Everywhere the Thunderbird: Was the Star of Bethlehem Based on an Actual Event?

The Makah Nation, in Neah Bay, Washington, have a legend of Thunderbird and Giant Whale. The legend details what a people observed when a great earthquake and tsunami hit the Northwest coast in 1700. Japanese written records pinpoint the event on a January night.

For centuries, using their only available scientific instrument -- the naked eye -- people all over the world have believed the sun moved around the earth. With more sophisticated technologies of measuring or observation, starting with mathematics and moving on to space-based telescopes, people moved away from mythology and toward real understanding of the nuts and bolts of their material universe.

Reverend Frank Williams, who with his wife Barbara recently moved to Eagle Point, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, near Sekiu on the outer western edge of Washington State's Olympic Peninsula, has used scientific records and mathematical computation to trace a connection between the legend of a great star and an actual astronomical event.

Williams, a retired Presbyterian minister, has compiled a detailed data file about the nature of what is called the Star of Bethlehem.

Williams, who finished seminary in 1964, has studied astronomy as a hobby all his life. He admits he is an interested amateur, in the best sense of the word. He became intrigued by the legendary star "about 14 or 15 years ago," after reading a one-page article written by a college student, published in a South Carolina science journal.

According to Williams, his research argues that the "star" was a series of unusually bright conjunctions of several planets, including Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, occurring on and off over the course of several weeks in August, repeating in years between 7 and 3 BC, as the planes of the planets' orbits lined them up in a view from Earth.

Williams says that he has met many people skeptical about his measurements. The secretary and editor of the Amarillo Astronomy Club, Jenny Zimmerman, who is an engineer, almost didn't attend a former seminar. But engineers will always listen to the math.

"She said she found it really overwhelming," said Williams. "She said I really started her thinking."

Williams has extrapolated the ancient conjunction based on mathematical computations of planetary orbits. Part of the conjunction comes once every 805 years. This would have made it a predictable event if viewers were depending upon long-term records of Sumerian or Egyptian astronomical observations. It is probable that such records were available to the three astronomers known as magi or wise men.

Other sequences in the event occur on an average of six times in a thousand years, quite frequently in relationship to planetary time, but rare in the much shorter time-lines of human prehistory or written history. Their appearance would have been viewed as miraculous by people who had never seen or even heard of them before.

Celestial events have frequently been associated with the birth of kings or cultural heroes. Any predicted persons found in the right place during these events could be accorded miraculous or sacred status, especially in societies that believe in the reincarnation of a culture hero, or the siring of children upon human women by supernatural beings - stories that may have originated with the first, forgotten appearance of the phenomenon.

Mythologies that support miraculous events may not just be symbolism. They may be an important hint at real scientific events, re-interpreted through more antique technologies. All over the planet, Thunderbird may be an earthquake.

A Chinese record of a star, appearing two years before the reported Bethlehem incident, that shone in the sky for 70 days, is not reflected by a Korean record, perhaps due to differing cloud patterns over the two land masses. Williams pointed out that observers in the middle east, with its clear dry skies, would have had a better chance of studying the entire progression of the Star.