THE NEW NINTH PLANET

I truly believe it. I believe that they will find it, the new Ninth Planet. No doubt. They've decided that it's there. That's all it takes. Once they decide that it's there, it's there.

We are all just a little bit crazy. Yes, we are. The most buttoned-down, logic-loving realists among us secretly believe that Paul is dead or Elvis is alive or that the moon landings were faked or that Reese's Peanut Butter Cups are not a gift directly from God, proof that She loves us. I admit to a belief that many...that most...that everybody might find highly unlikely, but I'm sticking to it.

I believe that until enough people with the proper scientific backgrounds were convinced that the possibility of the Ninth Planet existed, the Ninth Planet did not exist. Even today, there is only indirect evidence that the Ninth Planet exists. But the media has picked up the story. An ever growing number of astrophysicists are on board. The scales have tipped. In my lifetime - and it had better be soon because I'm 67 years old - a planet several times larger than Earth will be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto.

As evidence of my theory that belief leads to reality in a cosmic sense, I offer the Kuiper Belt. The existence of that amorphous mass of frozen snowballs in the neighborhood of the orbit of Pluto was first posited 80 years or so ago. People trained telescopes out that way on and off for decades. Then, in the late 1980s, Jewitt and Luu made it their mission to nail down the elusive suckers. After years...YEARS...of looking for them precisely where they happened to be, they found one Kuiper body. Then, six months later...SIX MONTHS...they found the second one.

Now, of course, we've spotted thousands of the things. Things that weren't found by accident. Things that weren't found for years after we began looking for them. Things that we couldn't see when we were looking right at them. Nonetheless, thousands.

Ninth Planet? It's a lock.