Question

Recently, I have been getting an awful lot of spam emails in re the planet 'Nibiru', which is supposedly going to end life on Earth as we know it some time around 2012. I like to think of myself as a thinking guy, so to me, this kind of talk seems absolutely ridiculous. That said, there is *usually* some truth in this kind of absurd rumors, so my questions is this: What information has led these 'crazies' to start propagating these types of end-of-days scenarios? IS there a brown dwarf star heading our way? If you're having a laugh now, well, then good! We all could use a little of that every now and again; however, thank you in advance for taking the time to answer this question in a serious manner.

I too am frustrated by the barrage of spam (and of questions to Ask an Astrobiologist) about the supposed threat from Nibiru. Nibiru is a fiction, and these stories are indeed ridiculous. Unlike most pseudoscience stories, there seems to be no factual core on which the Nibiru hoax has been constructed. This is different from, for example, the claims of aliens and a crashed UFO at Roswell, New Mexico. The alien stories are a fabrication, but the core fact is that an instrumented balloon did crash in Roswell on July 7, 1947. There is no similar factual core to Nibiru. From what I have read, the story originated from someone called Nancy Lieder, on her website ZetaTalk. She claimed to be channeling aliens, called "Zetans" (short for Zeta Reticulans, aliens from the star Zeta Reticuli). These aliens told her that a large planet will sweep by the Earth, flipping the Earth's axis and killing much of the human population. The original date for destruction was in May 2003, but of course nothing happened then, so the story is being recycled for a target year of 2012. Strange though it seems, that is the sole basis for all of this chatter on the internet. There is nothing else, no brown dwarf star headed our way, no mysterious "Planet X", no photos of strange objects in the southern hemisphere. Just endless talk and speculation. Incidentally, the widely reported "photos of Nibiru" posted at http://www.greatdreams.com/nibiru-possible.jpg obviously show a gas cloud far beyond the solar system, which is not moving; you can see this from the fact that the stars are the same in both pictures. A sharp-eyed reader has identified these photos as a gas shell around the star V838 Mon. Wikipedia has a nice write-up and a beautiful photo of it from Hubble at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V838_Mon. Yet many people cite these photos as evidence of the reality of Nibiru. It is such a waste. David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
February 28, 2008