The Photon Belt
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[edit] Definition
The Photon Belt is a belief largely linked to some parts of the New Age movement that our Solar system will soon pass through a massive ring of some sort of cosmic radiation called the Photon Belt, or Photon Band.
[edit] Origin
The first appearance of the Photon Belt seems to have been in an Australian UFO magazine in 1981. It gained in popularity after it was reprinted in the Australian Nexus magazine in February 1991 [1].
[edit] Discussion
There are a number of related beliefs involving the belt but they do have a few common elements:
- the Photon Belt orbits around Alcyone, which is the brightest star in the Pleiades cluster;
- our Solar System orbits around this star, but at right angles to the Belt;
- when the Earth enters the Photon Belt, all sorts of catastrophes will occur - earthquakes, volcanic *activity, droughts, floods, mass failure of all electrical instruments etc.;
- this period of disaster and chaos will be a "spiritual cleansing" for the planet and humanity and possibly the start of a new Golden Age;
- the Earth enters the Photon Belt once every 10,000 - 11,000 years.
None of the proponents of this idea are clear about sort of radiation this Belt consists of (they speak of "a magnetic flow of light", "high-frequency invisible light", "high frequency energy", "photon particles" and so on). Nor are they terribly clear about the mechanics of how this radiation will affect the Earth - according to which article you read, it will increase solar flares, or heat up the Sun, or cool the Sun down, or somehow 'compress' the atmosphere. Likewise, none of them seem to agree on just when the Solar System will enter the Belt (published dates vary between 1962 and 2012), or how long the earth will stay within the influence of this powerful energy (anywhere between 30 years and 300 years, apparently).
Of course, the verifiable fact that the Solar System is not orbiting around any of the Pleiades stars, that no astronomer has detected any sign of the Photon Belt, and that no amount of "cosmic energy" can do any of the things to the earth that they predict, does not matter at all to any of these people.
