Date: Thu, 6 Apr 2000 18:55:30 -0700 (PDT)

So that's why this week has been so intense. . . .

SF Gate

Are planets conspiring to end the world?

MATTHEW FORDAHL, AP Science Writer

Thursday, April 6, 2000

Breaking News Sections

(04-06) 01:32 EDT LOS ANGELES (AP) - Three planets and the crescent moon will bunch up in the western sky tonight - a celestial preview of a much bigger alignment that doomsayers call big trouble for earthlings.

Next month, the sun and six of the planets, including Earth, will line up like cosmic billiard balls. Just when you thought it was safe to ditch those Y2K survival kits, some astrologers believe the alignment could shift the Earth's poles, trigger earthquakes and ruin the stock market.

Astronomers, too, are bracing for the May 5-16 alignment. They will be busy debunking end-of-the-world predictions, just as they did in 1982 and 1962.

They will have to do it again in 2020 and 2040; the lineups occur about once every 20 years.

"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.

"It's very pretty," said Dennis Mammana, astronomer at San Diego's ReubenH. Fleet Science Center. "I think that's the limit to the significance of this thing."

The May alignment will involve the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. It won't be visible because of the sun's glare.

However, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn will appear close in the sky tonight as they march toward the grand alignment. The crescent moon will be crammed into the same area in the western sky.

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.

Every planetary alignment brings a new round of doomsday predictions.

A book called "The Jupiter Effect" received wide attention with its false prediction that California would be rocked by a major earthquake indirectly caused by the 1982 alignment.

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," author Richard Noone said. "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 also the planetary alignment signals a change from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius.

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."

Besides, Krupp said, even 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

Astology Insights

Shamanic Astrology