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, where he made increasingly incredible claims as the U.S. faced nationwide tumult.
