The Weekly World News remained the supermarket UFOlogist's journal of record this week, weighing in with not just one but two articles about Earth's strange and sometimes precarious relationship with other planets.

First, WWN stalwart Mike Foster springboards off the buzz surrounding the discovery of fossilized microbes in Antarctic ice to the mystery of the pyramids in his article, "Meteors from Mars Brought Human Life to Earth!"

Working from an argument published by veteran UFO researchers Robert Bauval and Graham Hancock in their upcoming Keepers of Genesis, Foster jumps from the possibly Martian origin of some of those Antarctic life forms to the possibility that life-bearing meteorites kept landing as late as 12,500 B.C., when they "helped to spawn Egyptian civilization."

If so, then space rocks built the pyramids - or at least served as inspiration. Like the Egyptian pyramids, many meteorites acquire a tetrahedral shape when they make impact, the WWN writer cited Bauval and Hancock as saying.

Moreover, the early Egyptians kept at least one such "pyramidal stone," the benben, in the Temple of the Phoenix at Heliopolis, to which "it came down from heaven." Was the benben from space? According to the News, we could know in as little as a few months, when a research team opens the secret door hidden in the Great Pyramid.

Meanwhile, an unidentified astronomer warned the News that the "ominous" alignment of several planets on May 3, 2000, could herald the end of life on Earth. According to WWN Atlanta Bureau Chief Michael Forsyth, the alignment of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun could produce serious gravitic stresses on the Earth, a phenomenon he said has been "long predicted" by experts.

The astronomer gave a more detailed account of what the planetary line-up could do, calling the event "a cataclysm of Biblical proportions … destruction on a scale so enormous that the human mind is incapable of conceiving of it."

The article, "The Earth Will Be Destroyed!" is contained in the August 17, 1999, issue of the Weekly World News.

Elsewhere in the tabloid universe, the Sun ran a profile of British policeman/astrologer Gordon Chisholm, who has devised a system predicting your chances of getting your car stolen according to your horoscope. According to Chisholm, Gemini drivers are most at risk for auto theft because they are "absent-minded enough to leave keys in the ignition," while Sagittarians' love of security devices ensures they fare best.

Finally, the National Enquirer noted that "Astrology Is for Real, Says Top Scientist." British astrological apologist Percy Seymour, who has written several books on the subject, told the Enquirer that the gravity of other planets creates electrical impulses in the human brain that influence our lives.