Time for a Sanity Check

SUBHEAD: Elenin, Nibiru, or Planet-X - It's coming but is it an ice ball, planet, sun, or alien spacecraft?  

By Ryan X on 10 July 2011 for Sign of The Times - 
(http://www.sott.net/articles/show/231434-Elenin-Nibiru-Planet-X-Time-for-a-Sanity-Check)

 
Image above: Illustration of Elenin passing in front of Earth this October. From original article.  

Oy! Where to start?
It seems there is a veritable fever going around at the moment, all centered on Comet C/2010 X1 (Elenin) and the possible connection it may have to Nibiru - or Planet-X as it's known in some circles. This is the supposed "12th planet" that's been prophesied to come plowing through the Solar System causing a doomsday scenario for us earth-dwellers. Right now, YouTube is awash with videos on Comet Elenin, making this and that claim.

Last I checked, a search for "Comet Elenin" returned over 5,000 results on YouTube alone (and that says nothing about what's going on in the blogosphere). As we've noted here on SOTT over the years, when the noise starts to overpower the signal, that's when there's usually something brewing behind the scenes. The Powers That Be don't just put resources into obscuring certain topics for nothing; and it seems that their disinfo machine is cranked into high gear for this one.

Due to all this noise surrounding these topics many questions abound: Is there something special about Comet Elenin? Does Elenin have anything to do with Nibiru/Planet-X? Is Elenin related to the chaotic weather we've experienced lately? Is Comet Elenin really a spaceship from another galaxy?

Is all of this somehow related to the end of the Mayan Calendar and the 2012 doomsday prophecies? These questions are understandable given all the lies we're swimming in and the frantic nature of the material we're dealing with. Hopefully a lot of these questions will clear up towards the end of this article. To summarize the situation, it seems that we have certain folks claiming that Comet Elenin is everything from an elaborate hoax, to a piloted alien spacecraft, to a stray neutron star, to Planet-X itself, and on and on...

All the while, NASA and friends seem to be sitting back comfortably in their chairs saying, "nothing to see here, folks!" So who's figured it out? Or hasn't anyone really put all the pieces together yet? Clearly, there's a lot of truth being mixed with lies - that is for certain. The hope here is to dissect some of the noise and inject a little sanity into what is otherwise an insane discussion. Let's go back to when this all started earlier this year and see if we can make some sense out of these claims about Elenin, Nibiru and Planet-X.  

Opening a Can of Worms 
Earlier this year SOTT published Laura Knight-Jadczyk's article on Comet Elenin titled "Comet Elenin is Coming!" There she discussed some of James McCanney's theories and made some rough predictions about Earth Changes due to certain alignments between the Earth, Comet Elenin and the Sun. The key to understanding this process is that these alignments have the ability to 'discharge' the solar capacitor (an area which encompasses the entire Solar System), using McCanney's terminology. When this happens, there's a much greater potential for geomagnetic effects on Earth which, as we're beginning to see, are also tied to earthquakes, volcanoes, large storms and other atmospheric anomalies.

And we sure have seen a lot of this these types of events this year! However, correlation does not imply causation and there may be other factors to consider too. But it was shortly after we published Laura's article that the disinfo machine began to kick into high gear. Now around this same time there was a lot of buzz surrounding the potential for a magnetic pole shift. I discussed how James McCanney's theories related to the possibility of magnetic field changes in the article "Pole Shift? Look to the Skies!". In this piece, I noted a huge spike in Google searches for the phrase "pole shift" in early January, likely tied to the increase in stories about mass animal deaths (which, by the way, haven't stopped).

So this was either on a lot of people's minds or at the very least the minds of those in alphabet agencies trying to steer public attention. Whatever the case, the 'pole shift' craze continued for the next few months. Given these trends, we began to see random folks on YouTube taking the video Laura used in her Comet Elenin article and making wild speculations about an impending 'pole shift' due to happen in the middle of March, right around the first Earth-Elenin-Sun alignment.

This was mentioned in Laura's article "Pole Shift in March? Not Likely!" I thought I made it pretty clear in my "Pole Shift?..." article that the only way we'd have a magnetic pole shift is if a very large (planet-size) comet passes close to the Earth. But apparently these folks didn't get the message. Alignments with planets and even comets are not uncommon and a magnetic pole shift would seem to be a highly unlikely possibility. As Laura stated in her article, "it's just plain nuts to go around predicting a pole shift in March based on the approach of Comet Elenin!" So what actually happened? Well, we're pretty sure the poles didn't shift in March (although the North Pole has been steadily drifting towards Siberia for some time now).

However, we did get an M9 earthquake in Japan causing a devastating tsunami around this time. We suspect that the alignment with Comet Elenin may have had something to do with this. There was a massive spike in geomagnetic activity around March 11th as noted by the planetary k-index (see image below.) As SpaceWeather.com reported for March 9th:

A coronal mass ejection (CME) exploded from the vicinity of sunspot 1164 during the late hours of March 7th. It leapt away from the sun traveling ~2200 km/s, making it the fastest CME since Sept. 2005. A movie of the cloud prepared by Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab shows a possibly substantial Earth-directed component. This CME and at least one other could brush against Earth's magnetic field on March 9th or 10th. High-latitude sky watchers should be alert for auroras.

Was this massive CME and the resulting geomagnetic activity around March 11th, as well as the devastating Tsunami in Japan, all related to an Elenin-Earth-Sun alignment? I mentioned in my recent "Planetary Alignments..." article the work of John Nelson and the relationship he discovered between planetary alignments and geomagnetic activity. But is there a similar correlation between geomagnetic activity and earthquakes? In fact, there does appear to be one. One such theory is the Lithosphere-Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling (LAIC) theory used to explain the phenomenon of ionospheric heating over a region prior to a major earthquake. This article describes how the ionosphere heated up just prior to the Japanese M9 quake.

Similar ionospheric heating over a region before a major earthquake has been detected in other instances as well. It seems that scientists have a difficult time explaining the cause of these ionospheric and atmospheric changes that precede major earthquakes. Most scientists still believe that the source of an earthquake must begin within the Earth itself, arising from forces generated by shifting tectonic plates. They suspect that radiation due to radon released before and during an earthquake causes the anomalous ionospheric heating and atmospheric changes observed. However, there are other schools of thought that posit that ionospheric changes due to solar activity is actually the driver behind major earthquakes.

Another good summary of this concept can be found here. Right now the jury is still out on how the process works, but given what we've observed between planetary alignments and Earth Changes, we suspect that the forces that trigger an earthquake likely originate from outside of the ionosphere. But it would take a whole other article to explain this reasoning fully. For the moment, let's explore some of what's being said about Comet Elenin and see if we can make some sense out of this madness.  

The Good
On April 11th, Dr. Mensur Omerbashich, a Bosnian scientist, submitted the paper "Astronomical alignments as the cause of ~M6+ seismicity" to the arXiv.org database, hosted by Cornell University. On the one hand, this paper was interesting because he drew a strong correlation between planetary alignments and earthquakes, something we've been keeping an eye on here at SOTT. But on the other hand, he attributes the mechanism behind this to his own "georesonator concept", which involves gravitational forces, while we rather suspect that electrical forces are primarily responsible for this correlation. The paper itself has been much discussed on the web since its release and many have tried to offer alternative interpretations to Omerbashich's data.

Much of his paper focuses on Comet Elenin as a big part of its dataset, which has caused some folks to raise an eyebrow or two. In an interview conducted by Marshall Masters of Yowusa.com, Masters questions Omerbashich on why he chose to focus on Comet Elenin for his paper:

The Elenin was suitable for testing of my concept because its trajectory, with inclination of around 1º, is virtually coplanar to our solar system. It also approaches the Sun relatively slowly, traveling along the legs of a hyperbola. These characteristics are enabling long alignments amongst the Elenin, the Earth and a third body. The Elenin also drags gravitationally locked particles spanning 30k+ km, but neither its relatively small mass nor relatively low density constitute forbidding factors for causing strong earthquakes in the georesonator. No other object with similar properties has been noticed in our solar system in the past few decades, to the best of my knowledge.

He's right. Most comets have some large amount of inclination in their orbit about the Sun. By "inclination", I mean that their orbit is offset by some degree from the plane of the ecliptic, which is where all the planets are.

For example, Comet Hale-Bopp is inclined a whopping 90 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic - pretty much perpendicular to the planets. A body having a small inclination (like Comet Elenin) is apparently an important feature for Omerbashich's georesonator concept. He also predicts that as Comet Elenin approaches the Earth, the earthquake activity will actually decrease. The reason for this, he explains, is that Elenin will pick up speed as it makes its slingshot around the Sun, so any alignments will be too short-lived to cause any major earthquake activity.

Now that Elenin is still on its approach, the Earth alignments should be of longer duration, leading to greater "resonance," and thus more high-magnitude earthquakes, he claims.

Omerbashich predicts that as Elenin heads on its way out of the Solar System, the earthquake activity should intensify for a period of time as the longer duration alignments increase again. This appears to be one feature of his theory that is falsifiable. While Omerbashich's paper focuses exclusively on explaining the peaks in earthquake activity, how do we make sense of the record number of tornadoes we've experienced this spring, along with other electrical anomalies including transformer fires? It seems that there is an electrical component to this whole process that Omerbashich has overlooked. However, when asked in the interview about his opinion of the popular Electric Universe Theory, he states:

I am not familiar with the details of that theory. Bear in mind though, that electromagnetism can also be a byproduct and a feature of a closed mechanical oscillator.

So maybe we have a chicken and egg problem? Does Omerbashich's georesonator cause the electromagnetic effects, or do the electromagnetic effects stand on their own? Remember the Ionosphere-Atmosphere-Lithosphere Coupling theory mentioned above? Omerbashich's paper also mentions the observed ionospheric heating before major earthquakes, yet his georesonator concept seems to fall short in explaining this phenomenon fully. James McCanney also spoke of planetary alignments as the cause of electrical disturbances in the solar system, possibly leading to Earth Changes. In his book Planet-X, Comets & Earth Changes, he cites Comet C/1999 H1 and Comet C/2001 A2 as examples of comets that supposedly caused such mischief. Neither of these comets have orbital inclinations even close to the plane of the ecliptic.

However, he does note that their strongest effects were during perihelion when they were closest to the plane of the ecliptic. These alignments, he mentions, did not set up in a perfectly straight line, so it appears that there's some leeway when it comes to alignments with comets. Since Omerbashich argues that alignments of long duration are a center-piece of his georesonator concept, this seems in contradiction to McCanney's findings, since the alignments McCanney cites were all short-lived. However, McCanney's correlations are mostly with hurricanes and not earthquakes, so perhaps each sort of alignment has a different 'flavor'? It would be nice to have more research dedicated to solving these problems, but for now we're left to piece together the clues we're given.  

The Bad
In any event, Omerbashich's paper has spread like wildfire throughout the alternative media. Some folks don't buy Omerbashich's georesonator concept and instead believe that the only way Elenin could exert forces at a distance strong enough to cause earthquakes would be if astronomers have grossly underestimated its mass. Some of these folks suspect a conspiracy at NASA to hide the real data on Elenin. Now there likely is a conspiracy at NASA, but in this case no conspiracy is apparently needed to explain the conundrum. It seems more likely that these folks still haven't figured out the role that electrical forces play in our solar system - the real force behind these correlations between Elenin and earthquakes. This appears to be the reasoning behind the speculation that Elenin is actually a brown dwarf, neutron star or some other hypothetical large body like the mythical Nibiru/Planet-X, instead of just a lowly comet. It's unfortunate to see how one layer of disinformation plays off another. As NASA and professional astronomers have neglected electrical forces in their models of the Solar System over the decades, this has left the door wide open for wild speculations of this sort - where mass and gravitation have to explain everything. You'd almost think some devious time-traveler in the future was cunning enough to set up such a sorry situation, but I digress...

There are other folks on YouTube who attempt to show that there is no comet in the location of the sky where Elenin is supposed to be and instead point to a brown dwarf in its place. It seems unlikely that so many astronomers (both professional and amateur) would fail to understand what they're seeing. Just a couple notes here: Mark Sircus, whose health articles we've featured on SOTT, is one such person to join the fray of individuals proclaiming that Elenin is actually some absurdly massive body (actually a neutron star in his case). While this is unfortunate, and does call into question his objectivity, it may just be a case of Mark getting too involved in topics he hasn't fully researched.

Hopefully Mark, like a lot of other folks, will come to their senses come October when Elenin gets up close and personal with the Earth. Another note I have to mention here is that while it seems extremely unlikely Elenin is anything other than a small comet, that doesn't invalidate the idea that there is some brown dwarf star sitting in a binary orbit with the Sun. There's actually more to this theory than most people realize, and a close approach of this companion star may be responsible for some of the anomalous events observed in the solar system recently. Unlike what the Nibiru/Planet-X crowd speculates, the research doesn't point to this companion star coming anywhere near the inner solar system.

We have surmised that the precession of the equinoxes is somewhat indicative of its orbital parameters, so we have a pretty good idea where it might reach perihelion. Most likely the closest it would come to us would be somewhere around the Kuiper belt region. According to Kepler's laws, two massive bodies should rotate around an imaginary center of gravity. If Nibiru/Planet-X is really a brown dwarf on the same size scale as the Sun, this imaginary center of gravity should always keep the two bodies from getting too close for comfort.

However, this doesn't mean that just because the Sun's hypothetical companion doesn't come into the solar system that it wouldn't have any notable impact. We've made the point elsewhere that if this hypothetical companion star passes through the Oort cloud, there would also be a tendency for it to dislodge comets towards the inner solar system too. We've mentioned McCanney and his theories quite a bit here, but what is James McCanney actually saying about all of this Elenin business? One would think that he might be saying similar things about Elenin as we are. As he notes on his website recently:

[Edited for readability] Comet Elenin IS NOT A THREAT to earth ... my name and work regarding the electrical nature of comets and the solar system are being hijacked by a government backed misinformation crew making all kinds of wild claims about Comet Elenin ... These postings are on web pages and blogs and many professionally made youtube videos disguised as coming from "average people" like you and me ... many times claiming to have resources to un-named "professional astronomers" who "verify" their baloney stories ... Some claim that they talk to aliens who "confirm McCanney's work" along with completely distorted ramblings ... some claim Comet Elenin will cause all sorts of disaster with time lines and dates with some claiming you should move to certain "safe sites" on a given timeline ...

These sites and people we have found are all coming from the same place ... let me make it perfectly clear that Comet Elenin is a small comet that will likely not be even seen by most people since it is so small and far away ... someone (group) is spending a lot of time and money to make a major issue out of a complete non-issue ... the curious issue is why all the misinformation and other "date" correlations being propagated on the internet and now on the major media ... It is clear that an extensive group of people are behind this and they are getting major press and air time ... then in clear disinformation style the NASA owned press has the "white hats" (the NASA "good-guys") riding in to save the day telling you not to listen to all those quacks on the internet (pointing directly to these many sites which distort my name and work which as i said is being completely mis-represented by the same disinformation crew in what we have come to learn over the years is a well orchestrated dog and pony show ... with the same disinformation crew controlling both sides of the "debate") [...] Others are associating this false reporting with possible NASA and leadership (NWO and other) groups to create false alien invasion scenarios (emphasis on FALSE) to create fear with the public ... i have NOTHING to do with any of these reports and let me repeat and make it perfectly clear ... my work regarding cometary alignments and the electrical nature of the solar system shows that Comet Elenin IS NOT ANY KIND OF THREAT TO EARTH ... emphasis on NOT [...]

While he's right - there does seem to be a big disinfo campaign afoot - his writing here seems utterly paranoid. Given the topics he's dealing with, some amount of paranoia is to be expected, but this does seem over the top. Perhaps he's caught a slightly different form of the Elenin fever than the hystericized YouTubers out there? In all seriousness though, it appears that McCanney is unwilling to join in a healthy discussion of these topics and network with other like-minded individuals.

This is unfortunate. It also seems like he's thrown up his hands and labeled everyone as some form of quack distorting his work without due consideration. As the saying goes, sometimes there is only a fine line between genius and insanity. It should be stated that SOTT does not endorse anything other than McCanney's older astronomy work, which was quite good for the time. He appears to be going off in his own direction which is very much different from ours.

 The Ugly
Recently Kerry Cassidy of Project Camelot completed filming a "roundtable video conference" on Comet Elenin which included the likes of Richard Hoagland, Dr Joseph Farrell, Keith Hunter, Dr Carl Johan Calleman, and Andy Lloyd. At this moment, the conference in its entirety has not been released. However, selected portions have been released to the public. Most notable in this roundtable group is Richard Hoagland, of Cydonia fame (the 'face' on Mars) and his thesis that Elenin is actually a "controlled spacecraft" which is beaming Earth with gravitational torsion waves causing this increase in earthquakes. As Michael Salla of the Exopolitics Examiner reports:

The main conference organizer, Kerry Cassidy, revealed that a number of anonymous whistleblowers had revealed that Elenin is a piloted spacecraft, and in fact was being trailed by a fleet of spacecraft. Hoagland claims that he has been confidentially told similarly by other whistleblowers of the artificial nature of Elenin. Dr Joseph Farrell agreed and claimed that Elenin was either an artificial object (controlled spacecraft) or a natural object placed in an artificial orbit. In probably the most significant observation of the conference, Hoagland claimed that Elenin was likely an active torsion field generator.

Anonymous whistleblowers, huh? Professor Nikolai Kozyrev, a Russian scientist was the originator of the idea of torsion waves. He developed an extremely sensitive apparatus to detect these waves, which he found occurred from any irreversible process. Due to this, his torsion waves were also denoted as "time waves" by some. He was certainly involved in some exotic physics, but the main point to understand here is that these torsion waves supposedly interact with matter in such a weak way that only the most sensitive devices could detect them.

 This has caused many scientists to wonder if what Kozyrev observed was even a real phenomenon at all. In any event, Hoagland doesn't appear to have grasped this concept (along with many others) if he truly believes that Elenin is emitting torsion waves which are somehow strong enough to cause earthquakes. But really?... Elenin?... a piloted spacecraft?.. As in, UFO or 'alien' spacecraft? Forgive me for stating the obvious, but UFOs tend to be extremely elusive objects, popping in and out of reality with uncanny, synchronistic timing.

We've been tracking the more notable sightings for years here on SOTT, so we have a pretty good idea what to expect from the UFO phenomenon overall. If UFOs are such slippery entities, why would they suddenly choose the form of a plainly visible comet to zip past the planets, when they typically can't even stay in our reality long enough for people to photograph them? Frankly, the assertion that Elenin is a "controlled spacecraft" isn't falsifiable, so there's little we can say about the matter.

 In other words, like much of what Hoagland claims, it's not even wrong.

What's unfortunate about relating Elenin to UFOs is that Kerry Cassidy, Richard Hoagland and the other folks involved with this Project Camelot "roundtable video conference" are setting up another scenario similar to what occurred with Comet Hale-Bopp in the late 90's. Back then some astronomers photographed a body trailing Comet Hale-Bopp, causing many to openly speculate that it might be a UFO. This ultimately led to the Heaven's Gate mass suicide. According to the Hale-Bopp entry on Wikipedia:

In November 1996 amateur astronomer Chuck Shramek of Houston, Texas took a CCD image of the comet, which showed a fuzzy, slightly elongated object nearby. When his computer sky-viewing program did not identify the star, Shramek called the Art Bell radio program Coast to Coast AM to announce that he had discovered a "Saturn-like object" following Hale - Bopp. UFO enthusiasts, such as remote viewing proponent Courtney Brown, soon concluded that there was an alien spacecraft following the comet.[51] Several astronomers, including Alan Hale,[52] claimed the object was simply an 8.5-magnitude star, SAO141894, which did not appear on Shramek's computer program because the user preferences were set incorrectly.[53] Later, Art Bell even claimed to have obtained an image of the object from an anonymous astrophysicist who was about to confirm its discovery. However, astronomers Olivier Hainaut and David J. Tholen of the University of Hawaii stated that the alleged photo was an altered copy of one of their own comet images.[54] A few months later, in March 1997, the Heaven's Gate cult chose the appearance of the comet as a signal for their mass cult suicide. They claimed they were leaving their earthly bodies to travel to the spaceship following the comet.[55]

It should be noted that Art Bell and Richard Hoagland had a long-standing relationship for many years. It seems awfully fishy that Hoagland is now promoting a similar story about Comet Elenin given what transpired with Heaven's Gate over a decade ago. What Cassidy, Hoagland and others have started here is most shameful. Presenting Comet Elenin as a spacecraft sent to "usher in a New Age" is just plain irresponsible considering the recent history of such claims.

The UFO and contactee community tends to house some of the more mentally unstable individuals. These claims by Hoagland as promoted by Cassidy seemingly amount to shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. But you can't really count something as a total disinfo job until Sorcha Faal (a.k.a. David Booth) gets in on the action. In a recent article titled "Top US Space Expert Issues Catastrophic Warning On Comet Elenin" published on the whatdoesitmean.com website, Booth highlights Hoagland's claim by emphasizing this so-called "secret code" which agents unknown have apparently embedded in the JPL data on Comet Elenin. (Just a note, it should be obvious by now that Richard Hoagland should never be considered an "expert" on anything other than COINTELPRO activities.)

The 'secret coding' referred to by Hoagland contained on the JPL website falls under the "Orbit Determination Parameters" statistics information block that lists the producer of the data as being "Otto Matic." According to Hoagland's report, the significance of the name "Otto Matic" being associated with Comet Elenin lies with it only being able to be associated with a video game developed by Pangea Software, published by Aspyr Media and then released to the public on 11 September 2001, the same day the United States suffered a crippling attack. Hoagland further asserts in his report that is "beyond coincidence" that Comet Elenin is scheduled make its closest approach to the Sun on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 11 September 2011, and that on 11 November 2011 (11-11-11) its orbit will carry it into a "grand alignment" between itself, the Earth and other planets in our Solar System.

Seriously?!? Keep in mind this is whatdoesitmean.com, which tends to take the looniest of the loony claims, then wrap them up in a nice package with a few credible side stories. I mean, I'd like to think that most people can see right though this stuff for the lies, half-truths and psuedo-logic that it is, but I'm afraid that there are probably some people that will fall for stuff like this. Hoagland, by way of David Booth and Kerry Cassidy, appears to be leading a bunch of folks along on a wild goose chase! Needless to say, the disinfo machine appears to be running on all four-cylinders at this point! Getting back to this comparison of Elenin with Hale-Bopp... Despite all these claims about spaceships trailing comets and such nonsense, observing multiple objects circling or trailing a comet might not be that unusual. It's often noted by astronomers that comets come in pairs. Comets often drag a large amount of disintegrating material in their tail too, some of which could be larger asteroid-like bodies. Another more controversial claim is that comets, if they are large enough, may even have natural satellites just like planets have moons. According to McCanney, this appears to have been the case with Comet Hale-Bopp:

The list of lies from NASA was nearly endless. Almost no sooner than photos from the Hubble Space Telescope had been placed on the official NASA internet site, than they were as quickly removed. NASA time lapse movies showed clearly a large companion or satellite orbiting the parent very massive and huge main nucleus. I called my contacts at Goddard Space Flight Center and the inside story was that H-B was HUGE. The ensuing story of the companion (which NASA officially admitted later WAS THERE at the Canary Island H-B conference) is so bizarre that it will take a separate book to describe it. NASA scientists accused individuals including some of their own professional scientists of "faking photos" and causing the death of 39 unsuspecting Heavens Gates Cult members, when in fact it is now proven that NASA scientists at the University of Hawaii were the ones who doctored the photos.

In other words, according to McCanney, Comet Hale-Bopp's nucleus was likely somewhere around the size of our Moon. This orbiting or trailing object that UFO enthusiasts claimed to be a spacecraft was perhaps just a natural satellite of Comet Hale-Bopp, tagging along for the ride. Again, we can see how one layer of disinformation propagated by NASA about the nature of comets leads others to accept more bizarre explanations such as comet-trailing spacecraft, etc. It's the same as with the claims about Comet Elenin being the size of a brown dwarf star. Lies feed upon lies and in the end only careful research can shed any light on the situation. ...and Authoritarian Science

It appears that NASA has not changed its ways since the days of the Hale-Bopp controversy either. Their stance on Comet Elenin is basically the polar opposite of those folks running around making unfounded, extraordinary claims. According to NASA, Elenin is just a tiny snowball comet that isn't going to impact the Earth in any significant way come this fall. What's more, all these claims about Nibiru/Planet-X are just an elaborate hoax so others can sell more books. In other words, "Nothing to see here, folks! Move right along..." A recent article on Space.com titled "Believers In Mysterious Planet Nibiru Await Earth's End" is an exemplary form of this whole attitude NASA harbors. It sets up its straw man argument by putting "Nibiru", "conspiracy theorists", "2012" and "YouTube" all in the same sentence:

The waxing obsession with Nibiru, which conspiracy theorists say is a planet swinging in from the outskirts of our solar system that is going to crash into Earth and wipe out humanity in 2012 - or, in some opinions, 2011 - shows that an astonishing number of people "are watching YouTube videos and visiting slick websites with nothing in their skeptical toolkit," in the words of David Morrison, a planetary astronomer at NASA Ames Research Center and senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute.

The folks inciting doomsday scenarios and making extreme claims about Elenin, Nibiru/Planet-X on YouTube are certainly acting irresponsibly. But NASA is no better it seems when it comes to engaging in rational discussion about these topics. In fact, NASA's outright denial of the danger posed by comets creates such an environment where irrational claims - such as the ones they rail against - can easily thrive. This outright denial only drives more people to irrational positions on these topics. True 'skepticism' is not a stubborn denial of the facts.

Morrison estimates that there are 2 million websites discussing the impending Nibiru-Earth collision. He receives, on average, five email inquiries about Nibiru every day. "At least once a week I get a message from a young person - as young as 11 - who says they are ill and/or contemplating suicide because of the coming doomsday," Morrison told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to SPACE.com.

This isn't the first time that David Morrison has claimed that he is hearing from young folks who are contemplating suicide over what they read and hear on the net.

(Which, by the way, if true, is extremely tragic! This should give pause to all those who make such doomsday claims and hopefully reflect on what drives them to do so.)

He mentions the same thing in a video released at the beginning of this year by NASA where he also attempts to debunk any claims about 2012, Nibiru/Planet-X, planetary alignments, magnetic pole shifts, etc. in a heavy-handed, authoritarian manner. Again, no rational discussion, just outright denial and basic authoritarian tactics. And Morrison wonders why so many young people are inclined to take their own lives in a world so devoid of truth? It's the irrational loonies on both sides of the spectrum setting up this sorry state of affairs.

Later on, the article discusses some of the history behind the Nibiru/Planet-X claims which were popularized by Nancy Lieder back in the late 90's. Nancy made a big hoopla over a rendezvous with this Planet-X sometime around 2003, which obviously never transpired. Since then her focus has been to ramp up a similar program focused on the 2012 timeframe. The article discusses some of the history of where the name "Nibiru" comes from:

Lieder originally called the bringer of doom "Planet X," and later connected it to a planet that was hypothesized to exist by a writer named Zecharia Sitchin in his book "The 12th Planet" (Harper 1976). According to Sitchin (1920-2010), the ancient Sumerians wrote about a giant planet called Nibiru - the "twelfth planet" in the solar system, after the other planets (including Pluto), the sun and moon - which has an oblong orbit that swings near Earth every 3,600 years. Humans actually evolved on Nibiru, he said, and colonized this planet during a previous flyby. Historians and language scholars say that Stitchin grossly mistranslated ancient texts. The Sumerians did indeed believe in a cosmology involving planets; however they thought there were five planets, not 12, and they did not believe that humans hopped to Earth from a place called Nibiru. Furthermore, astronomers have pointed out that a planetary orbit like the one Sitchin proposed for Nibiru is impossible: No celestial body could maintain a stable orbit that swings it through the inner solar system every 3,600 years and keeps it beyond Pluto the rest of the time. The body would quickly get sucked in or pushed out.

First of all, let me just say a few words about Sumerian astronomy since this author is really confusing the matter. According to astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier, these ancient astronomers were not particularly interested in the planets as we know them today, but rather in observing the orbits of cometary debris coming from different parts of the sky. Their "five planets" were not actually 'planets' as we understand them, but meteor streams left behind by some larger progenitor comet.  

In what few records the Chaldean astronomers left behind, they described these "five planets" as having fixed zodiacal positions in the sky, just like meteor showers do, whereas for the actual planets that we know today, their position in the zodiac varies over time. [Bailey, Clube, Napier; The Origin of Comets; 1990, p26] These ancient astronomers associated increased meteor and fireball sightings with ill omens, either of an environmental or social nature. Land would be laid to waste, crops would fail, armies would clash, cities would rise and fall, all due to the signs from the mighty sky gods (i.e. progenitor comets). Given this, the confusion about Nibiru being a planet is understandable.

 What the ancients were really describing with this name "Nibiru" and the other five planetary names were actually comets, or clusters of comets and their attendant meteor streams. It's also not unusual for long-period comets to have orbits which span thousands of years. So the claim that, "no celestial body could maintain a stable orbit..." is a bit of a distortion if the implication is that such a 3,600 year orbit could not exist. Many celestial bodies have been tracked having orbits of this period or greater. What's impossible is for a LARGE body to maintain a stable orbit while traveling through the inner solar system because making such a passage ultimately changes the orbit of said body.

A cluster of smaller comets with a 3,600 year period would not be out of the question here. Even if one or two of them get sucked into or kicked out of the solar system, there would likely be others that stay close to their original orbit. The Space.com article goes on to discuss this supposed association people have made between Elenin and Nibiru:

The biggest missing link in the doomsday prophecy is Nibiru itself. Because no giant, rogue planet has been found in the outer solar system to play the role of Nibiru, some conspiracy theorists have decided that a small comet called Elenin, which will pass nearest Earth in October 2011, is actually Nibiru. Even then, though, scientists say Elenin will come no closer than 100 times farther than the distance from Earth to the moon...

Again, as noted above, the association of Elenin to some massive body is due to the incorrect assumptions attached to Omerbashich's work that we discussed above. Part of this is, again, the fault of NASA for not being straightforward about the electrical nature of the solar system.

"The fact is that these folks are constantly changing their story," Morrison wrote in an email. "For some, Nibiru is no longer the Sumerian god or planet that is supposed to be returning to Earth in late 2012. It has become a catchword for almost any cosmic catastrophe."

If Morrison actually understood the real meaning behind "Nibiru" as described above, he might see how its status as a "catchword for almost any cosmic catastrophe" might be warranted. That isn't to say that Comet Elenin is Nibiru, however. I think we still need to draw a distinction between these two things until we have more data. From all appearances, Elenin is still a relatively small, long-period comet. It should be noted that comets are not so easy to detect until they've 'electrified'. Comets, despite the myth about them being 'dirty snowballs', are actually some of the blackest objects in all of space.

For all we know there may be a large cluster of comets already knocking at the door of the inner solar system. This is a very real possibility given the sudden increase of 'moons' detected around Jupiter and all the outer planets since the year 2000 [Knight-Jadczyk; Almost Human; 2009, p25] Moving on, the article attempts to debunk claims of Elenin's mysterious action-at-a-distance on Earth:

Internet rumors about Elenin began spreading earlier this year. Its approach to Earth was blamed for shifting the Earth's axis by 3 degrees in February, precipitating the Chile earthquake, then shifting the pole even more to trigger the Japan quake in March. "Ignoring plate tectonics as the cause of earthquakes, they suggest that the comet exerted strong gravitational or electromagnetic effects on our planet," Morrison wrote. When scientists pointed out that the comet is a mere 3-mile-wide glob of ice with no magnetic field and that it won't even pass very near Earth - and that plate tectonics, not comets, cause earthquakes - rumors began to circulate that NASA was withholding information about Elenin.

Some of these claims, specifically about Elenin and the March 11th M9 earthquake in Japan, seem to have some basis in fact, as we've explored. Electromagnetic effects from planetary alignments, resulting in seismic activity, is a definite possibility given what we've pieced together. To say simply that plate tectonics causes earthquakes is not so different than saying that electricity causes a lightbulb to brighten. There still has to be some event to trigger the earthquake, just as there has to be some switch to send current to the lightbulb. Morrison appears to be confusing a common theory with a mechanism of causation.

 If we actually knew what caused earthquakes, we'd already be able to predict when and where they would occur. 

 So far there is no known earthquake prediction system available to us. A little further down, Morrison debunks the claim that Elenin is actually some massive body like a brown-dwarf star in disguise:

If it were a brown dwarf, "it would not have a coma or tail, because the gas cannot escape from an object with substantial gravity. In addition, if it were massive we would be seeing its gravitational influence on the orbits of the planets, especially Mars and Earth, but there is no change in these orbits," Morrison wrote. "Finally, if it were a brown dwarf it would have been easily detected in various previous astronomical surveys, including the recent WISE infrared mission, even when it was still in the outer solar system," he wrote.

Again, we're not arguing that Elenin is actually a brown dwarf star, but we don't discount the possibility that such a brown dwarf star may be in a binary orbit with our Sun. In other words, the two objects, Elenin and a hypothetical brown-dwarf companion star, are independent of one another. Unfortunately, the folks out there on YouTube and other blogs just haven't accomplished the depth of research needed to see this and are muddying the waters with their claims - perhaps in some cases intentionally.

What Morrison says here about WISE is interesting, however. It is true that if such a body existed, WISE would have likely photographed it by now. However, that doesn't mean that anybody recognizes it for what it is at this point. In fact, astronomers like John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette admit that they are actually searching for such a dark body. They suspect that this body (which they've euphemistically named "Tyche") is on the size-scale of a Jovian planet. At the moment there is still much debate over what its orbital parameters or mass might be, but they suspect such a body does exist due to the irregular distribution of long-period comet orbits.

The process of testing potential candidates that turn up in the WISE surveys takes a long time, since each body must be tracked for some amount of time in order to compute its orbit. But that doesn't seem to concern Morrison here since it seems he's mostly concerned about pulling the wool over your eyes. In conclusion the article states:

Morrison offered some advice to those who are interested in astronomy or are worried about impending collisions. "If it [a story] is real, it is likely to be in regular news media, not just posted on some website," he told us. Furthermore, "not everyone who claims on YouTube to be a scientist or an employee of NASA is. But there is no simple way to distinguish truth from lies."

Indeed. There is no simple way to distinguish truth from lies. It takes true perspicacity, and even then nothing is for certain. From this brief article it appears that truth - for Morrison, as well as the author presumably - is only a matter of faith in those scientific authorities ordained by the Establishment.

There's a distinct us-vs-them attitude that pervades his comments; and this same attitude appears to have infected most of NASA and other professional astronomers as well. It's as if for them science was a matter of picking the right sports team in a championship. It's 'scientists' versus the rest of us unenlightened quacks. In any case, between NASA and the Nibiru folks, there is little middle ground for discussion on these topics of Comet Elenin, a hypothetical companion star, or any connection these might have to the Earth Changes going on right now. Hopefully some of this discussion serves to bridge this gap. (Even though I've probably only touched on a small percentage of the claims that have been made out there!)  

What's Next?
So if Comet Elenin is just an ordinary comet, what can or should we expect this fall when it passes by the Earth? We know that Elenin will probably not come close enough to impact the Earth directly, but what are some of the possibilities as the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Elenin? We know that comet tails do contain a large amount of dust and smaller asteroids. We also know that bacteria and other microbes can survive in the tail region while attached to this dust.

Since Elenin has traveled quite a distance to make it here, it might have picked up some distinct alien microbes somewhere along the way. Is it possible that we might experience a rash of new diseases, or some pandemic disease sometime in the late fall or early winter (northern hemisphere)? Or not until next year perhaps?

It can take time for the material picked up by the upper layers of the atmosphere (as Earth passes through debris fields of varying density) to precipitate down through the lower layers. Some scientists have linked past pandemics to comet passages before, such as the case with Comet 2P/Encke and the so-called Spanish Flu.

In the paper "Comets and Contagion: Evolution and Diseases From Space", R. Joseph and C. Wickramasinghe hypothesize that the flu pandemic of 1918 was due to the Earth passing through the tail of Comet Encke - the comet related to the Taurid meteor showers which occur every year at the end of June (this being the same time as the anniversary of the Tunguska Explosion over Siberia). Perhaps something similar could happen when the Earth passes through the tail of Comet Elenin this fall? But even if pandemic disease is in our future, there's still no reason to panic.

Despite what the medical authorities would have you believe, there is a lot a person can do on their own to project themselves from new diseases. There's a wealth of information in our Health & Wellness section and our very own Dr. Gabriela Segura M.D. has written several articles on the topic of detoxification. Such information could become vital in the event of a pandemic, but I think it's best if people were already in the habit of detoxing and supplying their bodies with optimal fuel beforehand (as there are many other benefits besides just preventing disease). The motivated reader might want to check out these links for starters:

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection Detoxify or Die: Natural Radiation Protection Therapies for Coping With the Fallout of the Fukushima Nuclear Meltdown The Day the Water Died: Detoxing after the Gulf Oil Spill

Of course, at the very least, if what we've seen so far this year is any indication, we may expect more of the same: earthquakes, volcanoes, violent storms and unstable weather. For all we know, many of these Earth Changes might be related to a hypothetical brown dwarf star making its perihelion approach; Comet Elenin might only be a smaller contributing factor. Remember the early Greenland sunrise this year? Perhaps there is something 'big' on the horizon causing slight changes in the configuration of the entire solar system? Such a possibility was discussed in a recent Cornell study which attempted to explain changes in the Moon's orbital eccentricity. Although no definite conclusions were reached in this study, we believe the possibility of a "massive distant body" remains open.  

Currently the Sun is behaving mighty quiet for a time when it is supposed to be at a maximum for solar activity. We've seen visible changes on both Jupiter and Saturn taking place within the last year. Astronomers are witnessing events they've never before seen in the short history of modern astronomy. There are a lot of mysteries to consider here. There is so much more to discover; new mysteries and new horizons are appearing and the imperative of keeping eyes open to objective reality left and right grows stronger with the dangers they bring. Try to keep in mind that all this noise about Comet Elenin being radiated across the Net from the Cosmic COINTELPRO sector is intended to DISTRACT you and vector your thinking.

There appear to be a number of actors on this scene with varying motivations. In a spooky way, it may be that Comet Elenin itself could be the source of some of this hysteria among the general public. Clube and Napier noted the distinct historical fact that when comet and fireball sightings were on the increase, social instability was often at a peak. Many times this would lead to the collapse of one empire and its replacement with another.

Mass social movements and religions would either dissolve or spring up from the upheaval. Perhaps relating comets to the 'gods', as the ancients did, is not such a stretch after all? At this point, considering the pace of these changes in our cosmic and social landscape, a sanity check is definitely overdue. .