The possible existence of a hidden planet orbiting the Sun is quite often associated with catastrophe on planet Earth.  Indeed, the popular consensus that Nibiru, a mythological planet as yet unaccounted for by scientists, is about to appear in our skies, may be intrinsically wrapped up with our common dread of cataclysm.  In the same way that many incorrectly anticipated an apocalyptic event prior to the turn of the Millennium, advocates of the 2003 hypothesis believe that we are about to face our gravest test since the Flood.

Although I believe in the existence of a hidden Planet X, in the guise of a sub-brown dwarf or ‘Dark Star’, I have been one of the strongest critics of the 2003 hypothesis.  Yet, there is some merit to the idea that Planet X may be associated with catastrophe.  In this paper I will outline a new hypothesis that seeks to configure the orbital behaviour of this hidden dark star with catastrophic events as recorded by geologists and paleontologists.

To explore this idea, we must immediately get to grips with a problem of time-scale.  I am often confronted with e-mails that state that Planet X could not have appeared in our skies on such-and-such a date because there was no massive catastrophe associated with its arrival.  The implication is that every time the Dark Star were to enter the planetary zone, the Earth (and presumably some other planets too) would be subject to fundamental change.  So if the Dark Star exhibits an orbit analogous with Sitchin’s 3600 years, the implication is that Nibiru causes devastation on a highly regular basis…extremely often when viewed on a geological scale.  I don’t accept this: it does not fit with the evidence at our disposal.

Catastrophism has come a long way, of course.  There was a time when scientists considered the world to be a very stable place, with an evolutionary progression that was slow and steady.  But we now understand that many cataclysms have occurred, and that evolution is a more ‘stop-go’ affair than one of slow, incremental change.  We know that continents drift across the face of the Earth, bringing about the creation of mountain ranges as land-masses lock horns.  Further, we know that significant extinction events have blighted our planet, even worse than the heinous acts of mass extinction we are currently responsible for.  Our awareness has been raised about how fragile our world can be, and also how changeable when seen through the eyes of a geologist.  We have moved from a theological world-view that led us to believe that the world was created to meet our needs, to a more terrifying reality.  We live in a world whose stability is not guaranteed.  Our environment has changed many times in the past, sometimes orders of magnitude worse than the global warming we have created through our industrial negligence.

Our world can also be devastatingly affected by external influence.  The chances of this are very remote, occurring on a time-scale that boggles the mind.  This reflects the sheer scale of the solar system, and the almost negligible proportion of it that is actually occupied by planets, asteroids and comets.  The planetary solar system consists mostly of open, empty space.  Even if two objects orbiting the Sun have paths that cross each other, the possibility of a collision is extremely remote.

So catastrophic events only become apparent over geological time-scales, when the small statistical danger posed by an Earth-crossing asteroid or comet is actually encountered after countless misses.  It follows that the regular reappearance of a planetary body that might somehow pose a threat to us would not, indeed could not, always be associated with a cataclysm.

Only a passing object the size of an actual star would be guaranteed to cause environmental devastation on Earth.  As the size of the object decreases, its relative danger threshold would quickly fall away.  Large brown dwarfs passing through the planetary zone might pose a problem.  Small brown dwarfs probably wouldn’t.  (The threshold appears to be 10 Jupiter masses). 

Regular size planets, or even gas giants, passing through the solar system would no more cause a problem to us than an alignment of the known planets.  This is why I maintain that for Nibiru to have brought about environmental change on Earth during any of its perihelion passages it must be nothing less than a brown dwarf, or else it would simply not be powerful enough as a celestial force.  If Nibiru is a regular, terrestrial world coming no closer than Mars, then it could not directly damage our planet.  Only when its mass exceeds Jupiter could it begin to become a real player in the catastrophe stakes.

In 1984, the paleontologists Raup and Sepkoski argued that there is a cyclical pattern to the extinction events recorded in the fossil record.  The pattern implied a 26 million year cycle, itself indicative of an extra-terrestrial cause.  There are no known terrestrial causes for such massive and regular extinctions.  Could Planet X be to blame, perhaps through showering Earth with comets as it achieves perihelion?

If the cycle of these extinction events is to be believed (and it remains controversial among scientists), then any direct extra-terrestrial cause must be coincident with that enormous time-scale.  So it would not be satisfactory, then, to associate a 26 million-year extinction cycle with a planet whose orbit is measured in thousands of years only. 

Nibiru’s relatively short orbit (Zecharia Sitchin’s ‘Sar’ of 3600 years) could only produce a random pattern of extinction events on this time-scale. The 26 million-year cycle would have to be a coincidental pattern, which is an unsatisfactory explanation scientifically.

One answer to this was the idea that Planet X instead takes the guise of an extremely remote ‘black dwarf’ star, orbiting the Sun at the very limit of its influence.  This theoretical body was called ‘Nemesis’.  Its orbital period at such a great distance (about 90,000AU!) would then be analogous with the 26 million-year extinction pattern.  Somehow, the argument went, Nemesis would bombard the planetary zone with a massive shower of comets at a given point of its orbital cycle, without ever approaching the planetary zone itself.

Here’s the problem.  If the Earth was successfully subject to a cometary bombardment with every orbital completion of Nemesis, then to guarantee a comet strike on little old Earth, each comet shower must have been truly massive.  After all, the shower of comets had to get past Jupiter first!  The black dwarf would have had to have literally peppered the Sun with comets every 26 million years, like a Chicago mob catching up with one of their old buddies. In which case there would have to be ample evidence of renewed and regular cratering of other planets in the solar system too.  But instead the solar system cratering patterns show little activity in recent epochs, implying a different mechanism for the ‘cyclic’ extinction patterns.  Lone killer asteroids perhaps, but not massive comet swarms.  One or two of these catastrophes (like the K/T boundary devastation) may have been caused by an asteroid strike, but the alleged 26 million-year extinction cycle cannot be accounted for by a routine act of cosmic pummelling.

It is also not clear to me why comets should be released by Nemesis at a given point in its orbit.  Surely there would be a sustained ‘drip, drip’ pattern of long-period comet activity associated with the extremely slow and distant sweep of Nemesis around the Sun.  Advocates of the Nemesis theory might argue that there is an interaction with the galactic tide, or an association with the Sun’s 30 million year motion through the galactic plane, that triggers such a catastrophic release of comets.  But this seems unlikely to me.  One might as well simply look to the motion of the Sun around the galactic centre, and miss out the middle-man (or middle-dwarf, in this case).   The bottom line is that a cosmic Nemesis is simply too distant, and irrelevant, to periodically facilitate such devastating killing events.

I have something different in mind.  In my book ‘Winged Disc’ I proposed a possible explanation for how a brown dwarf could on the one hand create a non-random pattern of comets from the distant Oort Cloud, and on the other actually appear in the solar system.  That explanation hinged on the possibility that the dark star’s loosely-bound orbit around the Sun was subject to change in a manner not often considered by astronomers.  Astronomers are used to thinking about planets behaving themselves, and only small bodies like comets becoming perturbed from their restful canter around the Sun.  But why couldn’t a planet among the comets also behave like a comet?

In fact, theoretical models show that 25,000AU happens to be a rather unstable place for a planet to reside.  A planet or brown dwarf at this distance would be subject to a number of forces from outside the Solar System, and could readily be nudged into a new orbit.  Indeed, one of the major Planet X researchers, Professor Matese, has calculated orbital paths for a brown dwarf at this distance that would necessarily bring it close to the planetary zone on occasion.  Such events are known as 'oscultations'.  The subsequent passage of an Oort Cloud intruder past, or through, the planetary zone could trigger another orbital change, this time into a Sitchin-like elliptical orbit. (Those occasions would be rare, of course, but then so are mass extinctions...)

Another physicist, Jack Hills, has made calculations about the effect of passing stars and black or brown dwarfs traveling near to or through the planetary zone.  Although passing stars would likely sail on past (given their considerable size and momentum), the dwarfs run a very real chance of becoming captured by the Sun.  Indeed, his calculations showed that a subsequent temporary orbit of the captured dwarf could be highly eccentric, possibly degrading over time.  This is in contrast to the general flat assumption that such a body would quickly be expelled from the solar system...

Hills showed that if the brown dwarf had less than 20 Jupiter masses, then its temporary infringement into the planetary zone would not necessarily cause chaos among the other planets.  But there would be a different effect, one that is generally appreciated by astrophysicists, but not well disseminated.  There is an energetic relationship between the orbits of the Sun’s children.  The ‘planetary binding energies’ are not fixed, but intertwined.  Introduce a new, maverick element to the solar system (particularly one of considerable mass) and those binding energies are subject to change, even if the planets are tightly bound in stable, circular orbits.  Hills indicated that the overall energy of the orbits of the known planets could alter if the interloper’s own orbit around the Sun changed.  This might happen if the interloper came from interstellar space and was captured by the Sun, or if it was an Oort Cloud object that had trespassed into the planetary zone and taken on a new, more tightly bound temporary orbit.

Exactly what would be the physical manifestation of such a change in the binding energies of the planetary orbits as the interloper falls under the influence of the Sun gravitationally?  Simply put, the solar system would be subject to possible contraction or expansion, dependent upon the particular event.  The very distances of the planets from the Sun would be subject to change!  The dwarf would not need to directly interact with the planets, either…simply the changing relationship with the Sun would be enough to affect other bodies in the solar system.

Jack Hills described these effects in a theoretical way.  His interest was in studying whether a body the size of Nemesis, a proposed black dwarf, could have become captured by the Sun.  He concluded that it would have caused too much chaos in the solar system.  But below 20 Jupiter masses, an interloper would not create the same devastation.  In other words, a small brown dwarf might just have been captured by the Sun in the remote past, and the solar system would still appear as stable as it is thought to be today.  So, if Planet X is a small brown dwarf, then physical mechanisms have been studied scientifically that do actually allow for its existence.  Furthermore, those calculations show that the interaction between this dwarf and the rest of the solar system might have fundamental physical ramifications.  The distance between the Earth and the Sun might have been altered.  Not just once; but every time the temporary orbit of the loosely bound cometary dwarf changes.

Which leads me to ask…has the Earth’s distance from the Sun altered?  Was the distance between the Earth and the Sun a variable that changed with respect to the incursion, and subsequent capture by the Sun, of a brown dwarf?  Surely this would have had catastrophic environmental effects, leading to massive lurches between Ice Ages and inter-glacial periods?  Furthermore, would not the actual physical displacement of our planet have rendered sudden, catastrophic Earth-changes environmentally?  What would happen to the oceans, for instance, when the Earth suddenly falls away from or towards the Sun?  Would they not be swept over the land, accompanied by titanic volcanic and seismic activity?  Might our understanding of the ebb and flow of Ice Ages (and mass extinctions to boot) find an extra-terrestrial cause in the guise of a maverick brown dwarf lurching from one unstable temporary orbit to another?

I have chosen three examples of sustained catastrophic damage to our world to illustrate how this hypothesis might work.  They start with the most recent, and work backwards to the early solar system.

A great extinction event occurred around the Permian-Triassic boundary some 245 million years ago.  The scale of the destruction of life on Earth was an order of magnitude greater than the wiping out of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.  The destruction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous is now thought to have been caused by a single impact event off the coast of Yucatan, Mexico.  This asteroid or comet impact led to the deposition of extra-terrestrial iridium, forming the famous K/T boundary in the rock strata of that period. Can we look to a similar cause for the more catastrophic P-Tr boundary mass extinction?

Well, the problem is that the extinctions at the P-Tr boundary did not occur instantly during a single boundary event (as would be expected if the mass extinction had been caused by an asteroid impact).  They were associated with multiple events, including the overturning of the oceans, and massive volcanism.  Paleontologists have recorded 4 distinct extinction episodes during the Permian, over a 10 million-year period. At a loss to explain such a bizarre extinction pattern, paleontologists considered the coalescing of the continents into the super-continent ‘Pangea’ to be a likely cause.  Ice caps were also forming at that time.  However, this is an unsatisfactory theory, as Richard Corfield notes:

“But this explanation does not explain the ‘pulsed’ nature of the several mini-extinctions that collectively comprise the P-Tr crisis…and so the current state of the P-Tr boundary debate is an unsatisfactory mishmash.  A messy road kill of both scientific hypothesis and extinction in the animal and plant world.”

How did the world’s entire ocean become overturned, driving multiple extinction events over a 10 million year period?  The devastation of the P-Tr boundary is so great that internal environmental readjustments simply don’t provide a satisfactory answer.  Instead, an extra-terrestrial cause is necessary to meet the fundamental and sustained changes affecting Earth during the Permian.  But an asteroid impact is insufficient.  What else is there?

I suggest that this pattern of extinction and environmental change is readily explained by the perturbation of the Dark Star into a temporary tightly bound orbit.  If this Oort Cloud brown dwarf drifted close to the planetary zone at the beginning of the Permian, and became captured into a new, much tighter orbit, then the Earth would have been subject to a number of tremendous pressures.  A lurch into a new terrestrial orbit might provide the mechanism for the over-turning of the oceans, the coalescing of the continents, and the formation of ice caps.  What’s more, repeated passages of the brown dwarf through the inner solar system, during its 10 million year long temporary tightly bound orbit, would endanger Earth again and again.  At the end of the Permian, the unstable temporary orbit might have naturally degraded, expelling the Dark Star back into the Oort Cloud.  Such an end-game orbital change would also have significantly affected the Earth environmentally, leading our world into the Triassic.

Such a sustained pattern of orbital change and planetary interaction with a brown dwarf in the inner solar system would certainly have destroyed far more life on this planet than the single asteroid strike of the K/T boundary.

But to achieve this, it seems likely that the perihelion of the dark star in the Permian was close to, if not synchronous with, the Earth’s own orbit.  In other words, its closest approach during that epoch must have been far, far closer than any approach achievable during our own.

This comparison leads me to suspect that the Dark Star’s perihelion distance in our current era is well beyond the inner solar system, or else significant extinction events should also have occurred in the last 4 million years.  The perihelion distance of Nibiru, in other words, is a variable, and the Permian might have witnessed its closest and most devastating series of passages.

New advances in molecular biology have allowed scientists to back-track evolutionary progress, and date the various points when great divergence in life on this planet occurred.  The Precambrian-Cambrian boundary 540 million years ago represented a colossal sea-change in the development of life on Earth.  The sudden emergence of an immense diversity of life forms at that time is known as the Cambrian Explosion, but paleontologists now consider it likely that life was already highly variable prior to this important geological boundary.  The boundary itself indicates a massive carbon isotope shift, implying ‘profound extinctions among latest Proterozoic life’.

Severe cooling would have accompanied such changes as carbon dioxide was catastrophically removed from the atmosphere.  In fact, such was the severity of the glaciation during the late Proterozoic that some scientists have theorised that our planet became completely covered in ice…the so-called ‘Snowball Earth’ effect.

Again, there appears to have been a multiplicity of this phenomenon over a period of several million years, rather than a single ‘Snowball Earth’ event.  But what could account for such a fundamental climate shift that witnessed glaciers forming over the equator?  It is thought that the break-up of the then super-continent ‘Rodinia’ may have contributed to this effect, spreading the broken-up continents around the equator.  This increased the global ratio of sea to land and brought about increased rainfall which, in turn, scrubbed out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  A positive feedback cycle then led to a series of glaciations around the globe.

But this is not a satisfactory explanation.  After all, the current continental distribution is also located in a band around the globe, and the last Ice Age was very mild in comparison.  It is also not at all clear what preconditioned the Earth to go into such a calamitous freeze, the likes of which have not been experienced since over 600 million years.

The ‘Snowball Earth’ scenario prior to the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary is an extreme environmental condition calling out for a bold explanation.

Again, I suggest that the precondition to this series of catastrophic global glaciations was nothing less than a temporary expansion of Earth’s orbit.

The Earth’s greater distance from the Sun would readily explain the freezing over of the whole planet, and the orbital expansion of Earth is consistent with the variable activity of the Dark Star.
 
 

The third catastrophic series of events in the geological record involves a massive bombardment of the solar system by comets and/or asteroids.  The cratered appearance of the Moon is largely due to this intense bombardment of space debris that spiked between 3.8 and 3.9 billion years ago, and the Earth similarly suffered the most cataclysmic bombardment in its history.

What puzzles astronomers is why this occurred so long after the birth of the solar system.  Once again, the bombardment appears to have been a somewhat dragged out affair, implying intense activity in the solar system for a time.

This puzzle has recently been resurrected to form the basis for the one-time existence of a 10th Planet that initially formed between Jupiter and Mars.  Somehow, this planet took on an unstable orbit and crashed into the Sun, at least according to the ‘Planet V’ theory.

Another theory holds that the bombardment was the result of a late formation of the outer planets Neptune and Uranus.  This late formation might have been the result of the more thinly spread material in the outer planetary zone, causing a longer accretion period.  But such a bombardment from outside the solar system should have catastrophically affected the Jovian moons.

Instead, my favoured explanation takes the form of the cosmic planetary interloper.  Sitchin’s account of the Celestial Battle fits this ‘lunar cataclysm’ event very well, as the planet between Mars and Jupiter (Tiamat; the primordial Earth) was bombarded by the planet Nibiru (my dark star).  This was said to have occurred about 4 billion years ago, some time after the solar system had formed.  I think this ‘late, great bombardment’ is the work of an interstellar brown dwarf that came through the early solar system as a passing failed star.  The subsequent interaction with the planets and the Sun resulted in its capture, and a sustained bombardment of cosmic debris.  But this is where I think Sitchin’s account is insufficient, because the very nature of the cataclysm was a temporary one, lasting at most 100 million years.

Bearing in mind the calculations by Hills, the interstellar intruder would be captured into a temporary orbit of some eccentricity.  This is consistent with Sitchin’s model, and for tens of million years Nibiru appears to have returned to the inner solar system, bringing repeated catastrophic effects to the inner planets.  During that time the Earth was pummelled by thousands of asteroids, many far larger than the one that killed off the dinosaurs.

Then it all stopped.  Why?  If Nibiru’s orbit was a stable one that continues to this day, then surely the cosmic melee would have been a constant feature of the solar system for the last 3.9 billion years?  The answer lies in the notion that the brown dwarf orbit calculated by Hills is a temporary one.  If the logic of astrophysicists like Matese and Whitmire is to be applied, then this captured sub-brown dwarf underwent massive orbital expansion, eventually locating it safely into the outer Oort Cloud.  At that distance it could do no more than shower down a few long period comets, most of which would be intercepted by the solar system’s sweeper, Jupiter.  The bombardment had ended after within a 100 million years, and the brown dwarf had taken on a slow, distant orbit around the Sun.  But, as we have seen, this was not the end of the story.  More extinction events were to manifest themselves in the geological record, taking on peculiar attributes.

There is a common adage in science that the more you study a phenomenon, the more confusing it becomes.  I think it is self-evident that the material I have presented here is complex and by no means clear-cut.  Each of the three examples I have offered provide their own mystery, but taken together they lead to even greater obfuscation.

The common thread between them is that they all involve unusual or unique activity over a period of some millions of years.  Then the activity stops.  A careful analysis of the bombardment events 3.9 billion years ago seems to vindicate Sitchin’s claim about a cosmic interloper of extraordinary significance.  Yet the effect disappears as quickly as it occurred, and this is the significant issue.  The theoretical models for such a planetary intrusion predict eccentric orbital properties, but for only a limited number of orbits.  Where some might argue that a planet in such an unstable orbit might fall into the Sun, or be ejected outright from the solar system, I would argue a middle position between these two extremes.  The dark star orbit simply changes from one phase to another, and these phase changes are what brings about the cataclysms we have seen on Earth at some of the epoch boundaries described above.

Murray and Matese both point to their non-random data sets of long-period comet orbits, and claim the existence of a brown dwarf/giant planet slowly meandering around the Sun among the comets.  Yet they struggle with the origin of such a body.  It could not have formed among the comets, as the material available at that distance was too scant.  But the capture of an inter-stellar body surely would have taken place much closer to the Sun itself, or else the brown dwarf would have continued past, oblivious to Sol’s influence.  Whitmire thinks that comets expand out into the Oort cloud, and that the giant planet would have done the same, whether captured or not.  I think he is right.  The dark star was captured and enjoyed a short-lived honeymoon of destruction in the planetary zone before drifting out into the comet clouds.

Perhaps this loosening of the orbital binding energy is a natural effect brought about by the so-called ‘dark energy’ repulsive force in the universe.  More likely, we simply have never had to consider such a possibility before, so haven’t built the effect into our accepted physical models.  If we were to find giant planets located tens of thousands of astronomical units away from stars, then mechanisms to explain their orbits would be thought out soon enough, I’m sure.  But such discoveries necessarily lie some way off.

But I think there’s more to this sub-brown dwarf than just a lone wanderer among the outer comet clouds.  It reappears, and it creates bizarre but temporary effects in the solar system.  Since our own planet is the one we have had opportunity to study most, it is the boundary events between epochs, and the long period Ice Ages that are not attributed to the Milankovitch cycles, that grab our attention.

Future study of the other terrestrial planets’ geology will provide further evidence for other cataclysms on other worlds, and my bet is that the same boundary chronology will apply.  After all, if the planetary binding energies change as a result of a ‘phase change’ in the dark star’s orbit, then all of the planets will be affected.  Local planetary conditions might alter the physical manifestation of the effect, but the timing would necessarily be the same.  In this I can make a scientific prediction based upon my hypothesis:

Epochal boundary changes on Mars and Venus will be synchronistic with the P-Tr boundary event, the Precambrian-Cambrian explosion and the late, great bombardment, or ‘lunar cataclysm’.  And perhaps a few other such events too, including extra-terrestrial geological markers commensurate with the sudden onset of long-period terrestrial Ice Ages (those suddenly following tens of millions of years of no glaciation whatsoever).

One of the arguments leveled at the ‘12th Planet’ hypothesis is that after the planetary collision between Tiamat and Nibiru, both planets should have maintained eccentric orbits that have a common point of origin.  Since the Earth clearly does not intersect the asteroid belt, it is argued that no such collision ever took place.  I think the picture is far more dynamic than this.  The resonance of planetary orbits indicates how planets can shepherd each other into mutually agreeable configurations, and it seems likely that bodies ‘settle down’ into more stable orbits over time (becoming less eccentric).  I take this further, claiming that a loosely bound planet can be affected by external influence as well; the galactic tide, passing stars, gigantic molecular clouds and so on.  Its orbit will vary over time, sometimes drastically as it is perturbed into a new orbital phase.  As such, we can take nothing for granted here at all.

I think Sitchin is correct in believing that a 10th Planet in the solar system was known to the Ancients.  There is plenty of supportive evidence for this, even if the physical discovery of this body remains elusive.  For the Ancients to have had knowledge of this body, they must have witnessed it.  That implies that it must have appeared in the skies, meaning that it has passed into the planetary zone within Mankind’s collective memory.

But I don’t think that it returned to the asteroid belt.  Earth does not return to the asteroid belt, so why should Nibiru?  The ‘Place of Crossing’ could just as easily apply to the motion of the dark star across the ecliptic, the apparent arc of the visible planets in the sky.  In fact, it seems likely that a planet repeatedly passing through the asteroid belt would have continually disrupted it over time, to the point where it should no longer even exist!  Its very presence argues against it being the location of Nibiru’s perihelion.  Nibiru would have acted as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, in the same way as Jupiter.

Given my own proposals that Nibiru’s orbit is highly variable, it seems reasonable to conclude that Nibiru does not trespass into the danger zone of the inner solar system at all, and possibly hasn’t since its devastating perihelion passages at the Permian-Triassic boundary 245 million years ago.   This conclusion may set me at odds with many other Planet X hunters, but I think this is a debate worth starting.  There is evidence of Nibiru’s presence in our solar system, and of the devastation it can sometimes unleash, but those events do not fit into a regular pattern of 3600-year intervals, or even 26 million-year intervals.  They are instead sustained periods of bizarre activity randomly distributed across the geological record, and are in accordance with an object whose behaviour is more that of a ‘hit-an-run’ perpetrator than a seasoned offender.

Finally, if Nibiru’s current elliptical orbit around the Sun is also a temporary one, coincident with the Ice Age of the last 4 million years, then does this mean that the global warming over the last 13,000 years is indicative of a now loosened Nibiruan orbit?  Is it once again in the process of returning to the comet clouds, its perihelion position now extended beyond the barrier of visible observation? This could explain an awful lot about the scant record of Nibiru observation during the historical period, despite its mythological significance.  All the more reason to breathe easy about the dark star.  It may have caused mass extinctions in the past, but it is unlikely to do so during its current phase.  2003 will be a non-event, irrespective of the timing of Nibiru.

Addendum, March 2004

Well, 2004 has come around and we're all still here. 

I recently read 'Delicate Earth', a follow-up book about Planet X penned by Mark Hazelwood.  The belief remains that Planet X will still show up, although the 2003 prediction has been shelved.  That's the benefit of hindsight I suppose.  Rather oddly, I have been having further thoughts about Nibiru and how it might be tied in with changes in the Sun's properties, and catastrophic events on Earth, and if anything I have moved towards these guys. 

Although I think James McCanney may be taking things a bit too far with his alternative physics solutions, there may be some truth to the idea that the Sun's magnetic field is the key to this. 

Nibiru need not come near to the Sun to achieve radical effects that would create big problems for us here on Earth.  In fact, as I will explain in my new book 'The Dark Star', there may be the potential for a significant interaction at what most people consider to be the edge of the solar system...if Nibiru is a sub-brown dwarf. 

That has the potential to open up the debate on the timing of Nibiru completely.  Why?  Because it need not move among the planets to achieve the kind of periodic effects that many predict for it.  I have something rather radical in mind, and it fits in with the very latest scientific evidence for a binary companion to the Sun. 

"But should the Seven Whistlers whoop at once

Then shall Earth's fate impend;

Some starry sphere, displaced may be, shall dash

The world to fragments in a shattering crash,

And all things have an end"

John Cotton, 'The Seven Whistlers' (An Old Worcestershire Delusion)

Written by Andy Lloyd, 13th June 2002, and updated 5th March 2004

author of 'The Dark Star' (2005),  'Ezekiel One' (2009),  'The Followers of Horus' (2010),  'Darker Stars' (2019)

Published by Timeless Voyager Press

    Darker Stars

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Dark Star

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  Twelfth Planet