People are looking for something spectacular to mark the New Millenium which actually starts on January 1, 2001. Very few fortune tellers like to tell you good news, therefore, they search for some innocuous natural phenomenon and try to make it into something malevolent. I have no idea where this idea came from. As I have said many times before about this subject, planetary conjunctions are a lot more common than the non-astronomer imagines. The one near May 5, 2000 will involve all the bright planets together in the same part of the sky, and will be very lovely, like pearls on a string, but these things happen, and history records no geologic episodes of any interest that are related to them. As for psychological effects, people can talk themselves into just about any state, and I am certain many people will step forward with unusual stories on that date. With 5 billion people on this planet, on any given day, lots of rare things happen based on statistics alone!