For the last several weeks I’ve been getting messages from scared people nearly every day. They are worried that the world is going to end on 23rd September. We have had numerous such dates, about a dozen a year at present. The chap who has been promoting that date all summer has now changed it to October in an interview with a US conspiracy radio chat show. These people are trying to drag you back to a pre-scientific dark age where you go to prophets to learn about the future, and the prophets look into the stars for omens. Nowadays they write books or publish videos or go on radio chat shows and learn lots of money from those books and get them promoted in sensationalist papers. Don’t let them do this. Relate to your own common sense. He is a fake prophet.
This is a "graffitied" screen shot of the count down timer to the end of the world here. It is easy to make a count down timer - it's just code running on a web page and proves nothing.
It’s no wonder that people are getting scared. The Daily Express and other sensationalist “red top” tabloids in the UK are promoting his book very heavily. This is what the google news search for David Meade looks like right now.
(this combines together material from my last few posts in Debunking Doomsday with some new material)
The Daily Express particularly has been promoting David Meade’s book heavily. Here are some of their recent stories in google news (I searched for David Meade).
If you are a scientist or astronomer doubtless you just LOL at those headlines. But try to think what they seem like to young children or vulnerable adults.
The people who get scared do include many young children, I get youngsters still at school and at home with their parents contacting me, as young as 14, saying they are scared, can’t sleep, sometimes suicidal. They are scared that they won’t be able to live to become an adult.
I hear of other scared children as young as 12 or younger from their parents. The other main group of people who get really scared by all this are young parents with children who don’t have scientific knowledge - they are scared the world will end before their children can grow up. They can’t sleep, no longer able to be happy as they were before. Some again become suicidal. They may be on medication from doctors to help with their fear, depression and anxiety about the end of the world.
These are not the only one - see the first comment to this article for instance. Sometimes they are university educated people (but obviously not in astronomy), computer scientists, and the like. Having many years of education or a degree doesn't make you immune to it. The main common theme is that astronomy particularly won't be their strong suit.
It is all caused by these stories. They often report to me and on the Doomsday debunked (facebook) group that when they stop reading the doomsday news and watching hours of doomsday videos a week, that they immediately begin to cheer up and return to their normal self. So it’s not a phobia. It’s not a medical condition. It’s indoctrination, a kind of propaganda making people scared. The ones who get really scared and who have maybe watched hours of videos and read dozens of stories before they found anyone debunking are the worst affected. They may continue to get wobbly moments over a year later, even knowing it is nonsense, when they just feel scared and don’t know what to do about it. It’s just habit, they get over it eventually but it can take a very long time.
I’m no psychiatrist but it is obvious this is not a medical or psychiatric condition but just completely the result of all this media onslaught for those who are vulnerable and start to search for these stories and videos.
Journalists - please stop this nonsense!
I know that many people like to read sensationalist and even fake news and you are writing for them. But this goes over the bounds of sensationalism I think, when it scares vulnerable people and makes them suicidal. I think that's the point where sensationalism is going too far. Not trying to stop the fun of writing sensationalist articles about flat Earth or alien births etc for those who write about such things and those who enjoy reading such stories.
Here is my petition to journalists.
Do sign and share to help spread awareness of it - and add your comments. Do also have a look at the other comments there to see the scale of the problem.
For debunking, see
If you are scared by all this nonsense do join one of those facebook groups for support, or message me.
The other main factor here are the YouTube videos. There are numerous Nibiru channels that upload videos on Nibiru. One of the top ones is Nibiru Planet X News which has 1,114 uploads right now, has videos just uploaded all the time.
According to Socialblade, they may be earning anything between $250 and $3,100 a month in ad revenue. It may well be more as most videos have a donate link in the video description and a patreon link.
The uploader is borderline criminal with reports from friends that he sends them death threats for writing comments to debunk his videos. I think it is borderline criminal anyway to profit from fear like this. It’s not unlike the people who phone up an old lady and persuade her to transfer all her savings into their bank account.
If you search for Nibiru then there are many channels there Search Results
That’s why I started a second petition,
As for this 23rd of September “prophesy”, it’s a rag bag of all the nonsense out there. David Meade seems to be a very gullible person who just writes down anything anyone tells him or that he reads on a conspiracy blog without checking anything. Things that you can disprove with just one minute of a google search. As for the dates, he just makes up dates from the top of his head. He is now saying October.
Here are some of the top fake Nibiru myths. They are all completely false, not a shred of truth in them:
- Debunked: The Vatican built a huge telescope, one of the largest in the world, to track Nibiru
- Debunked: The IRAS infrared satellite found Nibiru in 1983
- Debunked: Nibiru has been found on Google Sky
Debunked: This is a “Winged planet” and is Nibiru - and “missing section” in Google Sky
- Debunked: Astronomers get murdered by the secret agencies if they “speak out” about Nibiru - as proof they cite an astronomer who died of throat cancer six months after his planet X theory was disproved in the 1980s
- Debunked - California could fall into the sea or the Earth split open through earthquakes or continental drift
Anyway let’s do a bit of debunking for anyone who has fallen for this myth:
NASA HAS NOT CONFIRMED PLANET X - AND ANY PLANET OUT THERE IS NO THREAT TO EARTH
First NASA has not confirmed a planet X. There are several hypotheses for possibilities for extra planets way way beyond Neptune. Astronomers are searching to try to find these planets but haven’t found any of them yet. This is something that has gone on ever since the discovery of Pluto - searches for new planets. So far many have been disproved and no large planets have been found. Some of the astronomers are pretty sure that there are large planets out there, Mars, or Earth sized, even larger, but they must be very far away to not be spotted yet.
They have found many smaller planets - including one, Eris, that is almost identical in size to Pluto, though Pluto is slightly larger. There are dozens of known planets in our solar system now. At least, there are dozens of them, if you use the “geophysical definition” of a planet as anything large enough to be rounded under gravity. None of them are the slightest risk to Earth. They are distant faint objects in our sky that you need a big telescope to see.
From these small planets, the sun is so far away it looks like a bright star. This is an artist’s impression of what our sun would look like from Sedna, the most distant of these objects found yet.
Our sun is that bright star, just bright enough to cast shadows, to lower left the pinkish bright star is Antares and to lower right just below it, the other bright star there is Spica. Our sun would be by far the brightest star in the sky, but it would look more like a star than a sun.
Here is the same artist’s impression with labels so you can see where Earth is.
They are talking about a planet that might exist, much further away even than Sedna. One that would orbit permanently in this “twilight zone” far far form our sun, where our sun is never more than a distant bright star.
Do you think there is any chance that such a planet, if it even exists, is going to buzz past Earth or hit Earth on 23rd September of this year?
Of course not. It is nonsense, BS, promoted by people who don’t have the slightest understanding of modern astronomy. They are living in a pre-scientific dark age and trying to convince the rest of us that they are correct to do so. Basing all this on passages from the Bible and on “signs” in the heavens. They say that because of an alignment of planets with the sun that a magical mythical planet called Nibiru is suddenly going to appear from nowhere, never spotted by astronomers before, and hit Earth or fly past Earth.
In “evidence” of this they produce lens flares and offset double reflections (for instance in photographs taken through a windscreen, or a transparent lens cover) and claim that people with cheap mobile phone cameras are able to photograph a “planet” as big as the Moon in the sky that somehow none of the rest of us ever see, and that astronomers have never noticed - or if they have - they claim a worldwide global conspiracy amongst the tens of thousands of professional astronomers and hundreds of thousands of amateurs to keep this from us. They claim that this is funded by NASA who they also often say murders astronomers who reveal the truth.
While of course they are able to tell us the truth with impunity. And of course they are completely unbiased and the thousands of dollars of ad revenue they get per month on their YouTube channels are just to support them in their philanthropic exercise to tell the rest of the world about what is going on.
And they claim that astronomers wouldn’t tell the public because they don’t want to scare them - but that red top tabloids of course do, as well as their YouTube videos scaring people so much that many of them even become suicidal.
Do you see a few problems with this story?
The whole thing is daft, BS,
Brian Cox who colourfully called Nibiru "the imaginary bullshit planet"
Here is Brian Cox's tweet about Nibiru.
If anyone else asks me about "Nibiru" the imaginary bullshit planet I will slap them around their irrational heads with Newton's Principia" - tweet by Brian Cox
WHY IS IT NONSENSE?
It is not true, it's not even bad fiction it doesn't even make sense. As Brian Cox called it, "this Imaginary Bullshit Planet". It is complete and utter codswollop, BS, nuts.
To an astronomer it is like a square circle. Or like someone saying authoritatively and confidently in a deep voice with swelling impressive music that Usain Bolt won Wimbledon in 2008, or something else as absurd like that. It makes you want to LOL or giggle, it's so daft, especially people saying such daft things with such solemn authoritative voices. It's hard to convey how absurd it all is to anyone with basic astronomical background.
The things that make no sense at all include:
- That it would cross the orbits of all the gas giants. That is simply not a possible orbit for a planet. Sooner or later it would hit one of them, or be deflected by one of them or hit the Sun because they aren't in resonance with each other. It could last there less than a million years and our solar system is 4.5 billion years old. It would be long gone soon after formation of the Moon. That's as bonkers as the square circle or Usain Bolt winning Wimbledon.
- Hiding behind the sun. BS. Crazy idea. Asteroids can do that for a while, tiny asteroids in orbits similar to Earth. An asteroid in a "horseshoe orbit" for instance can gradually drift relative to us and can drift behind the sun and stay there for a while and be hard to spot until it drifts out again. Not a planet and it would need to be a one year orbit to stay behind the sun for any length of time, not a 3600 year orbit.
- Two suns. I find it hard to understand how anyone can take this seriously even without astronomical background. Or 2 moons. You can just see that we have only one moon. Sun casts only one shadow. Block the sun out with a finger and there isn't another sun there.
- Axis tilt. This is just bonkers and BS again. The pole star is still the pole star. Any starry night you can see with your own eyes that the Earth's axis hasn't shifted. GPS wouldn't work if it shifted just slightly.
- Countless other daft ideas. E.g. the idea that a brown dwarf is invisible because it is warm. Since when did warming something up make it invisible? They can't help but put their foot in their mouth with just about every second sentence
HOW DID IT GET STARTED?
It’s a modern internet myth, not an astronomical object. The problem is one of education rather than planet collisions. The name comes from Sumerian where it refers to any bright star seen at times of equinox, sometimes Jupiter, sometimes Venus, sometimes a bright distant star. Zecheria Sitchin tried to read the Sumerian tablets before they had been translated properly and claimed to find an elaborate story there about extra terrestrials from Nibiru that came to Earth to genetically engineer humans from apes and then put us to work as slaves in gold mines in South Africa. He said that Nibiru would return again in the late 21st Century. He wrote many books which were quite popular.
Then Nancy Lieder hijacked his idea claiming that she had had an organic implant put into her brain as a child by these ETs and that she was able to speak for them. She predicted that this mythical planet would return in 2003 instead of the end of the century. That was the age of the internet by then so she didn’t have to write books. She just blogged about it online. She told people to kill their pets in 2003 before the end of the world. She says she has no regrets about this although there was of course no end of world scenario in 2003, she said her prediction then was a distraction to confuse the authorities and that it would really return in 2008. Then in 2012. She continues to say it’s going to happen some time in the future.
Meanwhile others jumped on the bandwagon. The most recent is David Meade who has written a book that is in the top few books on “Eschatology” or the end of the world on Amazon kindle. It’s no wonder his book got there as there have been stories in the sensationalist red top tabloids in the UK all summer saying the world is about to end on 23rd September based on his book. He said we’d see Nibiru during the eclipse in the US on August 17th and then it will fly past Earth on September 23rd so close it will cause devastating effects.
Of course nobody saw any planet in the sky during the eclipse. But that didn’t stop people from posting dodgy photographs of the sun taken with mobile phone cameras and similar or taken through car windscreen windows showing lens flares and offset lens reflections which they claim proved that Nibiru appeared during the eclipse - and presumably disappeared when the eclipse went total as there are no photos of course of the solar Corona with “Nibiru”.
If you search Amazon books for Nibiru you’ll find hundreds of books on the topic. Search YouTube and you’ll find thousands of videos. You can buy supplies to help you survive the Nibiru cataclysm and if you are super wealthy you can rent space for yourself and your loved ones in a luxurious multimillion dollar bunker in Germany to hide in when Nibiru approaches.
It’s become an obsession for some people. The stories never stop. I get people saying “At least when 23rd September passes it will be over” - but it won’t. They will predict it again and again. I see nothing that’s going to stop people continuing to prophesy Nibiru for the foreseeable future. Probably in 2100 there will still be people saying that Nibiru is going to end the world in 2100. It seems to have developed a momentum of its own.
The thing is that as people who have been scared of this Nibiru for years finally get over it, young people or newbies come along who have never come across it before and see a story in the sensationalist news, in fake news sites, YouTube videos, etc and get scared all over again. For them it is new.
You could spend your entire life just watching Nibiru videos. Hours upon hours upon hours of people talking online saying with deep authoritative voices and stirring background music that they now know for sure that it is going to hit Earth or fly past in the very near future. You can do a search in Google for videos from the past and find people saying it with equal conviction and authority a decade ago or more.
It’s a cluster of really bizarre beliefs. Someone who believes in this myth normally also thinks
- That we have two suns. The second sun is hard to spot but if you point a cheap mobile phone camera directly into the sun at sunrise and sunset you’ll photograph it sometimes (It’s easy to check this, put your finger in front of the sun, don’t stare at the sun as that can damage your eyes and we have no pain sensors in our retina - instead - block it out with your finger and look above, below to left or right, no second sun)
- That the Earth’s poles have shifted - they mean geographical not magnetic. Again easy to check every clear night, set up a camera and photograph the pole star if you have one sensitive enough to do that or just locate it in the night sky. Wait a few hours. The pole star is the only one that hasn’t moved (describes a very tiny circle about true north). This proves that the Earth’s axis hasn’t shifted - it moves very slowly over thousands of years describing a circle in the star so the Egyptians for instance had a different pole star from us, but not noticeably in your lifetime, or for centuries.
- That there’s a big bright planet in the sky - big enough to show as an easily visible disk - which you can only see at sunrise or sunset - or perhaps you can only see it from Antarctica, or perhaps you can only see it if flying high in a jet plane above South America (that’s David Meade’s claim). It sometimes appears next to the sun, but can be spotted almost anywhere in the sky including sometimes in the east as the sun sets in the west - to see how this is nonsense just notice that when it is sunrise or sunset where you are, it’s midday somewhere else. So if there was a bright object in the sky next to the sun at sunset where you are, it’s next to it at midday somewhere else. As for the idea that it is only seen from the south pole, or South America - the celestial south pole is just like the pole star in the North - you can see it from the entire southern hemisphere every single starry night.
- That NASA somehow hides this planet from us, either by flying planes back and forth across the sky to hide them with contrails (which they claim are “chemtrails”) or by using a giant mirror in space to hide it. They often go on to say that NASA murders astronomers who speak up about Nibiru. To see how this is nonsense - NASA is not an astronomical body at all, never mind a world spanning astronomical dictatorship. There are thousands of professional astronomers and hundreds of thousands of amateurs world wide.
They are organized loosely by the IAU and everything is done in the public through thousands of electronic circulars every year alerting astronomers to interesting things to observe - and with the latest data from other astronomers worldwide, as well as papers in astronomical scientific journals.
NASA just launches telescopes to orbit, and provides funding for the search for asteroids and comets - others do the observations.
The whole thing is just total BS. And these people write endless emails to astronomers driving them to distraction.
The sad thing is that people with no astronomical education fall for this stuff. They seriously ask me “is this a photograph of a second sun?”. Would you believe it? That’s one of my most frequently asked questions - someone shares a photograph of the sun with a lens flare or an offset lens reflection and says “Is this Nibiru / a second sun?”
It’s not just a harmless rather loony idea like flat Earth. The big problem with this one is that it gets people scared. So scared they are afraid to leave their house (they feel safer from colliding planets at home for some reason).
Often they don’t want to tell anyone else including their spouse / partner / children / parents because they don’t want to scare them. So they bottle it up and get more and more scared and they spend hours a day searching for videos and stories about Nibiru, and in some sad cases they actually become suicidal. I’ve been contacted several times by people who said they were suicidal in the past because of their fear of an approaching plane or second star. And - some people have actually committed suicide over this. This happened to a young schoolgirl in Bath in 2012. David Morrison says he heard anecdotally by email of several others during his time fielding NASA’s “Ask an astrobiologist”. He said that questions about Nibiru were amongst the most frequent questions he got.
Astronomers have never heard of this unless they are contacted by scared people as here on Quora. It’s not an astronomical object. It’s a myth.
So you can’t counteract it by measuring distances to Nibiru or devise a way to deflect it, or point a telescope somewhere in the sky to try to see it. You can’t observe a mythological object.
The way to counteract it is through education. And to help people connect to their own basic common sense. If they hadn’t seen these videos first, would an ordinary person come to believe that we have two suns for instance?
I don’t think so. I think it shows the suggestive and persuasive power of videos and sensationalist news stories. They let you think that black is white somehow.
Once that happens you are in a confused realm of thinking with no way out at all, because you’ve undermined your own basic sanity and you no longer trust your own reasoning.
And praying won’t help. Wishing strongly that it isn’t real won’t help. Waiting for the date to pass by in the hope that this will be the end of it won’t help as they just come up with another date. For instance after 23rd September we already have the myth that there will be 14 days of darkness in November, which comes around every year. Then there’s the myth of flows of helium from the Sun that are supposed to hit Earth and destroy us around Christmas every year. Probably we’ll get pastor Bagley’s prediction of a gamma ray burst at Christmas too, that has signs of becoming a new perennial. And constant Nostradamus predictions, asteroid flybys that they say are going to hit us etc etc.
It just goes on and on. Believe this and you fall endlessly down the rabbit hole
The best way to deal with this if you get scared of such things - once you recognize that it is BS - is to just stop watching these videos and news stories.
If you continue to watch them, even though you know it is nonsense, some small part of you continues to think it is real. It’s a bit like being scared of high places. It’s almost like a phobia but I don’t think David Morrison is right that it’s a real phobia - he called it “cosmophobia”. But this is a generated fear or phobia. The people who contact me weren’t scared of the sun or planets or astronomy at all until they saw the videos.
So - just as it got started by watching the videos and reading the stories, I think it can be ended by stopping watching and reading them.
If a video channel or a news site mentions Nibiru - unless it is debunking it - then cross it of your list of reliable sources on astronomy or planets or anything cosmological.
Same also for a blog, anything. It’s a sure sign of nonsense like this. And try learning a bit of real astronomy. Try going out on a starry night and locating the constellations for yourself. Learn to identify the pole star (or the southern cross in the southern hemisphere).
With just a bit of experience of the night sky it will be easy to see the nonsense in this idea that our poles have shifted and that we have two suns. You also get to know the planets as tiny star like distant objects and get an idea of the vast scale of our solar system. Then the idea of a planet about to hit Earth may eventually become LOL ludicrously funny.
NOTHING NEW - STORY FROM 1970
There is nothing new about all this of course. For instance, back in 1970, ‘True Light’ Sect in Carolinas Bracing for End of the World
“Mr. Braswell estimates that about 17 of his follow ers, middle‐class residents of this North Carolina‐South Carolina border area, have given up working as farmers, bank employees, postal work ers, bricklayers and salesmen to prepare for being changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye” into “spiritual bodies,’ as the Apostle Paul foretold in his first letter to the Corinthians.
‘For the past 25 years I have firmly believed that 1970 would be my last year on earth,’ Mr. Braswell, who receives no pay from his congregation, said in an interview. ‘I have made no arrangements beyond that.’
…
‘Mr. Braswell's group, which he numbers at 450, and a rival True Light group of approximately 900 members both profess to be the only true followers of Cunningham Boyle, a South Carolina lay man who reportedly left the Methodists to found the True Light sect—sometimes called Boyleites—a century ago.’
Mr. Braswell's group gathered for a three day series of meetings last week at the Rocky River Church in northern Union County, N. C.
Calmly, and with no outward display of fear, the True Lights sang traditional Gospel hymns, prayed, took communion and accepted last minute converts for Baptism.
The congregation filed out to encounter a band of youthful believers in the Bahai Faith, who had come to convince the True Lights that Christ had already returned in 1844 in the person of Baha'u'llah, the Persian founder of Bahaism.
One of the proselytizers urged Russell McLeod, an elder, to read some Bahai tracts, but the Camden, S. C., True Light leader replied politely: “We don't have much time.”
I think the only difference is that nowadays they would be on the internet uploading YouTube videos and posting facebook comments. Then these videos and facebook comments sometimes get published as news stories in the red top tabloids.
For background to stories like this see: Debunked - The world will end because the Bible (or some other sacred book) says so
BUSINESS ECOSYSTEM
And gathering a following on the internet they get more and more confident in their own prophesies - and then you get the book writers, doomsday prep suppliers, YouTube video uploaders etc - amounts to a multi-million dollar business now probably, especially if it is true that some multi-millionaires have got caught up in it all, shelling out big bucks for doomsday bunkers.
See
This just proves that people are getting more and more inventive at finding ways to part rich people from their money. The idea there is that they rent space in a lavishly funished bunker in a Soviet surplus underground shelter site in Rothenstein, East Germany. One that the government has no use for any more with the end of the cold war.
These people latch on to any disaster and always, anything that happens in the world is a “sign of Nibiru”. For instance a hurricane is going to end the world according to them. See for instance, my Debunked - World to end on September 23 - and Hurricanes + fires + earthquake in Mexico prove it.
Please connect to your own common sense. Hurricanes are disastrous to people who live in the path of the eye of the storm, and can rip off the roof of their house. They do not end the world however.
THIS WILL NOT “ALL BE OVER” AFTER SEPTEMBER 23
As soon as that date is over, they will immediately start with another, then another. This is a sign that you have already got sucked in to a spiral that will never end. Hoping it won’t happen only makes it seem more real. Praying for it not to happen is worse. The only way out of it is to see how ridiculous the whole thing is.
Would you go to a “prophet” to find out if you are going to have rain or sunshine tomorrow? Yet suddenly you think these people have a hotline to the future when they prophesy that the world is about to end.
Here is a joke weather forecast with Godzilla :).
These stories are just as absurd as that!
To get an idea of how often these stories “break”, I started a list here: Fake doomsday and disaster news from 2015 through to 2017 but it soon became clear that it would be very long. I haven't gone back to try to complete it yet. Even for just three years I found it rather overwhelming task to try to list them all.
Since July 2016 they’ve shared these stories for:
2016: July, October (twice), November (twice), December (twice)
2017: January - March, January (twice), February (twice), June. and now Sept.
Here are some of the absurd dates that have got people scared since summer a year ago:
- October 2017 : David Meade's new alternative date
- September 23 : his main date
- June : Debunked: 'This is NOT a hoax' Asteroid strike will kill millions in JUNE, shocking video claims
- January - March 2017: Debunked - Nibiru will hit Earth between January and March 2017
- February 17th Debunked: Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts
- February 16th: Debunked: 2016 WF9 to hit Earth and trigger mega-tsunamis February 16th or 25th 2017 - says Dr Dyomin Damir Zakharovich
- February: Debunked: Nibiru fragment to strike Earth in February
- January 13th Debunked: World to end on Friday 13th because of a Full Moon and Venus at its brightest (NOT) for eight years, both in the sky together.
- Mid January: Debunked: World To End (with supervolcano) After Two Snowy Days In Salento, Puglia, Southern Italy, Tears On Macedonia Icon
- Boxing day 2016: Debunked: Pastor Paul Bagley predicts that Magnetar SGR 1806-20 is going to send a gamma ray blast on 26th December 2016 which will be devastating to Earth
- Christmas 2016: Debunked: Earth is threatened by a flow of interstellar helium 3 and helium 4 around Christmas every year
- November 14th 2016: Debunked: Supermoon on 14th November 2016 is the beginning of the end of the world
- November - every year: Debunked: NASA says that Earth will enter total darkness for 15 days in November 2015
- October 31st : Earlier version of Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts
- October 20th: Debunking: Halley’s comet is going to hit Earth this week - claim by the Daily Mail that Halley’s comet was about to hit Earth that very week. (Halley’s comet is in an orbit that can never hit Earth at present)
- July 29th: First version of Why the World will End Surely on 17th February 2017? Shocking Facts - promoted by the online Telegraph magazine with count down timer to end of world. Got lots of people really scared.
There were several other Nostradamus stories - that’s a perennial, and asteroid impacts - I haven’t kept note of all of them. Those are just the dated ones I notice by searching through the list of debunking articles since last summer.
These are all stories that got people scared enough so that I felt I needed to post debunking stories to reassure them.
We will probably continue to get those stories for centuries into the future, at least there is no sign of them stopping.
People who were scared before lose their fear and see it is nonsense. But new people come along, young children or just new to it all and they get scared all over again. I see no sign that it is ever going to stop.
It’s the “What if” that sucks people into this.
“What if a big scary planet that no astronomer has ever seen were to suddenly appear and hit Earth?”
“What if we really have two suns despite all the evidence to the contrary?”
“What if tears on an icon do mean the end of the world?”
Of course none of this is real.
THE SEPTEMBER 23 MYTH
This is just a work of imagination and numerology by someone called Daniel Marston. His page is here: Signs of the End. It spins a story out of the book of Revelations, which is notorious for having so many enigmatic statements in it that you can interpret to mean almost anything.
There is no astronomy or science here. There is no cause and effect. Jupiter passing in front of the distant stars of Virgo - a pattern of stars that in ancient times some people decided to call a virgin - though there is no resemblance to a lady at all. It dates back to the ancient Sumerian goddess Shala consort of the storm god Adad, and with power over crop fertility. Details here: Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses
This is a Sumerian cuneiform tablet depicting Shala on the right.
Cylinder seal: King holding mace facing suppliant goddess. A smaller, nude goddess stands between them. Inscription reads "Adad, Šala". It is at the British Museum (BM 102551).” © The Trustees of the British Museum.
This was taken up by the Greeks as Demeter and the Romans as Ceres and then in the Middle Ages (after the Bible was written) it was associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary. At the time of Jesus surely the authors of the Bible would have associated it with Ceres? More about it here.
This constellation is not mentioned in the Bible - at least, a search for Virgo in the King James Bible turns up 0 results.
This is one thing that scared people wrote to me about - the Express reblogged this facebook page comment as “news”
“One conspiracy theorist posted a Bible verse on their Facebook page which read: ‘Luke 21:25-26 reads: There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. People will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’
They added: ‘Now tell me, with no doubts, that isn't exactly what's happening, coincidence or not. Let me point out that on [August] 21 we had the eclipse, and on the 25 hurricane Harvey struck, flooding on the 26.’
The modern numbering of verses of the Bible of course doesn’t go back to the authors of the Bible.
Meanwhile, the Ancient Chinese saw those stars as part of the Azure Dragon of the East - and the Three Enclosures.
Rendering of the Flag of the Qing Dynasty (1889-1912), Author Sodacan. The modern constellation Virgo includes stars that are part of the “Azure Dragon of the East” in Chinese constellations.
There are no dated predictions in the Bible at all. Instead there are warnings about false prophets. I think that these would undoubtedly count as “false prophets” in the biblical sense.
Do you see how all this is just a story made up by humans - a modern myth? For more on this:
NIBIRU IS DAFT AS A HIPPO IN YOUR KITCHEN
it’s totally daft. The idea does not even make astronomical sense. It’s not something you could search for with telescopes. It’s a modern myth. It’s as daft as a myth that you have a hippo in your kitchen.
We do have a Minor Planet center. They have discovered over 700,000 minor planets so far. Those are objects varying in size from a few meters all the way up to thousands of kilometers. The larger ones are always in the outer solar system way beyond Neptune.
Has David Meade found any comets or asteroids? Of course not. Does numerology based on verse numbers of the King James Bible and all this story telling about constellations based on names given to them by the Sumerians lead to discoveries of asteroids or comets? Of course not.
But suddenly gullible people believe that this method lets them find a new planet that no astronomer has ever seen, and what's more, in the vastness of the solar system, that this planet is headed straight towards the tiny dust mite that is Earth. Does that make sense to you
Planet X, where "X" means unknown - not found yet - is an idea for a planet that might possibly be a new member of our solar system. Historically in the past Uranus was discovered by Herschel, then Neptune was predicted and then discovered. Finally Pluto was also predicted and discovered but was much smaller than expected. Lowell coined the name “planet X” so Pluto was the first to be called “planet X” before it was discovered, but you can perhaps think of Neptune as the first “planet X” as it was the first to be predicted and then discovered.
Each one added a new planet to the outskirts of our solar system way beyond the ones we already know about.
None of them, not Uranus, not Neptune, not Pluto - none of them threatened Earth at all, no more than the planets that astronomers knew about already.
Since then we’ve found many “dwarf planets”similar in size to Pluto or a bit smaller beyond Neptune. Some of them cross the orbits of Neptune and are called “Resonant trans-Neptunian object”.
There are other dwarf planets in our solar system inside of Neptune's orbit, large enough to be rounded under gravity. The best known, Ceres was discovered in the nineteenth century, orbits between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt.
However we now know of many others, less well known outside of keen astronomers, for instance, 2060 Chiron discovered in 1977 which orbits between Saturn and Uranus. It’s got rings too, like a tiny Saturn
This is an artist’s impression. We can only see it as a tiny dot of light but we can deduce that it must have thin rings.
There is nothing hidden about any of this. You can’t hide the night sky from astronomers. They share their observations through the IAU and the minor planet center.
This is shows how astronomers continue to find more “minor planets” as they are called in our solar system.
We know of more than 700,000 asteroids, and dwarf planets. Of those, nearly 500,000 have been numbered. List of minor planets
Do you really think it’s possible that amongst those 700,000 minor planets there’s a whole big planet like Earth that somehow none of the astronomers, amateur or professional have ever seen?
And yet somehow, it’s one you can spot with a cheap mobile phone, not designed for photographing the Sun, and it somehow pops into view when you point this cheap camera at the sun during eclipses or sunrises or sunsets?
Do you think that someone with a mobile phone has access to a technology that is not available to the hundreds of thousands of astronomers world wide?
Nearly all countries with universities have astronomy departments with access to telescopes and advanced cameras, way more sophisticated than your mobile phon. There are hundreds of thousands of keen amateurs world wide too. .
As for the idea that astronomers know about it and are hiding it, or are forced to keep silent about it by NASA who the conspiracy theorists seem to think is a global dictatorship that murders dissenters - it’s absolute tosh.
NASA is one of many space agencies including ESA, ISRO (India), ROSCOSMOS (Russia), JAXA (Japan), CNSA (China) etc. And though they launch space telescopes, these space agencies don’t organize astronomical observations.
The astronomy is organized by the International Astronomical Union | IAU. It has 79 International members and 10,052 Individual members. There are many professionals that aren’t members and hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers, many of them keen observers who are involved in things like tracking asteroids.
Observations are published world wide in the Minor Planet Electronic Circulars. These are mind numbingly dull for most people, pages of figures. But to astronomers who know how to read them, they give all the information about the latest observations of these numerous minor planets. Often many circulars a day and thousands sent out every year. It’s all in the public. The circulars are all there for anyone to read.
The people who say you can photograph “Nibiru” with a mobile phone don’t realize what a planet looks like anyway. They think of a "planet" as a big bright obviously round object in the sky, a bit like our Moon and Sun. If you’ve ever tried to find Venus, Jupiter or Saturn in the night sky, or the other easy naked eye planets Mars ,and Mercury, you’ll know that they are never more than very bright stars in appearance. They aren’t big circular objects in our sky. The sun is absolutely huge, and a planet that big would collapse into a star. And the Moon is nearby.
You can’t see the Moon itself during an eclipse or when it is close to the sun in the sky - because it is lit up from behind. Yet they think this "planet" is easiest to see when it is right next to the sun in the sky. Of course that's the most likely place to get lens flares and offset double reflections in a photograph.
It just doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense that you’d see a planet as a big bright object near the sun at any time of day. You can see Venus and Mercury in the dusk or dawn with the sun below the horizon. If you know exactly where to look, you can block out the sun with a building or your finger and see Jupiter or Venus close by as white specks in the blue sky. This needs good seeing. This is a good time to try it actually.
This was the finder chart for the eclipse from the article. I think few people saw the stars except for Venus, which was very bright, because the sky was mainly a bit cloudy or hazy, I heard one commentator during the broadcast say she could see both Venus and Jupiter but sadly the camera didn’t show them. They are quite far from the sun:
Eddie Irizarry / Stellarium
Anyway you can also look for them any time of day if you have a clear blue sky. But they are hard to spot. Just a white speck against a bright blue sky, not noticeably brighter than the sky itself. Still, you can try hiding the sun behind a building and see if you can spot them. Not easy.
So yes there are real planets for sure. And sometimes you can see them near the sun too. But only as tiny specks of light in the blue sky that are very hard to photograph as they are no brighter than the blue of the sky itself.
And none of those planets is in any way a risk to Earth. And new planets that we discover beyond Neptune are no more likely to go careering through the solar system and hit Earth than Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and the other planets and minor planets and asteroids that we already know about.
Mars often gets close to Earth. In 2003 Mars got to a distance of 55,758,006 km (34,646,418 miles) away. That was the first time it had been so close for 60,000 years. The last time it was that close, there were Neanderthals and mammoths on Earth
Artist's rendition of Earth approximately 60,000 years ago | Mars Image
It still was no more than a single bright dot of light to the eye. And Earth is a tiny speck in interplanetary space too. From Mars, our second closest planet, then Earth also is just a distant star like that. A pale blue star, not a red one.
This is the famous “pale blue dot” photo that Voyager took before its cameras finally had to be turned off through lack of power:
Those coloured beams of light are an artifact of the camera. As Carl Sagan put it:
“We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam”
Here is Earth as seen from Saturn, on “the day the Earth smiled”
Cassini: Earth and Saturn “The Day Earth Smiled”
Carolyn Porco, who leads the Cassini imaging team said that at the time of the photo, people should:
“… look up, think about our cosmic place, think about our planet, how unusual it is, how lush and life-giving it is, think about your own existence, think about the magnitude of the accomplishment that this picture-taking session entails. We have a spacecraft at Saturn. We are truly interplanetary explorers. Think about all that, and smile.”
That’s why it is called “The Day Earth Smiled”.
There’s another image in between, known as the Pale Blue Orb, from 2006
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
For more about these photos see Today in science: The day Earth smiled | EarthSky.org
We also have many photos of Earth and our Moon from Mars such as this one.
It’s pretty good - we have a powerful high resolution telescope orbiting Mars called HiRISE, though it’s not a patch on Hubble. Usually it takes photographs of the Mars surface in detail with up to 30 centimeters resolution, but they pointed it towards Earth for that photo. Details here: Your Home Planet, as Seen From Mars
However if you saw Earth from the Mars surface, this is what you’d see, photograph by the Spirit Rover, the first ever photograph taken of Earth from another planet:
Earth seems so huge when you are standing on it. It’s easy to imagine it must be one of the largest things in our solar system and that other planets and asteroids can hit it easily.
But turn that the other way around. Do you think there is a chance of Earth hitting Mars or Jupiter or Neptune? They are distant planets, just tiny dots in the night sky. They never are large enough to see any detail, except for Venus sometimes. Some people with exceptionally good vision can see the crescent of Venus with naked eye when it is in its best position, as a tiny tiny crescent in the sky. They are all in stable orbits and not a single planet is any danger to Earth.
What’s more, there is no way a planet can get into an orbit like that anyway. It would be unstable. Yes a planet could get into an orbit like that in the early solar system, when the solar system was still forming and large protoplanets hitting each other to form the current planets.
But a planet or protoplanet in that orbit would not last as long as a million years. It might have hit Earth, yes, but most likely, Jupiter or the Sun as they are far larger targets, or ejected from the solar system. All that would have played out over 4.5 billion years ago, not long after the Moon formed.
As for a star or brown dwarf, then you have the opposite problem. If there was a star or brown dwarf in an orbit that took it beyond Neptune and as close as Earth, none of our planets would be in stable orbits. Not even Mercury. All of them from Mercury all the way to Neptune would be ejected from the solar system. or hit one or other stars.
The only stable orbits in a binary system are either huddled so close to one of the stars that they are less than a third of the way from either star to its companion, at its closest, or scattered so far away that they are more distant than three times the distance of the separation between the two stars at their most distant.
So both of those ideas - of a planet in an orbit that comes from beyond Neptune to closer than Earth, or of a star or brown dwarf or solar system that does that - they are just LOL silly to an astronomer. It’s like someone telling you:
“You have a hippopotamus in your kitchen.”
You say
“Of course I don’t have one”.
They say
“It’s just because you don’t know how to look for it. If you take a photograph with a mobile phone camera at sunrise or sunset you will see it clear as day - and it’s just about to smash all your plates - you’d better watch out! It’s a dangerous creature when cornered.”
You then take a photograph at sunrise and don’t see it, and they say
“Oh you don’t always see it. Keep trying and eventually you are bound to spot it. Look here is a photo I took myself of the one in my kitchen. You must wake up to this danger we all face!”
combining: Kitchen, Lichtraum, Gallery and Hippo
“Can’t you see that it is a Hippo? I took it just this morning, I swear!”
It really is as daft an idea as that if you have the most basic of astronomy.
They say the most absurd things. I mean - they even say there’s a second sun next to the real sun. They claim you can only photograph it with a mobile phone camera sometimes at sunset, or sunrise. That’s so like the hippocampus in your bathroom, I’m surprised how anyone can fall for it.
You’d just need to block out the sun with your finger, look above, below, left or right, and you can see for yourself that we have only one sun.
And for anyone with an astronomical background the rest of what they say is just as absurd as that too.
Do share this article with any scared friends if you find it helpful.
See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date
Also if you want to help make a difference, you can sign and share these two petitions - and do have a look at the comments to get an idea of the scale of the problem. Click “Join Conversation” to see more of them.
- Sign the Petition - To YouTube: Halt Ads on Doomsday Videos
- Sign the Petition - To Journalists: Debunk Rather than Dramatize "Doomsday" Stories - Vulnerable Get Suicidal
And if you need help - well message me of course and comment on any of these posts - and do take a look at our facebook group Doomsday Debunked
Comments