In January 1996 I began notifying my clients that the January 12, 1996 - March 10, 2003 Uranus transit in Aquarius would coincide with a number of developments, some perhaps startling and some fairly ordinary:

• Internet access will be as common in middle class American households as a telephone was a generation or two ago, and the hardware to do this will cost no more than an ordinary TV does today.
   
• Computer criminals will cause a major financial panic, including a Wall Street crash.
   
• A period of revolutionary social and political change - parallel to the American, French and the Bolshevik revolutions - will sweep the world, focusing especially on the U.S. and Canada, France, China and Russia. This will be a secular, not fundamentalist, revolution; and as such it will push back fundamentalist political power throughout the world (even in the Middle East, where such movements have been on the rise for over twenty years now).
   
• The U.S. Congress will pass the most restrictive immigration legislation seen in generations.
   
• Radio astronomers will receive the first recognized signals from extraterrestrial civilization - probably in ’97 or ‘98.
   

As 1996 draws to a close, a couple of these predictions have been at least partially fulfilled. The Internet prediction took a giant step forward with the July announcement (which announcement had itself been predicted in my July forecast) and September delivery of Web TV. In reality this is only a very meager beginning: what is coming is a household appliance which combines cable TV, telephone, personal computer and the Internet all in one package. And restrictive immigration laws and enforcement are already in evidence on the US political scene. Cyber-terror and secular revolution remain to be seen . . . but they will be seen, and will in fact have the greatest direct effect on people’s lives. (Imagine all the world’s electronic equity being temporarily wiped out!)

The SETI prediction has drawn the most interest and comment from my clients. Some have even asked whether the summer ’96 NASA announcement regarding the discovery of fossil life form traces on Martian meteorites - touted as evidence of extraterrestrial life - constitutes a vindication of my SETI prediction. The answer is no. The validity of meteoric evidence for life on Mars remains controversial, and even if it were universally accepted it has no direct bearing on SETI, which is an acronym for the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Fossil microbes don’t count. Given that what SETI activity there is - and there are a number of projects underway - focuses on detecting and decoding electromagnetic signals from extraterrestrial civilization, that’s what it takes to validate this prediction. And it’s coming . . .

SETI succeeding is an event without direct historical precedent, so there’s no way I can say that Uranus in Aquarius will infallibly produce such a momentous occasion. After all, Uranus enters Aquarius once every 84 years (the last transit was from January 30, 1912 to January 22, 1920), and we don’t have ET’s calling Earth every 84 years . . . or at least, it doesn’t make the newspapers or show up in the history books. Chances are there have been signals sent many times in the past, but the technology to receive them is a fairly new development in historical terms.

Lacking any direct precedent, it occurred to me to check for an analogous discovery of an entirely unknown and alien civilization. And the last such major historical revelation happened when Columbus realized he had found not the Asia he sought, but an entirely new world. This occurred, not in 1492 when Columbus landed in the New World, but several years later when it finally dawned on him that he and his crew had been exploring an unknown continent, filled with alien civilizations all its own. The fateful realization dawned on August 15, 1498, according to an entry Columbus made in his journal on that date. And a chart for that moment of enlightenment features . . . you guessed it, Uranus in Aquarius. (See solar chart at left, untimed data from Microsoft Encarta ’95 Encyclopedia.) As an astrologer, the link between heaven and earth is as clear as daylight to me. "As above, so below" means that life (including civilization) is out there as well as down here. It’s only a matter of time before the long-sought signal proves that. And if the last similar discovery - Columbus’ journal entry - is any kind of precedent, then the odds are good that the signal has already been received . . . but hasn’t yet been recognized for what it is. Precisely when that moment of discovery will arrive, I do not know. With Jupiter and Uranus in Aquarius in 1997, and Neptune joining them there in early ’98, those two years seem as likely as any during the 1996-2003 time frame . . . but it’s coming, one way or the other.