Doomsday conspiracies are a dime a dozen, but not many of them predict an immediate end. That's why people are sitting up and taking notice after author David Meade has claimed in his book Planet X – The 2017 Arrival that the Earth is going to be destroyed when the eponymous mysterious planet collides with it.
To believe that, though, one has to first reconcile with the assumption that ours is a binary star system — like Tatooine in the Star Wars films. This means one has to assume that our very own Sun has a twin. Meade says this twin of the Sun has seven planets revolving around it, and one of them — known as Nibiru or Planet X — is going to slam into the Earth in October this year.
Also read: Doomsday: This is how human race on Earth will be destroyed
Is there 'overwhelming evidence'?
In an article published online, he has claimed that there is "overwhelming evidence" of the arrival of Planet X this year, and that it will collide with Earth at its South Pole. However, Meade does not elaborate on this evidence at any point.
Meade, meanwhile, claims that the planet cannot be observed with the current astronomical infrastructure the Earth has. He writes in the online article: "This system is, of course, not aligned with our solar system's ecliptic, but is coming to us from an oblique angle and toward our South Pole. This makes observations difficult, unless you're flying at a high altitude over South America with an excellent camera. As it intertwines and approaches it, will come from our south and loop all the way to the extreme north, then come back south again as it exits our orbital path."
What is Nibiru?
Nibiru, it may be noted, is a planet that has not been observed by scientists either before or after its existence was proposed by Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin. That it would hit Earth, leading to annihilation — in what is now referred to as the Nibiru cataclysm — was proposed by a woman named Nancy Lieder in 1995.
It may also be noted that Lieder claimed to have been contacted by extraterrestrial beings from another galaxy, and that Nibiru would actually be closest to Earth sometime in 2003, leading to cataclysmic changes in the blue planet, ending humanity as we know it. Of course, nothing of the sort happened.
