By Tanish Pradhan
Our species has shared a romance with doomsday theories for millennia. The thought that an unstoppable force might come along one day and put an end to life as we know it has thrilled as well as terrified almost every person that has ever lived. Sometimes though, a particular story surfaces, which is so shrouded in conspiracy and mystery, that to even think about its plausibility seems absurd. These stories are the ones which cannot be shared in public without the risk of the people raising questions about your sanity. One such truly terrifying tale is that of Planet X, or as its believers call it, Nibiru.
The Nibiru story has been around for so long, has been repeated by so many people and has so many versions that it is almost impossible to talk about a single dominant theory. The general idea, though, is about a massive celestial object crashing into or passing close by earth causing mass devastation of life and civilisation. The rest is usually stories about how the establishment is trying to cover up the fact that we are all doomed.
The various theories
The original Nibiru conspiracy can be traced back to Nancy Lieder, a woman from Wisconsin, who claimed that extra-terrestrials called Zetas had made contact with her and even gone so far as to implant a communications device in her brain. In 1997 during the build-up to the Hale-Bopp comets perihelion, she claimed, speaking for the Zetas, that the comet didnt exist at all, but was a hoax used to distract people, from the arrival of a large planet, until it was too late. She called this planet, Planet X. When the Hale-Bopp comet did pass by Earth, Lieder updated her claims by deleting the parts about the Hale-Bopp not existing and further elaborated on how Planet Xs close approach would halt the rotation of the earth for about 6 days and cause a pole shift. This would mean the destabilisation of the Earths core which would cause numerous earthquakes and super-volcanoes due to the displacement of the crust. She claimed that this would consume the lives of billions but that the establishment was happy to use this as a means for quick and easy population control.
Zecharia Sitchin, an Azerbaijani-American author wrote books about human origins involving extra-terrestrial gods. Taking inspiration from Babylonian religious texts, he wrote of a giant planet in extremely large and elongated orbit, which passed by Earth once every 3600 years. On this planet lived sentient beings which came to Earth during this time, to become humanitys first gods. In accordance with certain Sumerian Myths, he called these beings the Annuki and the Planet Nibiru, in his book The 12th Planet. In 1996, Lieder claimed on her site, that Planet X and Nibiru are one and the same, and these Annuki are the Zetas. In 2010 however, Sithcin distanced himself from the Planet X theory, saying that there was no connection between his work and Lieders claims.
In 2001 Mark Hazlewood, a member of Lieders online Zetatalk community published a book called Blindsided. It was focused on the idea that Planet X would pass closest to earth in 2003. Lieder, in support of these claims, came out on the radio asking people to euthanise their pets to protect them from the suffering that would be caused by the pole shift. It was also confirmed that she went ahead and euthanised her own dog which she later claimed was because it was acting aggressively. When May 2003 came and went, Lieder, said that she had been giving out false dates in order to trick those in power and that she couldnt give out the true dates since it might allow them to declare martial law and prevent efforts by people to escape the devastation.
A conspiracy theorist called David Mead claimed that the Nibiru Cataclysm was referenced in multiple passages in the Bible. He called himself a Christian numerologist, a title whose legitimacy is questionable at best, and claimed that in October 2017, Nibiru would collide with Earth. He claimed that this was a sign which was mentioned in the book of Revelation and that it would signal the beginning of a seven-year tribulation period, which would be years of pain and suffering for humanity. He, however, did also say that only a third of earth would be destroyed and that mankind could rejoice and rebuild after the seven-year period was over, which, if you think about it, isnt as bad! What was also special about Meads theory, was his claim that Nibiru wasnt just a planet, but an entire star system. According to him, governments had been pumping chemicals into the sky to make sure that Nibiru wasnt visible, in turn destroying the environment.
The plausibility of it all
What is really bothersome about the Planet X theory and why it has so many people riled up, is the fact that such a planetary collision is actually possible. Although scientists will assure us that if Nibiru was real, our sophisticated technology would have seen it already, we cannot be sure that that holds true for long. It is really easy for the most of us to dismiss a doomsday theory as the fantasies of a deranged mind, but when we really think about such scenarios, they seem to be dreadfully possible. The truth of the matter is that most people would choose to call harbingers crazy because they would rather not imagine a scenario where the world around them is destroyed or changed drastically. It is definitely possible, that a few years hence, our tech picks up a massive planet set on a collision course with us.
What happens if it happens?
The one thing that truly distinguishes us as a species is the ability to verbally communicate knowledge we have acquired through experience. This means that subsequent generations do not have to rely on instinct to survive and live as the previous generation did. This remarkable ability has led to every subsequent generation of humans living better lives than the previous one. It is a sort of self-made evolution. The trouble is that this knowledge is only limited to the existence of our species. It is our most valuable resource and its preservation must be our ultimate priority as a species.
Terrifyingly, this knowledge base of ours is unbelievably fragile. We carry it with us on a tiny planet floating through space which has no protection from external threats. The history of Earth is littered with extinction events. What we as mankind need is a safeguard or contingency plan, instead of a misplaced sense of disbelief.
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