- Operator: "You have a collect call from Planet
X. Will you accept the charges? Me: Duh ... who's calling? And what do
they want?
-
- Oh, come on! You've heard about Planet X. It's the new
successor to the Y2K song-and-dance, another excuse to stock up on canned
goods and change the curtains in the bomb shelter. Planet X, according
to a hysterical spate of popular books and articles, is a celestial body
some say is three times the size of Jupiter about to devastate the Earth
with its gravitational chaos and cause apocalyptic "earth changes,"
and a "pole shift," and make lots of money for these New Age
gurus preaching the ever-popular specter of agonizing apocalypse - and
urging you to buy their long-lasting batteries.
-
- I think it noteworthy to mention that as organized religion
has declined in a sordid soup of sex abuse scandals and embarrassing political
entanglements " not to mention embezzlement, terror and murder - the
ET industry has correspondingly prospered. What is it about this sad human
race that we need something invisible and fantastic to cling to, especially
if it dangles us over the edge of death and destruction?
-
- But is it real? you ask. Is Planet X really the threat
to our existence some people say?
-
- I don't even know if it's worth the time to discuss this
at all ... except that there seems to be a shadowy psychological connection
between the myths people choose to believe and what really happens in the
actual world. It's not so much that our wildest wishes have a bearing on
the outcome of actions (although this is true in some cases). Rather, what
we bring down on ourselves is often a case of what we had hoped for is
then developed by others as a commercial opportunity, an exploitable way
to make a quick buck or two.
-
- That's how churches got started, isn't it? As magical
rituals to anesthetize our fear of death. It's the same principle fundamentalist
Christians use today to support Israeli Zionists while they secretly hope
their support triggers Armageddon (which will wipe out all those unrepentant
Zionists who are now their allies) as God shows up in his shiny Starship
New Jerusalem to spirit away the faithful - the Chosen - to that great
RV in the sky, which presumably is parked in the same lot as Planet X.
-
- It also happens in the geopolitical world, say, when
a certain dark-skinned minority is totally set up and blamed for some colossal
catastrophe that results in thousands of badly educated yahoos driving
around in their pickup trucks looking to waste the first raghead they can
find.
-
- The truly dangerous aspect of all this is that people
who choose to believe in an impending menace from outer space are, by my
reckoning, many of the very same people who accept the same killer myths
that threaten our survival, that the Middle East conflict is about some
Book of Revelation curse rather than the mundane scam about land and money
that it surely is.
-
- Is a great horror from outer space merely an excuse,
just a way to divert our attention from our own shortcomings, our own crimes,
our own guilt? Or, as the true believers would have us believe, is it
some strange species knowledge of what happened once before and will happen
again?
-
- I've seen members of this latter group marking off the
days on their Mayan calendars, counting down to December 21, 2012, when
the big "galactic synchronization" is supposed to occur, the
end of the 25,000-year Mayan great cycle.
-
- Is speculation on events so far away that if we traveled
all our lives at speeds faster than we have ever reached, we still couldn't
reach them ... are these subjects akin to religion, constructed to delude
us into forgetting that one day all of us will shed this mortal coil and
leave behind nothing but our reputations? To put that more clearly, does
contemplating the death of our species or our planet somehow give us comfort
in deflecting us from thinking about our own personal imminent demise,
which some people insist is the true objective of all social behavior?
-
- Or is this persistent fantasy of catastrophic death from
above actually a legitimate - and evolving - astronomical syndrome that
could have more impact on human history than any other single previous
event? I mean, what DID take out those dinosaurs 65 million years ago?
-
- Through the time machine in our minds comes Ronald Reagan's
famous contemplation of peace: "I occasionally think how quickly our
differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat
from outside this world."
-
- And in the newsreel of our memories flash the Fatima
prophecies, Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast, the
enduring Roswell sideshow and those enigmatic lights in the sky, not to
mention the movie "E.T." and that paleontology book with the
classic title, "T. Rex and the Crater of Doom."
-
- Most perusals on matters involving outer space, lately
- if they're not activities astronomers can prove are legitimate celestial
events, such as the Hale Bopp or Shoemaker Levy comets, which everyone
could see - have been relegated to bookstores with crystals and dragons
that are frequented by middle-aged women in long skirts.
-
- In that latter category - commonly called the New Age
- a legend has grown up over the past 20 years about a mystery planet,
sometimes called "Nemesis" or "Nibiru," attended by
arcane biblical references and fantasies of super-intelligent space travelers.
The most popular of these, the ten or so books in Zecharia Sitchin's "War
in Heaven" series, have been so popular they have spawned second-
and third-generation imitators and propelled the prehistoric culture of
Sumer (a geographical region now generally known as Iraq) to a never-anticipated
popularity.
-
- They are also the basis of the latest Planet X craze,
whether today's imitators say so or not.
-
- None of these books, Sitchin's or anybody else's, has
ever passed the science test, in the minds of the vast majority of qualified
readers. Sitchin's depictions of prehistoric Mesopotamian culture are riddled
with bad footnotes, spurious mistranslations and grievous physics errors
that have utterly ruined his chances for scientific credibility, though
these faults have not diminished his popularity among legions of would-be
believers. A little pseudoscience goes a long way in the minds of P.T.
Barnum's target audience.
-
- The gross financial product of so many Sitchinesque websites,
books, support groups, channelers and debunkers has reached considerable
proportions, the champ of which category today appears to be a $50 book
by one Mark Hazlewood called "Blindsided: Planet X Passes in 2003."
That's right. Get those batteries ready.
-
- There are many other would-be luminaries on this astral
bandwagon that I won't mention here. For a look at all this outer space
snake oil, I highly recommend Phil Plait's "Bad Astronomy" web
page http://www.badastronomy.com/ if you wish to immerse (and detox) yourself
in the latest apocalyptic elixirs of a most dubious nature.
-
- As with Sitchin (and his apostles Alford, Horne and Icke),
this latest posse of poseurs could just as easily be swept away with an
irritated wave of the hand, except for one small thing ... the number of
people who, believing in such questionable disciplines as astrology, spirit
contact, and the power of crystals, represents no small percentage of the
population. And then the question becomes, again in the minds of those
believers, if they believe it will happen does that mean it WILL happen?
-
- There are two ways to become a promoter of the Planet
X myth. One road runs through science that implies just an intriguing hint
of spirit, while the other road meanders through the highly subjective
impulses of spirit and is sweetened by just enough science to get the faithful
to conclude they can't understand the subject without appealing to a higher
power.
-
- Let's dispatch the spiritual approach first because it
is so transparently absurd. Let's consider the urgent communiqués
of one Christos Lightweaver, which came in by e-mail today and insists:
-
- "What is known for sure is that a large "Planet
X" comet is coming in from behind the sun. (As if something could
hide behind the sun.) It is being covered up/blacked-out by the controlled
media but SOHO photos on the web by independent astrophysicists show it
to be highly magnetic and already causing massive solar corona ejecta when
it passed between Venus and the Sun. When it passes the earth it could
do the same, attracting solar ejecta with effects ranging from scorching
'fire from the sky' to massive lightening (sic) storms and EMP pulses.
It could also trigger the pole shift with 300 mile per hour winds, mile
high tidal waves, massive earthquakes and unprecedented volcanism creating
a 'nuclear winter' effect (extreme cold) for years to come."
-
- Mr. Lightweaver attempts to appear empirically reasonable
by saying: "On top of that, we've had so many disaster movies the
last several years that people have been inoculated (desensitized) against
the real thing." He says it's a brown dwarf star, quotes Hazlewood,
and attaches himself to the post 9/11 political disquiet that is now sweeping
the land. He attributes the global economic meltdown, politically expedient
terror, and even quotes the recently canonized Padre Pio as sure indications
that Planet X is bearing down on us, as he pathetically grasps for support
with helpings of buzzwords from any discipline that catches his attention.
-
- In addition, he borrows huge handfuls of Sitchin's mythology
to support his arguments: Reptilian Anunnaki replicants are now among us,
an alien super race. There are those who believe that the Anunnaki of Nibiru
are coming back to Earth soon. They believe that Planet X is going to pass
by Earth, in May or June of 2003, on its 3,600 year orbit around our sun.
Such believers are terrified of the consequences that a close pass by Nibiru
might bring. They fear this will cause earthquakes, tidal waves, severe
flooding, food shortages due to climatic conditions, diseases, meteor fire
storms, volcanic eruptions and the like. They are afraid that it will result
in a great catastrophic infliction of loss of life on Earth.
-
- Mr. Lightweaver also notes that Anunnaki civilization
is also "interspersed in the Orion and Pleiades systems." This
statement is a sure sign of a charlatan.
-
- I love it when people do this, because they can't even
figure out that constellations as seen from Earth are like pictures on
a wall; they are in no way groups of stars in three dimensions because
the stars comprising each constellation are all at varying distances from
Earth, some much further from each other than they are from Earth. So anytime
anybody uses phrases like Pleiadians, Arcturians, or the name of any other
constellations, you know they're huckster idiots, despite the often alluring
nature of their earthbound political commentary. Some of the best socialist
political commentary I've ever read came from Commander Hatonn, once a
prominent Pleiadian strategist based in Las Vegas?
-
- Oh, yes, Mr. Lightweaver has one other piece of advice
for you during the passage of Planet X, which he believes has been brought
down on us by the nefarious influences of the Anunnaki agents still on
Earth. What is it?
-
- "Target the forces of Anunnaki anti-love with your
Ruby Rayguns."
-
- OK. Beyond stupid. But I'm sure he's making lots of money
with this shtick.
-
-
- Let's address the pseudoscientific approach, which is
somewhat more realistic and alluring, as long as you don't look under the
illogical rocks littering the trail.
-
- NASA groupie Richard Hoagland reached Sitchin's class
of compelling New Age vaudevillians when he convinced millions that "the
face on Mars" was actually a vestige of a once-great civilization
that actually lived there. Fortunately, recent NASA photos have revealed
the thing for what it is - a hill with a few creases in it.
-
- But like true hoaxers throughout history, Hoagland has
moved on to bigger and better stuff, and occupies a prominent position
in the new Planet X hootenanny with a brilliantly constructed sleight-of-mind
explanation that attempts to utilize the new and fuzzy disciplines of hyperdimensional
physics, scalar electromagnetics and celestial mechanics.
-
- To make a long and involved story short, Hoagland insists
that by using hyperdimensional geometric indicators that he discovered
on Mars, which led to a new appreciation of the lost physics revelations
of 18th century scientist James Clerk Maxwell, called questionable quarternions,
plus a photograph indicating a planet spit out of its own solar system
by twin suns, plus the as-yet unverified tendency of some planets to emit
their own heat, plus a little dose of hyperdimensional physics espoused
by Michio Kaku, plus a heaping helping of the scalar electromagnetic theories
of Thomas Bearden, plus the insistence that modern physicists just don't
get it, plus the discovery that hyperdimensional stress energy indicates
our solar system's planets effect the angular momentum of our Sun much
more than previously thought, all indicate that an unknown planet exists,
a Jovian-type (that means like Jupiter) exists some 450 light years from
the Sun.
-
- That, as they say, is pretty far out, since a good 20
known stars exist within 20 light years of our Sun.
-
- Of course, the dimensions in his formula are experimentally
unreachable (they certainly are), but through his dedicated research, he
has discovered that great secret that there is in fact a Planet X-type
heavenly body bearing down on us.
-
- Sigh. As web critic Michael Goodspeed has noted, http://www.ufowatchdog.com/hoagie.html
Hoagland has not only claimed to be the discoverer of numerous "firsts"
in the outer space: glass structures on the moon, oceans on Europa, a signal
from a spaceship in the constellation Pegasus (which was supposed to have
arrived some years ago), fake asteroids sent by ETs to warn us of real
asteroids, and underground cities on Mars http://www.mactonnies.com/imperative34.html.
Goodspeed concludes, "Of all the questionable characters on the alternative
scene today, perhaps none has been accused of such indiscretions more often
than Richard C. Hoagland." And it is Hoagland who has constructed
the most believable scenario about Planet X.
-
- Now, I said all that to say this. When you get that collect
call from Planet X - when some utterly sincere individual attempts to apprise
you of the hottest new details of this latest apocalyptic threat to life
on Earth - just hang up the phone. It's just another cold call from someone
who couldn't master the facts if he had them trying to sell you something
you don't need.
-
- What really gets my goat is when one of these "channelers"
tries to lump together current political events with these supposedly current
celestial "events", because all that does is demean and discredit
all the hard work put in by thousands of honest researchers who have been
trying to tell you something is wrong with the current political picture
that has been presented by our completely corrupted mass media.
-
- When these two subjects are connected, both become bogus.
But the fact is, one of these scenarios - the one taking place on Earth
- is very real, while the other - taking place "out there" -
is definitely a paranoid fantasy to delude the public for the purpose of
making money off the easily gullible, which now that I think of it is very
similar to President Bush's paranoid fantasy that it is right and honorable
to use a totally false story to seize another country's oil fields. If
anything is true, maybe it's that President Bush is really the Planet X
about to bring apocalypse to the whole world, and if we're focusing on
some imaginary, mythological threat from outer space, chances are good
we won't see the impending disaster that is right now on our doorstep.
-
- All these trendy rumblings about Planet X are merely
the echoes of own mortality. It is the echo of our own guilt for destroying
a planet that, except for the presence of the human species, remains perfectly
lovely and quite likely is the most hospitable place in the entire universe.
-
- The possibility that in the late spring of this year
we are about to obliterated by a large invader from space is not real,
and not worth a moment of our further study. The probability that babies
are about to be obliterated by laser-guided, depleted-uranium bombs dropped
from American fighter jets IS real, and deserves every waking moment of
our most profound attention.
-
- PS: A prominent ET channeler website insists all the
above-mentioned players (except Mr. Lightweaver) are agents of one government
or another, specifically tasked to foul the playing field for legitimate
investigators in the fields of celestial mechanics and scalar electromagnetics.
Although I put no stock in channelers, I'd have to agree with their assertion
that these channeled entities occasionally tell the truth when it suits
their purposes.
-
- John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the coast of Florida
and had a brief flirtation with several Pleiadian princesses before he
discovered that most humans are frightened animals who must lie in order
to live.
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