My motivation for this thread? I just read a post from Purplekitten, she raised a scary subject that I feel needs to be addressed. Children are being terrified by thoughts of the world ending. As much fear as this nonsense is creating among some adults, I can't imagine how the children must feel. Enough is enough, this has to stop before people start losing their sanity and begin making rash decisions. BA has clearly covered the evolution of Planet X, my hope is to point scared newbies to this information, and hopefully, have others add to it.
You want to know about Nancy's Planet X, and how it was cooked up, well here goes.
1. The name "Planet X" was first introduced in 1905, by two scientists, Percival Lowell, and William Pickering. Planet X was later discovered in 1930 by another man following in Lowell's footsteps, his name was Dr. Clyde Tombaugh. The name for the new planet was suggested by a young schoolgirl from England. She thought that because the planet was so far away from the sun and in its own dark world, it should be named for the Greek god of the underworld, Pluto.
http://www.kshs.org/people/tombaugh_clyde1.htm
It was later believed that Pluto was too small to create the perturbations needed to affect Neptune's orbit. It was discovered in 1992, by the Voyager space craft that all previous data used in calculating Neptune's orbit was bogus, so the new data was then calculated and found to be more accurate. Hence, the "wobble" in Neptune's orbit disappeared, because it was never actually there to begin with. So you see, there never was a larger planet tugging on Neptune's orbit, and Pluto was Lowell's Planet X all along.
2. Then in 1950, Macmillan Company published Immanuel Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. A book based on Venus actually being a comet that grazed the Earth a couple of times before settling into its current orbit. In his book, he also claims that the comet was actually responsible for the Exodus of the Bible. (Sound familiar?)
http://www.skepdic.com/velikov.html
3. "The Path of the Pole" by Dr. Charles Hapgood published in (1970)
boast wild theories that Antaritica was really the lost continent of Atlantis, do to a sudden, unexplained pole shift about 12,000 years ago. He just failed to offer any evidence, and of course, this theory was later proven to be false, and deemed an imposibility by modern science.
http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/origins/mom/atlantis.txt
4. Zechiria Sitchin
http://www.sitchin.com/ Claims in his book the Twelfth Planet, that through his translation of Sumerian Seals, a rogue planet has always been around, as it swings by earth every 3,600 years and does massive damage to Earth. He even claims that one of Nibiru's moons, at one time, collided with a primitive Earth. Yet, common sense suggest that if the planet did such massive damage to Earth every 3,600 years, there would be plenty of evidence in soil samples and geological records. Even Sitchin doesn't claim to know when Nibiru will return, or the exact effects it would cause.
5. Ben Goldman, an excentric movie director, in 1967 claimed to be in contact with Aliens from Planet X. He believed the planet was located somewhere outside of Pluto. He also claimed to be in telepathic communication with the inhabitants of "a planet in the Zeta Reticuli system." He called them "Zetas"
http://www.planet-x.150m.com/goldman.html
6. In 1995, out of the blue comes this woman on AOL who begins posting like crazy. On several usenet groups, she denied the existence of Hale Bopp and pronounced it a FAKE. Even when people gathered outside her apartment with telescopes in 1997, she wouldn't come out to see the comet for herself.
http://www.laughton.com/paul/rfo/nancy/nancy.html
(more to come later.) Please feel free to add to this post.
08-May-2003, 07:06 AM
The Evolution of the Planet X
Linear Mode
