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Planet lineup a
By Pat Gee
wake-up call for some,
big yawn for others
Star-BulletinWill the alignment of the sun and six planets on Friday signal the end of the world, as some doomsdayers are predicting?
Psychic Dayle Schear laughs and says, "it will be just like Y2K. We'll all be around." That is, except for those who are victims of the earthquakes that she sees happening around the world.
Astrologer Susan Aiu says "I don't know" but the Earth might be pulled off its axis "like a washing machine with an offside load -- and there's no reset button on the Earth."
The May alignment will involve the sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. To astronomer Peter Michaud, public information officer at the Gemini Observatory on Mauna Kea, the alignment is nothing but "a pretty conjunction of planets.
"Astronomically, it's kind of a yawn. ... Nothing ever happens. It really boggles my mind that history has shown there's no correlation" between the alignment of planets and natural disasters, he said. Yet, every 20 years or so doomsdayers make similar predictions.
If the event inspires people to look up at the sky, "that's a good thing," he said.
The belief that the world would end after an alignment of the planets began about 300 B.C., said Mike Shanahan, planetarium producer at Bishop Museum.
The planets have been aligning about every 20 years since, and "we're still here," Shanahan said.
Bishop Museum isn't having a public screening of the event because, "there's nothing to see," Shanahan said.
Schear, a Hawaii-based psychic for the last 26 years, said the legendary prophet/astrologer Nostradamus predicted in the 1500s that "May 5 would be a "dangerous day," ending in apocalyptic holocaust.
Nostradamus never specified the year the world would come to an end because he spoke in "quatrains" or verse, but some have interpreted it to happen by the year 2000, Schear said.
But her que sera, sera attitude is, "If it ends, it ends. Nothing I can do about it so I might as well have a good time."
Aiu, an astrologer in Hawaii for 30 years who can be heard regularly on KSSK, said the alignment of several planets will constitute "a great big long line of energy ... like a firehose. Everybody gets hit with this. It will be like a great big exclamation point" in their lives.
There will be a lot of stress and tension, too, with the alignment at a right angle to Uranus and Neptune. And the fact that the planets will also be "in Taurus, which is ruled by Venus," might mean "a wake up call to the world that women are worthy and certainly capable of leading," Aiu speculated.
Star-Bulletin reporter Lori Tighe contributed to this report.
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