How many followers did the planet x hoax had at it's peak ?

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NCC 2000 - USS Excelsior. Commanded by captain Hikaru Sulu.

42

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Light is faster than sound. "That's why some people appear bright until they speak"

WWGD (What Would GLP Do)

Inspected by #13

(that was one of those glad-I-wasn't-drinking-coffee moments)

I don't know the answer, but I bet it depends on how you define "followers". They ranged from the true-believers and completely-obsessed, to the mildly-interested. BABBers probably count too; most of us didn't believe, but we "followed" it with interest.

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I assume you mean Nancy's? There are quite a few others, but that was the main cult. Anyway, that is the single biggest unanswerable question about the whole deal. For what it's worth, I think it was more like a pyramid. Nancy, then her innermost circle of trusted acolytes like Milly Gumper, Jan Rypdal... Probably never more than about 10-15 of these at any one time.

Beyond that, a wider layer of cult cannon fodder - the real Zetadrones. The sort who sold up their houses and relocated to godforsaken places to avoid the Shift. Now that is the first number it is hard to arrive at. Still small globally, I'd bet, maybe not more than 100-400.

But the people that always bothered me most were the outermost circle, who were just ordinary people who'd happened on Zetatalk - maybe because a Zetadrone acquaintance told them about it - and who were making their lives a misery worrying about this stuff. (Sometimes they'd turn up on sci.astro looking for advice.) For all we know there could be thousands of these who have endured pointless anxieties just because of Nancy Lieder's nonsense.

This is all mere conjecture, though.

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Fin
Skep-ti-cult® member #488-28303-790

Hmmmmmmm.....could this be the long sought-after "Question To The Ultimate Answer? :-k

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We had one of those locally. He contacted the Observatory, first by phone, later by lengthy letter, asking us to do all sorts of things for him.

We had one person that took the time to address all of his concerns, one by one, replying to a detailed letter point by point.

He was a poor, seemingly-miserable person, living in a tiny apartment on some sort of disability income. For some reason he bought into all the PX garbage, but I think we allayed all his concerns with logic and evidence.

Sad business, that was.

How did the PX thing start? With Leider I mean. Did she just stumble into a chatroom one day and start rambling about telepathic aliens and the endtimes and such? Was she a frequenter of Sci.Astro who went insane?

I'm asking, what was the first anyone ever heard of Nancy Leider?

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

The Zetatalk website has supposedly existed since 1995.

The earliest post mentioning Zetatalk on Usenet appears here, dated March 26, 1995.

Nancy apparently started posting in August of that year, though her earliest posts don't seem to have been archived.

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Boy. She's crazy.

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

According to the History of Zetatalk website, she was previously involved with a guy named Michael Lindemann and his group, ISCNI (Institute for the study of Contact with Non-human Intelligence). I don't know much about him, myself. This was supposedly before she set up the Zetatalk website.

This isn't a direct answer to your question, but here's some statistics for the ZT website.

Alexias discription of Zetatalk makes it sound like a joke site, or a video-game maybe.

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"Most editorials are written by people that love to argue but got kicked off debate team for not making any sense." -Seanbaby

You really have to wonder about those kinds of people. I mean, do they spend their lives getting into this kind of stuff? Before Nancy came on the scene were they into the whole Y2K doomsday scenarios?

Woo-Wooism does seem to go back a long way. They had some clips from a "UFO Contactee" convention on History channel from the late 1950's/early 1960's on the other day. Instead of talking about Zetans and Planet X it was Venusians and Planet Clarion. The more things change the more they stay the same.