The September 11th attack
Answers to attacks sought in the stars

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer

E-mail boxes across the country are being flooded with a supposed prophecy of Tuesday's terrorist attacks and messages that claim the face of Satan is visible in images of the fireball exploding from the World Trade Center.

See what you want in smoke clouds, but don't believe the Nostradamus nonsense.

The e-mail writer took some creative license with the words of 16th century French astrologer Michel de Notredame, known as Nostradamus, to make it sound as if he forecast Tuesday's terrorist attacks with lines such as: "In the year of the new century and nine months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror" and "in the city of york there will be a great collapse, two twin brothers torn apart by chaos."

Nostradamus never wrote that.

The first clue might be the claim in some versions of the e-mail that the prediction was penned in 1654. That could only have been true if Nostradamus wrote it from the grave, 88 years after his death.

David Mikkelson and his wife in Agoura Hills, Calif., have spent most of their free time since Tuesday debunking the myth and reading hundreds of messages about it sent to their Urban Legends Reference Pages Web site at www.snopes.com.

People feel reassured that if war is going to break out, there might be evidence that it couldn't have been avoided, said Mikkelson, who edits the Web page. Trouble is, he said, people have been turning to Nostradamus after every recent tragedy and reinventing his words.

Other rationalizations are making even psychics skeptical.

A numerology message going around adds the flight numbers of hijacked planes to arrive at the calendar days of this week. Others point to Tuesday's date — Sept. 11, or 9-11 — as the American code for a call for emergency.

Alan Johnson isn't buying it.

"Find some sense in it? I don't think there is any," said Johnson, a psychic counselor in Kane'ohe, who admits the attacks took him by surprise.

He isn't gazing at the smoke clouds, either. "You can look at the carpet and see faces," he said.

But Norma Jean Ream, an astrological consultant in Pahoa on the Big Island, says people tend to look to the skies, or to God, or to the Internet, for explanations.

"Regardless of what kind of church you belong to or philosophy you believe in," she said, "you look for ways to understand it."

She sees the same planets in alignment now as she has seen during other wars.

Johnson said he can draw a similar conclusion in Asian astrology, because it's the Year of the Metal Snake.

"The last metal snake was the year Pearl Harbor happened," he said. "In hindsight, I see this energy is surprisingly influential."

Everyone can find some meaning in Tuesday's terror, whether they read it in numbers, planets or colors in a photograph, Honolulu astrologer Sundae Merrick said.

Merrick said she saw the Saturn-Pluto opposition, a signal for serious aggressive acts.

"The whole call to war thing, I think it's a call to love," she said. "By balancing energies, we can create healing."

Internet groups are turning to scripture, God and smoke clouds.

Cromwell Crawford is skeptical.

"I think it's more psychological than it is religious," said Crawford, an ethics professor and chairman of the Department of Religion at the University of Hawai'i.

"In a time of great stress and catastrophe, people want to get control of the situation, and they want to find the answers," he said. "They hear what they want to hear. They see what they want to see."

Reach Tanya Bricking at tbricking@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8026.