CRAZY ABOUT COMETS

By LEON JAROFF

The ancient Chinese thought they were celestial brooms wielded by the gods to sweep the heavens free of evil. In the West they were believed to presage the fall of Jerusalem, the death of monarchs and such anomalies as two-headed calves. The Norman Conquest of England was attributed to the 1066 flyby of Halley's, history's most famous comet, which has been linked to everything from Julius Caesar's assassination to the defeat of Attila the Hun. Told that Earth would pass through Halley's tail during its 1910 visit, many Americans panicked and bought gas masks and "comet pills."

Alan Hale calls these waves of fear and mysticism "comet madness," and as co-discoverer of Comet Hale-Bopp, he's seen more than his share. Ever since his find was announced, he has been inundated with inquiries, pronouncements and accusations from the cometary fringe.

Hale has found that the arrival of a major comet--especially so near the end of a millennium--is still widely regarded as an omen of upheaval and disaster. Several Christian Fundamentalists, he writes in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer, have proclaimed Hale-Bopp to be one of the "signs of the end times" foretold in the New Testament. They also suggest that the comet might be the object described in Revelation 8: 10 as a great star named Wormwood that "fell from heaven, blazing like a torch." Wormwood, according to the Bible, destroys a third of almost everything: people, land, rivers and seas. Others claim that the comet is some kind of alien mother ship "under intelligent control."

Speculation reached a fever pitch last November when Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer based in Houston, Texas, announced on a nationwide radio talk show that he had photographed a "Saturn-like object" that seemed to be following in Hale-Bopp's wake. Shramek's breathless claim elevated Hale-Bopp fantasies from supermarket tabloids to the mainstream press and generated thousands of posts to message boards and astronomy home pages on the Internet. One fast-spreading rumor had it that the object was an alien spacecraft four times the size of Earth.

Hale was barraged with reporters' queries, and in an effort to calm the waters, he investigated Shramek's photograph and determined that the "object" in it was an ordinary eighth-magnitude star. After posting his conclusions on the Net, Hale became the target of a flood of hate E-mail, much of it accusing him of being part of a conspiracy to suppress the true nature of Hale-Bopp.

Hale acknowledges that it was only natural for our ancestors to be apprehensive about the fiery apparitions in the night sky. But he is impatient with their modern counterparts, who should know better. "I ask readers to treat all these irresponsible reports with the disdain they deserve," he says, "and instead enjoy the beauty of the comet for its own sake."

--By Leon Jaroff