The Forecast That Couldn’t Lose, Even When It Did

A few weeks ago I was listening to an astrologer online telling people not to go to large, public gatherings on the Fourth of July weekend because he was predicting a terrorist attack. And he was far from the only astrologer saying it.

I want to walk through what happened here, because I am an astrologer, and this is the kind of thing that makes my job harder.

The astrology was real.

Let me give the transit its due first. On July 3rd or 4th, depending on your time zone, Mars met Uranus at 3°52’ of Gemini. That is a genuinely notable conjunction. Mars is heat, action, and aggression. Uranus is sudden and disruptive, the thing nobody saw coming. Put them together and you often get volatility, reckless impulsivity, and sudden outbursts.

Astrologers were especially intrigued because that conjunction landed on America’s 250th birthday, and the United States has its own Mars and Uranus together in Gemini in its founding chart.

I am not going to tell you the transit meant nothing. It mattered, and any serious astrologer would have been watching it closely.

The setup was legitimate. What happened on YouTube was where things went wrong.

What actually got predicted.

Here is a sample of what some astrologers had forecasted for that specific weekend. A major terrorist attack in the US, an earthquake in the western United States, civil war risk in the US, and nuclear escalation between Israel and Iran. One person made six separate predictions for the US that weekend, including a major fire and a shooting.

It is July. It is a heat wave. A fire somewhere in the US is close to a given. It is a national holiday weekend. A shooting somewhere in the country was unfortunately close to a given too. Six different outcomes for an entire country. When half of them are extremely likely given the season, location, or date, it is not astrological prowess, it’s a spray gun prediction.

The terrorist attack prediction had help from current events.

This was the most serious claim on the list, and it also needed the least astrology to arrive at.

That weekend the US was hosting a wave of international visitors for the FIFA World Cup, layered on top of the usual Fourth of July crowds. Events like that draw exactly the kind of attention security agencies worry about. Add the symbolic weight of the country’s 250th birthday, a date that would mean something to anyone looking to make a statement by hitting it, and add that the US had been on heightened alert for months over the ongoing conflict with Iran. Anyone following the news that week could have flagged an elevated risk window without opening an ephemeris.

The shooting prediction was a calendar entry.

The Fourth of July is consistently one of the deadliest weekends of the year for gun violence in America. Forecasting “a shooting” in America over that specific weekend just restates known stats. It is the astrological equivalent of predicting rain in a rainforest and calling yourself a meteorologist.

The earthquake prediction did not happen when claimed.

An earthquake in the western US was on the list, and California did have one, a 5.6, on June 24th. That is ten days before the actual weekend the prediction was for.

California alone has thousands of earthquakes a year, most too small to feel. Naming an earthquake in the western United States, give or take a couple weeks, is close to a bet you can’t lose.

A fire in July when there were already serious blazes being fought in June. A shooting over a national holiday weekend. An earthquake somewhere in a region that has thousands of them annually. Three of the predictions on that list were built to win before the weekend even started.

The sign-off did the real work.

After telling people to avoid crowds on a national holiday because of a probable terror event, the astrologer closed with a hope that he was wrong.

This is just ass covering. If something bad happens, he called it, he warned everyone. If nothing happens, he said he hoped he was wrong, and he was, so he still comes out looking humble.

There is no version of that weekend where the forecast fails, because it was built with enough surface area to survive no matter what.

This was not one person.

Multiple astrologers ran close to the same play before that weekend. Doom framing, warnings to avoid crowds, saying a disaster was highly likely to occur in the US. I understand the incentive. Fear performs. It gets shared. Calm and specific does not usually go viral.

But we are already living through a chaotic time, and everyone already knows. You do not need an astrology chart to arrive at that conclusion.

So when an astrologer says something violent will materialize that weekend in America, most people just nod and roll their eyes, because that already sounds true without any astrology attached. And when the claims get more specific and they miss, like a major terrorist attack that did not happen, it costs more than that one person’s credibility. It makes the whole field look like guesswork to anyone watching from outside it.

What an ethical astrologer would have said.

A responsible read of Mars conjunct Uranus in Gemini describes conditions, not headlines. It points to volatility, things heating up and boiling over fast, and in Gemini specifically that tends to land around information, communication, technology, and transport. Shocking news. Systems glitching. Announcements nobody saw coming. Sudden reversals. Travel disruptions. Plans changing overnight.

A seasoned mundane astrologer, which I am not since I specialize in individual readings, can probably do even better than that while still remaining well within responsible boundaries and avoiding clickbait. Regardless, notice what the description above does not do. It does not tell anyone to stay home from a national holiday because of a probable attack. That restraint is what an honest, professional read actually looks like, even when it garners less views on YouTube.

Why this matters if you run a business.

This is the exact same strategy used on entrepreneurs constantly. Think about how much of what you consume online runs on fear. The market is about to collapse. Buy this, join this, launch by Friday…or you are never going to succeed. Name a threat, make it vivid, make it urgent, then position yourself as the genius. It is the identical structure, just wearing a different costume.

Now to bring this into my wheelhouse, your astrological birth chart is not a threat assessment. Your transits are not a sentence handed down to you. Astrology at its best hands you information you can act on, something that makes you clearer and more decisive, not smaller and more scared. If a reading of your chart leaves you frozen instead of oriented, something has gone wrong. Fear stalls momentum, and in business, stalled momentum is expensive.

The standard worth holding.

The Mars-Uranus conjunction was real. The clickbait was frustrating.

Next time you see someone online claiming they are a professional astrologer, ask better questions. Does this describe conditions, or does it hand down an unavoidable, awful verdict? Could this claim actually be proven wrong? How many predictions did this person make, and how many of them were highly likely at the time regardless of the planetary positions? Does this leave you with something worthwhile and productive you can actually do?

That is the standard I hold myself to. I do not always get it perfectly right, but I am a consistent proponent of practical astrology with ethical guardrails. It’s just too f-ing easy in the current state of the world to succumb to fear mongering, and it will lead to more people mocking astrologers instead of respecting the profession.

You will never hear me tell you to fear the sky. That is not what this work is for.

First published in Work With the Sky, my newsletter for entrepreneurs.