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One last thing...

"The planet Mars makes great athletes"

What has Mars got to do with sports performance?
Suitbert Ertel: “The birth charts of sports champions are unusually likely to show Mars either just above the horizon or close to its highest point in the sky. This is what is now known as the Mars effect.”

Names, please!
“Boxing champion Muhammad Ali, Belgian cycle-racing champion Eddy Merckx, German track champion Martin Lauer, French tennis legend Suzanne Lenglen and many more.”

There must be even more champions who do not benefit from the Mars effect.
“True. But several studies have shown a very clear statistically significant positive correlation between the position of Mars and sports success, which means that you can find more sports champions—also military leaders, scientists and medical doctors—born with Mars rising or culminating than you would expect to find by chance.”

But why?
“I tried to find an explanation. Michel Gauquelin, who discovered the phenomenon, suggested there was a correlation with character traits because in astrology, Mars is associated with strength, power, success and achievement. So he hypothesized that for certain children, those genetically endowed with strong motivation and such traits, Mars energy might trigger fetal hormonal processes and begin the mother’s labour. He called it the ‘midwife hypothesis.’ Others have suggested a connection to solar activity. I have been unable to prove anything. But the effect is real.”

Suitbert Ertel is a professor at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Göttingen, Germany. He devoted a substantial part of his academic career to the Mars effect, and is the co-author (with Kenneth Irving) of The Tenacious Mars Effect (The Urania Trust, ISBN 1871989159). His fields of interest also include paranormal sciences.