hai friends,
For
thousands of years it has been believed that the fortunes of men and
women move in cycles. The ancients depicted the concept as the great
Wheel of Fortune, eternally turning and spilling off the winners on top
while bearing up the wretches beneath and giving them their time in the
limelight before they, too, get dumped. The trouble was that no one knew
for sure what powered that wheel or exactly what speed it was turning
for any given individual. People knew their days were numbered, but they
didn’t know the number.
Until recently the situation hasn’t
improved much. For hundreds of years we have known that it is the
regular and predictable cycles of the moon and sun that regulate the
ocean’s tides, but the tides in the affairs of humans have not been so
easily forecast. It was almost as if they moved erratically of their own
accord, unmotivated by outside forces.
The extensive cycle
research of the past thirty years has proved otherwise. It has
established numerous links between regularly occurring human behavior
and external natural cycles ranging from weather and solar radiation to
phases of the moon and planetary cycles. Here are some dramatic
examples.
MURDER TIDES
At the University of Miami,
psychologist Arnold Lieber and his colleagues decided to test the old
belief of full-moon “lunacy” which most scientists had written off as an
old wives’ tale. The researchers collected data on homicide in Dade
County (Miami) over a period of 15 years — 1,887 murders, to be exact.
When they matched the incidence of homicide with the phases of the moon,
they found, much to their surprise, that the two rose and fell
together, almost infallibly, for the entire 15 years! As the full or the
new moon approached, the murder rate rose sharply; it distinctly
declined during the first and last quarters of the moon.
To find out
whether this was just a statistical fluke, the researchers repeated the
experiment using murder data from Cuyahoga County in Ohio (Cleveland).
Again, the statistics showed that more murders do indeed occur at the
full and new moons.
Dr. Lieber and his colleagues shouldn’t have
been so surprised. An earlier report by the American Institute of
Medical Climatology to the Philadelphia Police Department entitled “The
Effect of the Full Moon on Human Behavior” found similar results. That
report showed that the full moon marks a monthly peak in various kinds
of psychotically oriented crimes such as murder, arson, dangerous
driving, and kleptomania. People do seem to get a little bit crazier
about that time of the month.
That’s something most police and
hospital workers have known for a long time. Indeed, back in
eighteenth-century England, a murderer could plead “lunacy” if the crime
was committed during the full moon and get a lighter sentence as a
result. Scientists, however, like to have a hard physical model to
explain their discoveries, and so far there isn’t a fully accepted one.
Dr. Lieber speculates that perhaps the human body, which, like the
surface of the earth, is composed of almost 80 percent water,
experiences some kind of “biological tides” that affect the emotions.
When a person is already on psychologically shaky ground, such a
biological tide can push him or her over the edge.
BLOODY MOON
Crimes
and violence aren’t the only things affected by the 29½ day full moon
cycle. In the Journal of the Florida Medical Association, Dr. Edson J.
Andrews writes that in a study of 1,000 tonsillectomies, 82 percent of
postoperative bleeding crises occurred nearer the full than the new moon
— despite the fact that fewer operations were performed at that time!
Clearly, the full moon is a dangerous time for surgery, and the
dissemination of this knowledge should result in planning operations for
the new moon.
MOON DOLLARS
Practical economic use
of the lunar cycle has been going on for a long time. In tropical rain
forest countries in South America and Southeast Asia, where most of the
world’s hardwood comes from, tree-harvesting contracts are linked to the
phase of the moon. The trees are only cut down on a waning moon, as
near to the new moon as feasible. This is because on a waxing or full
moon, the sap rises in the trees and extensive sap bleeding attracts
hordes of deathwatch beetles, which will devastate a crop. Awareness of
this cycle means the difference between making or losing millions of
dollars every year.
LUNAR BABIES
One future use
for the monthly lunar cycle may be in choosing the timing and gender of
babies. Curtis Jackson, controller of Southern California Methodist
Hospital, reports that more babies are conceived on the waxing moon than
on the waning. He quantified 11,025 births over a period of six years
and found that nearly 1,000 more children were conceived during the
waxing moon. Apparently, successful conception is easier at that time.
More interesting are the results of German researcher W. Buehler. In an
analysis of 33,000 births Dr. Buehler found that there was a significant
preponderance of male births during the waxing moon. This knowledge,
combined with medical techniques known to affect fertility and sex, may
well help people in planning for their children.
HARNESSING THE SOLAR WIND
The
moon isn’t the only body out in space that produces human cycles. The
sun, the basic source of all life on earth, has its own rhythm, which
produces cycles in humans and non-humans alike. Since the 1800s
astronomers have noted that there is an eleven and a twenty-two-year
sunspot cycle; that is, for some years there would be hardly any
sunspots, and then for some years the sun’s face would be as blotchy as a
teenager with acne. It wasn’t until the 1930s, however, that it
occurred to anyone that something going on that far away from earth
could affect us. During the sunspot peak of the 1930s, Dr. Miki Takata
found that human blood serum was affected by the solar radiation put out
by sunspots. During the same period it was discovered that sunspot
emissions affected a wide variety of other things, such as the size of
tree rings and the amount of radio interference on certain bandwidths.
During
World War II, the potential communications blackout that sunspots and
solar storms might cause was of great concern to the armed forces, so a
radio engineer at RCA named John Nelson was asked to come up with a
method of predicting when the storms would occur. Nelson figured that
the only major variables that might conceivably affect the sun’s
turbulent surface were the planets surrounding it. He devised a system
of charting their relationships to the sun and to one another and found
that when certain angular relationships between planets occurred,
sunspots and solar magnetic storms broke out. To date, his system of
prediction has been 95 percent accurate, and the hypothesis that the
planets cause solar “tides” was proved by Professor K. D. Wood at the
University of Colorado.
More recently, many scientists have been
suggesting that the sunspot cycle is critical in the formation of our
weather patterns. Indeed, during a seventy-year period in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the cycle was interrupted and
sunspots stopped for no apparent reason, Europe was plunged into its
coldest period on record, nicknamed the “Little Ice Age”. Astronomer
John R. Gribbin and astrophysicist Stephen H. Plagemann even speculated
that sunspot and planetary cycles are linked to earthquakes, and a
future unusual planetary alignment may trigger a devastating California
quake. The more the subject is investigated, the more important these
cycles appear.
MASS HYSTERIA
The amount of solar
radiation we receive, which is determined by the sunspot cycle, may have
profound historical significance. Soviet professor A. C. Tchyivsky has
correlated the eleven-year cycle with what he calls a worldwide “mass
excitement cycle”. He found that throughout history events such as wars,
migrations, crusades, uprisings, and revolutions have clustered around
peak sunspot periods. In the three years surrounding these peaks 60
percent of such events occurred, while only 5 percent occurred in the
troughs. It would appear that tides govern the affairs of nations as
well as individuals.
GOVERNMENT COVER-UP
But can
planetary cycles directly affect individual human events? If the answer
is yes, then cycle research begins to look pretty much like astrology, a
subject most scientists aren’t too fond of.
An Atomic Energy
Commission-funded project at Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque, New
Mexico, came up with a report entitled “Intriguing Accident Patterns
Plotted against a Background of Natural Environmental Features”, which
correlated on-the-job accidents of government employees over a period of
20 years with various natural cycles. This preliminary report (the
researchers suggested further study was in order) found that accidents
peak with the sunspot cycle and — even more intriguing and
“astrological” — that people were more likely to have accidents during
the phase of the moon the same as or opposite to that under which they
were born.
Some really hard and startling evidence might have
come out of this research had it been allowed to continue. But alas,
that was not to be. Shortly after its completion, the report fell into
the hands of Time magazine, which did a spoof on it in its January 10,
1972, issue, under the heading “Moonstruck Scientists”, complete with an
old woodcut of maidens dancing in a frenzy under the rays of the full
moon.
That was all the Congress needed to kill the project and
suppress the report. When I wrote to the Atomic Energy Commission and
Sandia in 1972, I was told that the report was not for distribution and
that I, or any other taxpayer, could not see it. The report remained
classified until 1977, when I again requested a copy, this time under
the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. At first, I was told
that all extant copies had been lost, hut through the efforts of a
persistent Energy Research Administration officer, Sandia was finally
pressured into coughing up a copy — accompanied by a somewhat terrified
disclaimer telling me I really shouldn’t believe what was in it.
J.
E. Davidson, who wrote the report with a team of fellow scientists, told
me over the phone that he was sad the research had been canceled. The
team felt they were on to something and, except for a nosy journalist
and premature publicity, might have made a significant contribution to
cycle research. Instead, their work was thrown down the drain. But
that’s the breaks when Congress is your boss.
STATISTICS DON’T LIE;
ONLY STATISTICIANS DO
Probably
the most distinguished work connecting planetary cycles with events and
trends in the lives of individuals has been that of French psychologist
and statistician Michel Gauquelin. In the mid-1960s he set out to
disprove astrology statistically by analyzing planetary positions at the
births of professionals, using samples as large as 10,000, 15,000, and
20,000. Astrologers have always believed that certain planets coming up
over the horizon, or directly overhead at a person’s birth, guide that
individual toward a certain profession.
To Gauquelin, the task
he had set for himself seemed like a piece of cake. All he had to do was
prove that the planet associated with athletic achievement, Mars, fell
at random points in the nativities of 10,000 or 15,000 athletes, and
that would be that — astrology would be debunked. To emphasize his point
he also investigated groups of doctors, lawyers, writers, and others in
jobs associated by astrologers with specific planets.
To
Gauquelin’s surprise, the results turned out to be exactly the opposite
of what he had expected. Mars did appear to be rising or culminating in a
vast number of athletes’ birth charts. Similarly, Jupiter appeared for
bankers, Saturn for doctors, Mercury for writers, and so on. Gauquelin
was astounded. Had he accidentally proved the case for astrology when he
had meant to debunk it?
Actually, he had done a lot more than
that because his data not only confirmed traditional astrological
assignments, they uncovered new ones. For writers, for instance, the
traditionally associated planet is Mercury. Gauquelin found that Mercury
was indeed significant in writers’ natal charts, but he also found that
the moon was equally important, something astrologers had never
posited.
Gauquelin's work established the fact that planetary
positions do affect human disposition, talent, and direction and that
these effects can be specifically determined by scientific methods such
as statistical analysis and probability.
by John Townley
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