The year was 1919, and countries were grappling with their losses after four years of war. A pandemic had been raging since the preceding spring, claiming hundreds of thousands of lives with no end in sight. And in spring of that year, a damning column made the rounds in newspapers from Arizona to Wisconsin, placing blame for the lives it claimed on the planet Jupiter.
Yep, you read that right — Jupiter was the cause of millions of flu-related deaths, according to Albert F. Porta, a nationally-syndicated columnist with a slew of credentials to his name. In this particular article, he was identified as a “noted sunspot scientist.” In others, he was named a meteorologist or an astronomer.
But he was neither of those; Porta was an architect and engineer by trade. However, he is best known for his columns that boasted of his supposed expertise on meteorology and astronomy, ...
