There is no Planet X--not at least, in the apocalypse-
producing form that has been claimed for the past few years.
Nancy Leider, the voice of Zeta-Talk, has been saying for
some time that this mythical monster was going to make a
close pass on May 15, and wreak holy hell on earth. From her
remarks on Coast to Coast AM on Friday, April 25, 2003, my
impression is that she's apparently putting back the date of
its arrival and saying that it won?t be as big a deal as she had
originally been led to believe. She implied that the
aliens she claims to channel have misled her for unknown
reasons.
Nancy Leider has been the victim of a kind of millennialism
that strikes many close-encounter witnesses. I know it well:
it struck me, too.
Listen to my
first hypnosis tape and you can hear it slamming me literally
right
between the eyes. However, a problem arises when you
associate it with specific dates and events. The attempt to
focus it just does not work, and cannot work unless there is
specific, physical evidence to focus it on.
There is no astronomical evidence that a large and
destructive body is anywhere near our solar system, let
alone moving through it.
However, various websites devoted to drawing people?s
attention with scary stories have collected every possible
mention
of any unusual solar system event or discovery in order to
create the impression that any report of anything unusual or
new was proof that Planet X was out there. Photographs
were breathlessly posted showing the incoming horror getting
closer and closer. Ms. Leider evolved a theory that earth was
visited by a cataclysmic event every 3,600 years?and never
mind the historical record, or the fact that evolutionary
biology would be in chaos if catastrophes actually took place
so frequently.
As is usual in these cases, ?safety zones? were ballyhooed
and, like fear?s camp-followers, food sites appeared selling
Planet X survival packs.
I saw one of these incidents up close during the passage of
the mega-comet Hale-Bopp. I was even blamed for some of
it, because I went on
the Art Bell program with remote viewing teacher Courtney
Brown, who announced
that his remote viewers had found that the Hale-Bopp comet
was being followed by an object
that was, in reality, a gigantic alien spaceship. But when he
provided photographic proof to me, allegedly given to him by
a ?deep-throat? astronomer friend who was keeping him
informed sub-rosa, there was a crude digital ring drawn
around the
object, meaning that I could not subject the image to a
simple test for authenticity.
So, instead, Art Bell and I simply published the image, only to
be told almost immediately thereafter that it was from an
astronomical telescope in Hawaii and had been doctored to
show an object. Telescopes around the world than began
saying that there was no object.
This surprised me very much, because just days before, I?d
had a conversation with a spokesperson at Greenwich who
had assured me that the object was there. In addition, there
was plenty of amateur photography of it that appeared quite
authentic. The Japanese National Observatory had even
posted a photograph of it on their website weeks before the
controversy erupted showing that the object had a
gigantic ?something? sticking out of it.
The object was indeed there. In fact, months after,
astronomers quietly began to discuss it, and notices were
published about it in various places, including
science
magazines. But what was NEVER true was that there
was any suggestion at all that the object was a gigantic alien
mothership. This was simply the opinion of some remote
viewers.
Astronomers should have simply told the truth: the object
was there, it was probably some sort of plasma associated
with the comet, or even a second cometary head, but it was
not emitting any signals, it was not showing any signs of
independent, guided motion, and in no way appeared
to be a spacecraft.
But they dared not, because a fatal illogic had evolved in the
hysteria of the situation: if you
said that the object was there, then the media was going to
scream that you believed that it was an alien spacecraft.
Therefore, astronomers dared not speak the truth. Reason
was throttled. Lives were lost.
The same sort of hysteria surrounds Planet X, but with one
difference. Unlike the Hale-Bopp object, there is no natural
phenomenon that actually fits the description of the rogue
planet. So, Planet X believers have had to compensate. As a
result, every little story of a new asteroid or some unknown
phenomenon being observed in the solar system is being used
to bolster the fallacy of Planet X. This collection of
"news"
convinces the gullible by implying that ordinary science is,
in reality, providing evidence for an extraordinary claim that
apparently has no real-world support.
Earth is discovered to have a ?bulge.? Planet X is identified as
the cause. Another possible planet is discovered outside the
orbit of Pluto. They?ve admitted it at last?Planet X is here.
But May 15 will come and go without Planet X?s arrival. In
fact, the next claimed date and the one after that and the
one after that?all of them will come and go without Planet
X?s arrival.
How can I be so sure? For the simple reason that there is no
orbital object recurring on a fast cycle that is causing
destruction on earth. If there was, the world would be in
chaos on a fast cycle, and it isn?t.
Certainly, there are
upheavals and catastrophes on planet earth. Right now, we
are in the throes of an extinction event that rivals the one
that destroyed the dinosaurs. In fact, not only all of human
history but all of human evolution has transpired during this
extinction event. It has been going on for 2.8 million years,
ever since Central America rose up out of the ocean and
destabilized earth?s climate. Since then, the planet has been
suffering repeated ice ages, with a concomitant loss of many
species. This unstable environment has also caused natural
selection to favor intelligence over every other adaptation,
with the result that an overgrowth of the planet?s intelligent
species?us?is causing other species to extinguish at about
the same rate that they did as the era of the dinosaurs came
to a close.
I can predict with certainty that, no matter what happens,
earth?s environment will, in one way or another, return to its
more normal state eventually, which is one of striking
ecological stability and gradual, almost stately, species
evolution. How long will it be before that happens? Oh, just
the blink of an eye in geologic terms?perhaps two or three
million years. Will mankind still be around then? Perhaps and
perhaps not. One thing, though, is quite certain: if we cannot
manage our planet in such a way that it can support our
overgrowth, we will experience a dieback ourselves. Gods and
aliens won?t be responsible. Neither will we. After all, in
overbreeding, we?re only doing what nature designed us to
do. During its evolution, our species has experienced
continuous challenge. We are a product of environmental
instability, and therefore are easy breeders. Human sexuality
as it exists now evolved during a time when we were
constantly threatened with extinction. Now our survival
adaptation has become our greatest threat, greater by far
than any alien invasion or rogue planet or whatever
improbable catastrophe we may dream up to entertain our
longing for change and release from the toils and
responsibilities of everyday life.
I am sure that Ms. Leider is entirely sincere in her beliefs that
she is talked to by aliens from Zeta Reticuli. Indeed, I
wouldn?t be at all surprised if she doesn?t have some sort of
contact with the same bizarre presence that has been in my
life and the lives of millions of other human beings for
millennia, and, in recent decades, with such striking force
that it has, in many lives, taken on a very real and physical
appearance.
And, indeed, if there is anything consistent about exposure to
this presence, it is the atmosphere of apocalypse that
accompanies the experience. I very well remember the early
days of my experience, when I was just beginning to face its
presence in my life. You can hear it in my first hypnosis: a
man screaming in agony as he witnesses a horrific vision of
the world exploding. There followed a haunting vision of the
moon disintegrating, and many other visions of a similar ilk.
Do I dismiss them as hallucinations? I do, indeed. Do I think of
them as prophecies? Most certainly?but for the same reason
that all prophecies of catastrophe are true. Statistics don?t
lie, and they show us that, at any given moment, there
exists, to varying degrees, the possibility that a world-class
catastrophe will take place. So, if I say, ?I predict that the
world will end,? I am going to be right, without question. But
if I say it?s going to happen next month, I?d better be sure of
my facts, because the odds against my being right are very,
very long.
Why would it be that the close encounter experience gives
rise to intimations of apocalypse? It is because the visitation
of these impossible and overwhelming presences creates a
catastrophe of mind in us the same way that the visitation of
the angel who inspired the Book of Revelation created a
catastrophe in the mind of John. This happens because these
presences overturn our understanding of what the world is
and how it works. We gaze, suddenly, upon the lurid peaks of
unknown being, and we see our whole world waver and fade
before our eyes, and are cast away into confusion. It feels
like the world is ending. What it actually means is that the
mind, as we once knew it and lived it, is ending.
After the publication of the Book of Revelation, Christians all
over the Roman Empire expected that Jesus was going to
return any day. Generation to generation, every generation
since has had this same expectation?that their particular
situation contained the seeds of the end time. And, in every
generation, they could have been right.
At the moment, a novel called Armageddon is number one on
the bestseller
list. No less an authority than Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer
Royal, has just published a tightly-argued book, Our Final
Century, suggesting that mankind might die back dramatically
or even become extinct in the next hundred years. And in
truth, there have been few generations since the Book of
Revelations was written that could lay such cogent claim to
being the generation of apocalypse.
Not since the middle years of the Roman Empire have there
been so many doomsayers, or so strong a sense of change.
Of course, the intimations of apocalypse that filled the world
in those days were true: Rome fell. The Roman world, the
Roman way of thought, the Roman universe, the Roman mind?
all came crashing down to a dreadful end.
By the eighth century AD, Rome, which had been a city of
more than a million five hundred years before, was a haunted
ruin populated by a few thousand shepherds. Travel by road
had all but disappeared in Europe. Money was forgotten. In all
of Europe, there were probably under a thousand people who
could read. It?s population was less than fifty percent of what
it had been at Rome?s height.
So, the Roman era prophets of doom were right. The world as
they had
known it did indeed end. It was killed by two things: a long
series of plagues and pestilences brought on by excessive
population density and too much free travel, and a
fundamental abandonment of the institutions of belief that
had supported the traditional order of life.
Sound familiar? Well, if it doesn?t, it should, because our world
is in the process of repeating the same cycle, only this time
on a planetary scale. Witness AIDS and SARS?both of them
went flying around the planet on aluminum wings. Rome?s
diseases traveled on ox-carts, but the effect was the same:
infection spread because the population was too dense.
Maybe this time disease will not be the primary triggering
factor of dieback. But dieback will happen, one way or
another. It is always, and inevitably, the consequence of
overpopulation. In Rome?s time, the world was mostly empty.
But not the empire. The empire was suffering severe
population stress even though its density was far less than is
present now. This was because of the rude technologies
available then made each person far more difficult to support
than is true now, and the whole system therefore that much
more vulnerable.
We, also, are at a point of crisis that is going to trigger a
dieback, and, at the same time, our mind is changing. And we
know it, each one of us, deep in the dark back rooms of our
souls. Like the Romans, we know that our world doesn?t work.
Like them, we can?t say exactly why.
Our old religious institutions, powerfully challenged by modern
secular consciousness, are screaming.
Radical Islam, institutionally unable to cope with modern
reality, answers by rejecting it altogether, seeking instead a
return to an era and a level of general education when its
holy book was above challenge.
Fringe elements of Christianity do the same, some even going
so far as to attempt to influence world affairs in ways that
they hope will trigger the dreamed of battle of Armageddon,
with the result they will at last be able to leave this vale of
challenges to their beliefs, and ascend in rapture to a heaven
that was imagined long before the troublesome world of
modern science was so much as a mote in the devil?s eye.
So, Ms. Leider can lay claim to the mantle of prophet, for her
sense that great change is in the wind is almost certainly
correct. But Planet X?and in just a matter of weeks?
Fortunately for the rest of us, she?s being a little impatient.
And, perhaps being exposed on an unconscious level to the
ferocious terror associated with close encounter, she's trying
to
somehow contain her visions, to give them a comprehensible
dimension, to find the reassurance of clear and finite
structure in what is actually an indefinite, as-yet unfocused,
but very, very real fear.
