Henrietta Hay's Column

Don't walk under a ladder. Don't let a black cat walk in front of you. Never step on a crack in the sidewalk. Beware of comets. And watch out for extra-terrestrial creatures. They're everywhere waiting to jump out at you.

I don't believe in that stuff. Practical souls, like me, who have to see it to believe it, tend to walk under a ladder deliberately and look up to see who is standing on it. Although superstition is as old as humankind one would think that in this scientific age it would be disappearing. Actually it seems to be getting stronger. And the World Wide Web furnishes a huge, wonderful vehicle for the superstitious.

Webster defines superstition as "a belief or attitude based on fear or ignorance, that is inconsistent with the known laws of science or with what is generally considered in the particular society as true and rational . . . or any action or practice based on such a belief or attitude."

Some superstitions are merely practical, like the ladder one. After all, painters have been known to drop open cans of red paint from the top rung. But the sources of others are buried way back in primitive mythology and before. One version of the 13 taboos that I like goes back to the days when humans first learned to count. Using their ten fingers and their two feet, which they regarded as units (I guess they hadn't discovered their toes yet), they arrived at the number 12. Beyond that lay the unknown - the mysterious - the frightening.

To the primitive person, what could be more frightening than a comet - that mysterious light in the sky with a long tail floating out behind? The ancient Chinese thought comets were celestial brooms, which the gods used to sweep the heavens free of evil. Hannibal, who so successfully crossed the Alps, committed suicide after hearing that a comet was a harbinger of his death. The famous Bayeux tapestry shows the 1066 fly-by of Halley's comet, which was believed by many to be related to the Norman conquest of England.

And now in 1997 we have the 39 Americans who shed their "containers" and moved on to a space ship waiting behind the Hale-Bopp comet to take them to a higher level of evolution. It shocked and saddened us, but it was their choice. Call it religion or superstition - or whatever. The fact remains that reality and science were not a part of the Heaven's Gate cult.

Astronomers tell us that Hale-Bopp is a huge, dirty snowball, a huge ball of ice some 25 miles in diameter with a tail of gas and debris millions of miles long. It travels around the sun every 2,000 to 3.000 years, and its closest approach to earth is about 120 million miles. It is beautiful to see. It seems magical and I can imagine making up stories about it, but it is real. I have not seen the space ship.

One of my bad habits is listening to fragments of the Art Bell talk show in the after- midnight hours. He specializes in the weird and superstitious, and I find that it is more entertaining than politics. He was the one who first started talking about the object, possibly a space ship, behind Hale-Bopp. He and his listeners called it the Hale-Mary.

In the clear light of day, the idea that anyone could believe in a space ship big enough to be seen with the naked eye from 126 million miles away is beyond belief -- mine, anyway.

I am a fan of Star Trek and I feel quite comfortable wandering around the starship Enterprise or chatting with Captain Janeway of the Voyager. But it is make believe. It is a story. It is pretend. As my friend the philosopher tells me, it is called the willing suspension of disbelief.

A space ship hiding behind Hale-Bopp? For my dose of fantasy I'll stick with Captain Janeway. I'll take modern science for reality, television for entertainment, and enjoy that wonderful spectacle in the northern sky for what it really is.

I'll probably defy superstition by walking under ladders from time to time, but just to be on the safe side, maybe I'll keep my eyes peeled for those pesky little extra-terrestrials.