On the evening of Friday, November 13, 2026, authorities in Peoria, Illinois, rendered safe a bomb discovered earlier that day at the BioUrja Renewables ethanol plant. The device was neutralized at approximately 9:12 p.m. local time after a one-mile blast radius had been established and thousands of people evacuated. The incident, widely reported as a credible threat and possible attempted industrial sabotage at a facility producing highly combustible fuel ethanol, produced no explosion and no injuries.
For students of mundane astrology, the chart cast for the precise moment the bomb was declared safe is startlingly on-point.
The Chart Highlights
Saturn sits near the Midheaven in early Aries and forms a square to the Hades–Kronos conjunction in mid-Cancer. In Uranian astrology, Hades–Kronos combinations frequently describe attempts to undermine authorities, laws, or high office—exactly the flavor of an attack (or threatened attack) on critical infrastructure. The pairing lies close to the fixed star Sirius, long associated by Diana Rosenberg with themes of violence.
Saturn itself occupies a degree zone Rosenberg linked to deliberate cruelty, mass deaths, or mass disasters—yet Saturn also rules those in positions of responsibility who can prevent catastrophe. The Midheaven at roughly 12° Aries carries Rosenberg’s note of “danger of fire” and is conjunct the star Alderamin (alpha Cepheus). Rosenberg’s commentary on that star emphasizes the King finding a way to triumph over limitations and chains—fitting language for authorities successfully neutralizing a threat.
And then there is the Sabian Symbol for the Midheaven degree itself (Aries 13° / 12°40′):
“An unexploded bomb reveals an unsuccessful social protest.”
The match is almost embarrassingly literal.
Elsie Wheeler and the Sabian Symbols
Most readers outside specialized astrology circles have never heard of Elsie May Wheeler, yet her contribution remains one of the most remarkable and enduring gifts to the field.
In 1925, in Balboa Park, San Diego, the gifted clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler collaborated with the pioneering American astrologer Marc Edmund Jones. Jones prepared 360 blank index cards, each secretly marked with one degree of the zodiac. Over the course of a single extraordinary day, Wheeler—unaware of which degree any given card represented—clairvoyantly described a vivid symbolic image for each one while Jones rapidly recorded her words. The result was the complete set of Sabian Symbols: a unique, evocative picture for every degree of the zodiac.
Wheeler was a medium of unusual clarity. Despite physical limitations that restricted her worldly experience, she produced images of remarkable consistency, modernity, and psychological depth. Jones later refined the wording slightly for clarity, and Dane Rudhyar popularized the symbols further with his own poetic interpretations, but the core imagery remains Wheeler’s.
For nearly a century, practicing astrologers have found these symbols astonishingly accurate when applied to natal charts, event charts, and progressive degrees. They supply a level of nuance that signs and planets alone cannot provide—revealing the qualitative “flavor” of a specific degree. Many professionals consider them indispensable. When a symbol such as “An unexploded bomb reveals an unsuccessful social protest” appears exactly on the Midheaven of a chart drawn for the moment a bomb is rendered safe, the coincidence stretches credibility to the breaking point.
Coincidence?
What are the odds? There are 360 degrees in the zodiac. The probability that a randomly selected event chart’s Midheaven would land on the single degree whose Sabian Symbol literally describes an unexploded bomb is already low. That the surrounding planetary picture (Saturn/MC square Hades/Kronos near Sirius, danger-of-fire notes, protective Saturnian authority, Alderamin’s theme of triumph over constraint) should also align so tightly makes pure chance even less plausible.
Astrology does not claim mechanistic causation in the modern scientific sense; it describes meaningful correspondence. Moments of high public drama often crystallize the symbolic language of the sky with particular clarity. This Peoria chart is one of those moments.
Hats off once again to Elsie Wheeler. Nearly a hundred years after that remarkable day in Balboa Park, her images continue to speak with uncanny precision.
The bomb did not explode. The protest—if that is what it was—failed. And the stars, it seems, had already written the caption.
https://www.jamesburgess.com/an-unsuccessful-bomb-explosion.html
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