Gauquelin's program is documented in L'influence des astres (1955) and decades of follow-up: birth records of thousands of eminent professionals, planetary positions computed, the Mars effect appearing in champions, and weaker analogues claimed for Saturn in scientists and the Moon in writers, in the rise and culmination sectors only. Gauquelin called it neo-astrology and planetary heredity, explicitly rejecting zodiac signs, houses, and newspaper astrology as baseless.
The documented controversy: the Belgian skeptics' committee and the French CFEPP tested the effect and fought over it; CSICOP ran the Zelen test in 1976 and a 1979 champions study. In 1981 CSICOP fellow Dennis Rawlins published sTARBABY in Fate magazine, alleging the skeptics' analyses were bungled or worse; Paul Kurtz's camp answered with its own accounting. The effect's status after seventy years: neither replicated cleanly by hostile labs nor shown to be artifact, a statistical stalemate with casualties.
The observation both sides concede: even if real, the Mars effect is statistically small, applies only to eminent champions, and has never been turned into a usable prediction or a mechanism. Gauquelin himself noted the effect weakens with cesarean and induced births, a detail skeptics and proponents each weaponize. An anomaly too weak to use and too stubborn to bury: the archive's favorite kind.
When the debunker's own data keeps producing the anomaly, who owns the result?