said E.C. Krupp, director of the
Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
        The alignment will involve the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn, and comes just when you thought it was safe to
ditch those Y2K survival kits.
        The May show won't even be visible because it will be obscured
by the sun's glare. So if there is to be any earthly excitement, it
will have to come from all those quakes, tidal waves and volcanoes.
        On Thursday, in a celestial preview, three planets -- Mars,
Jupiter and Saturn -- will appear close in the sky as they march
toward the grand alignment. The crescent moon will be crammed into
the same area.
        ``It's very pretty,'' said Dennis Mammana, astronomer at San
Diego's Reuben H. Fleet Science Center. ``I think that's the limit
to the significance of this thing.''
        There's no risk of a collision: The moon is 239,000 miles away;
Mars 216 million miles away; Jupiter 543 million miles away; and
Saturn 927 million miles away.
        Each one of these planetary alignments brings a new round of
doomsday predictions.
        A book called ``The Jupiter Effect'' received wide attention
with its prediction that California would be rocked by a major
earthquake indirectly caused by the 1982 alignment of the planets.
It turned out to be all wrong.
        Another book ominously titled ``5/5/2000: Ice, The Ultimate
Disaster'' predicts the alignment and increased solar activity will
unleash a complex chain of events causing the Earth's crust to
slide and poles to shift.
        ``Quite frankly, it would be a geological Armageddon,'' said
author Richard Noone. ``You'd have volcanism going on globally.
Earthquakes beyond the scale anything Richter ever dreamed of.
Tsunamis hundreds of feet high, sweeping hundreds of miles
inland.''
        The 390-page book uses ``pole shifting'' to explain everything
from the disappearance of the civilization that built the pyramids
to why woolly mammoths appear to be flash-frozen in Siberia.
        Noone has moved his family to safety in Georgia, but astronomers
say he and everybody else have nothing to worry about because the
extra pull and stretching from the aligned planets is a small
fraction of the moon's tidal and gravitational strength.
        Astrologers, though, say the planetary alignment signals a
change from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. And that's
not a good thing.
        The ``pileup of energy'' is going to lead to ``some very serious
reversals in the stock market,'' said astrologer Norman Arens. He
also predicts cataclysmic quakes, floods and volcanoes as well as a
movement away from 2,000-year-old Christian principles.
        Mammana countered that nobody has ever been able to explain how
rocks in space can influence lives.
        ``It's a shame that they have to fall into the traps of things
like this,'' he said. ``The universe is a grand and wonderful
place, and the fact that we can understand it and predict the way
it behaves is a wonderful testament to our intelligence and our
ingenuity.''
        And besides, Krupp said, if the end of the world is near, so
what?
        ``There's no reason to get upset about it. If it is the end of
the world, there's very little you can do,'' he said.
                                 *------
        On the Net:
        Griffith Observatory: http://www.griffithobs.org
        Reuben H. Fleet Science Center: http://www.rhfleet.org
        Richard Noone's home page: http://www.rnoones.com