Happy End of the World, Everyone! (Not Really)

If you have been on the internet recently, you are probably aware that there are a whole bunch of people who earnestly believe that the world is going to end tomorrow when earth supposedly collides with the invisible planet Nibiru, as is allegedly prophesied in the Book of Revelation. In reality, Nibiru does not exist and the latest scare is only the most recent in a long train of panics over its supposed arrival.

The name Nibiru meaning “crossing” in ancient Akkadian. The ancient Babylonians used the word to describe the occasion when a planet undergoes an equinox. It was not the name of a specific planet, but rather a generic word that could be applied to any planet under specific conditions.

Then, in 1976, the pseudohistorian Zecharia Sitchin published his book The 12th Planet in which he claimed that Nibiru was really a tenth planet in our solar system that follows an elliptical orbit and passes by Earth every 3,600 years before passing on into the outermost reaches of the solar system where it cannot be detected. He claimed that the ancient Mesopotamian gods were really aliens from Nibiru who came to earth in order to mine gold.

ABOVE: Four statuettes of Mesopotamian gods; Zecharia Sitchin falsely claimed that such figurines were really representations of extraterrestrial beings.

Obviously, to any sane person, this is all totally ludicrous, but, somehow, massive portions of the population became obsessed with Sitchin’s pseudohistory; he has a massive cult following on the internet and his writings comprise a significant portion of the source material used for the History Channel’s popular Ancient Aliens television series.

Mainstream scholars of ancient history have universally repudiated everything Sitchin has written, pointing out that he seems to have possessed virtually no understanding whatsoever of ancient Mesopotamian culture or religion. Scholars have also pointed out the egregious errors and outlandish falsehoods propagated throughout Sitchin’s writings. (For more information about why Sitchin’s theories are wrong, Near Eastern scholar Michael Heiser has created a whole website devoted to debunking his theories.)

Physicists have noted that the alleged trajectory of Sitchin’s Nibiru is totally incompatible with the laws of planetary motion. They further observe that, if Nibiru did exist, its previous journey through the solar system would have thrown the Earth, Mars, and their moons out their current orbits; the mere fact that Earth has a stable orbit proves that Nibiru could not have passed anywhere near it.

ABOVE: Pseudohistorian Zecharia Sitchin poses with an enlarged photograph of an ancient Sumerian cylinder seal

Zecharia Sitchin published a whole series of books known as The Earth Chronicles series. He claimed that these books were direct translations of ancient Sumerian texts; in reality, they were nothing more than science fiction set within a vaguely historical framework. Sitchin’s followers, of course, accepted everything he told them as though it were undeniable fact.

Even Sitchin, however, never predicted that Nibiru would collide with Earth. The idea of a “Nibiru collision” originated with a woman Nancy Lieder, who, in 1995, claimed her on website that, as a little girl, she had been abducted by a race of Gray aliens known as the Zetas, who implanted a communication device into her brain, allowing them to send her telepathic warnings of impending disasters so she could alert the people of Earth. Among other messages, they supposedly informed her that a mysterious rogue planet known as “Planet X” would soon collide with Earth, destroying the planet entirely and killing everyone on it.

Nancy Lieder later identified “Planet X” with the Nibiru described by Zecharia Sitchin. Sitchin himself denied any connection with her doomsday predictions. In The End of Days, one of the last books he published before his death, he rebuked Lieder, predicting that Nibiru would not return for another 900 years, in around 2,900 A.D. or thereabouts, when it would merely pass near the Earth and would not collide with it. (You know a theory is crazy when a certified crackpot rejects it as too absurd.)

ABOVE: Photograph of Nancy Lieder from 2013

In 2001, one of Nancy Lieder’s followers, Mark Hazlewood, published a book promising that the anticipated collision between Earth and Nibiru would occur in May of 2003. Roughly one week prior to the supposed apocalypse, Nancy Lieder herself went on the radio and fervently pleaded her followers to euthanize their pets to prevent them from suffering further during the impending apocalypse, claiming that she herself had already euthanized her own dog.

After the date of the supposed apocalypse had passed and the world did not end, Nancy Lieder condemned Mark Hazlewood as a fraud and a charlatan and claimed that her own support for his date was really a “white lie… to fool the establishment.” Afterwards, many of her followers proposed new dates for the Nibiru collision, but Lieder herself did not explicitly endorse any of them.

The Nibiru cataclysm reached its maximum popularity in the years leading up to 2012, when proponents of the cataclysm became convinced that the collision would occur on December 21, 2012. It even received a passing mention in the disaster epic film 2012. After this date passed and (unsurprisingly) the world still did not end, the conspiracy theory still remained popular, but it did seem to be losing supporters.

Then, in January of this year, a man named David Meade, who calls himself a “Christian numerologist,” declared that the Nibiru cataclysm would occur in October of this year. To support this assertion, he cited his own absurdly ridiculous numerological interpretations of various Biblical passages. He later revised the date, declaring that Nibiru would actually arrive on September 23, claiming that the solar eclipse on August 21 was a harbinger of Nibiru’s approach.

ABOVE: Photograph of the author and conspiracy theorist known as “David Meade,” taken from his website planetxnews.com

Obviously, for a doomsday prophecy that has already been wrong twice, Meade’s whole theory should never have been taken seriously at all. Furthermore, Meade has no academic or spiritual qualifications to say anything about Biblical prophecy. An article in Christianity Today described him as “a made-up expert in a made-up field talking about a made-up event.” Unfortunately, Meade’s prediction has been given undue levels of media coverage, causing these ridiculous doomsday claims to become a widespread internet sensation.

ABOVE: A core component of Meade’s claim is based on the notion that the star “Wormwood” mentioned in Revelation 8:10-11 is really the planet Nibiru.

Meade’s assertions have been further compounded by the reemergence of fake news stories from last summer claiming that NASA had confirmed Nibiru’s existence and that it was “headed straight for Earth.” In reality, NASA has emphatically denied Nibiru’s existence. This year, in light of the doomsday theory’s reemergence, NASA scientist David Morrison has produced a very instructive video explaining why Nibiru cannot really exist. NASA also has an article posted on one of their webpages explaining the history of the Nibiru conspiracy theory and why scientists have rejected it.

Quite simply, if Nibiru really existed, it would be obvious to everyone; we would all see it in the sky right now as it approaches. Furthermore, astronomers would have detected at least a century ago, long before Sitchin ever set pen to paper.

IMAGE
The featured image for this article is an artist’s conception of Planet Nine, a hypothetical planet proposed by legitimate astronomers, which some conspiracy theorists have unfortunately conflated with the imaginary planet Nibiru.