Comet Attracts Oddball Theories

9/22/96

John Fleck
Journal Staff Writer

Fame has cast a strange shadow across astronomer Alan Hale and Comet Hale-Bopp, the comet he discovered last year.
While the Internet has buzzed with scientific discussion about the comet as astronomers share their pictures and observations about what could be the brightest comet of the century, there has been a weird side as well.
Consider this posting on one of the Internet discussion groups:
"There has been a tactical news blackout on this subject. And understandably so, for the government has sold our very souls to the evil Reptoid Space Gods who pilot that hollowed-out battle planetoid known exoterically as The Hale-Bopp Special yet esoterically as the Great Niburu which Springeth Forth from the Womb of Our Lady BABALON."
The theory is that Hale-Bopp is an alien emissary of some sort, no doubt up to no good.
It mysteriously "changed course" soon after Hale and star-gazer Thomas Bopp discovered it. (The underlying facts -- scientists revised their orbital estimates for the comet as they got better data.)
More recently Charles Morris, a friend of Hale's who maintains an Internet collection of comet information at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has been accused of being engaged in a government cover-up, withholding the real pictures of the comet being taken by secret government telescopes.
Astronomers either scoff at the talk or ignore it, so engrossed are they in studying the comet.
But Hale, who has taken to collecting some of the more odd material, has time for a laugh about the fuss.
His favorite?
An Internet posting saying "Hale and Bopp are government agents who have since disappeared into the desert."