This was all outlined in Richard Noone’s book, Ice: The Ultimate Disaster. According to Noone, a massive planetary/lunar alignment on 5/5/2000 was supposed to yank the earth’s ice caps from their lofty positions and shove them down to the equator, creating massive global upheaval, killing most of earth’s life and greatly upsetting all the shoggoths that live in Antarctica. And, oh yeah, a new Ice Age.

Ice: The Ultimate Disaster was first self-published in the early 80s and updated in 1995. The book first captured my imagination when I saw it in a Illuminet Press catalog I somehow managed to get while I was in high school. I never got to read Ice (it was on the list of titles I wanted to order from Illuminet, but wasn’t able to–due in part to lack of money, but also because my parents were wary of just about every book in the catalog. But I guess Okbomb! and the Principia Discorida are not necessarily books you want your 14-year-old son reading), but it’s remained ingrained in my memory since then.

Obviously, Noone’s predictions, based on dodgy archeology and the usual stuff about Freemasons, the Illuminati and so on, didn’t come true, since you’re reading this and perhaps still nursing a Cinco de Mayo hangover. Like all the y2k fears and paranoia that were rampant around that time, Ice is an embarrassing sort of artifact–one that got embarrassing fairly quickly, as this piece from James Randi shows. But it also calls back to a more innocent time when fears of a global ice age were getting a little more press than the slightly more worrisome global warming thing.

“A team of scientists is on its way to the site to collect samples and verify whether it was indeed a meteorite.

Geologists have called on the authorities to stop people going near the crash site.

A local journalist, Martine Hanlon, told the BBC experts did not believe the meteor would make anybody sick, but they did think a chemical reaction caused by its contact with the ground could release toxins such as sulphur and arsenic.

An engineer from the Peruvian Nuclear Energy Institute told AFP news agency that no radiation had been detected from the crater. He ruled out any possibility that the fallen object might be a satellite.”

No possibility it might be a satellite? Not even, say, an American satellite? Hmm? That’s just what they want you to think! Pravda tells a different story, one for which you need to don your tinfoil hat:

“Western media reports are stating that the US spy satellite debris hitting Peru was caused by a meteor, but which, according to these reports, would be ‘impossible’ as the size of 30-meter crater, if caused by a meteorite, would have hit the ground with about as much energy as 1 kiloton tactical nuclear weapon, and which would have been recorded by the seismic stations around the World.

Most astonishing about these reports, however, are that they state that it was the Americans themselves who destroyed their own spy satellite with the attack upon it being made by the United States Air Forces’ 30th Space Wing located at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. This incident further fuels the intrigue involving the United States War Leaders plans to attack Iran in their attempt to engulf the entire Middle East in Total War, but, against which, according to Russian Military Intelligence Analysts, a ‘high ranking and significant’ faction of the American Military Establishment is opposed to.”

Mystery gases, or War Leaders bent on fomenting Total War? I prefer to think that this story has the real answer. (Thanks to Richard for the Pravda link!)