Conspiracy theorists are scrambling to warn everyone of Earth's impending demise sometime this month, December 2015. They are claiming that Nibiru or Planet X will collide into Earth before the year ends.
According to the doomsday preppers, many governments around the world are actually preparing for the apocalypse in complete secrecy. Among the conspiracy theories running wild online is that Puerto Rico is already hoarding body bags and coffins, The Daily Star Sunday reported. The US government, for one, had also been supplying emergency rations of water and self-heating meals. The UN peacekeepers and Russian soldiers had been learning English and undergoing US military training in order to work well together when Planet X hits Earth.
A YouTube video first reported by The Express claimed to have recorded the first ever glimpse of Planet X. "This object is round, it is not any other planet, it is that other incoming object, there is no question about it has its own light bright circular, it is not the Sun," uploader, Henning Kemner, said in his video.
Gordon James Gianninoto, who claims to have maintained communications with aliens, is among those who shared the theory that the end of the world is nearing. "As it goes by it's going to grab the crust and flight it up over the North Pole and let go of it - and when it lets go, the North Pole is going to be eastern tip of Brasil," Gianninoto said. He also claimed that China is also preparing for the apocalypse by building ghost cities.
Conspiracy theorists have been talking about the Nibiru Cataclysm since 1976. The theory was floated by writer, Zecharia Sitchin, citing Babylonians and Sumerians prophecies. The Nibiru planet reportedly orbited the Sun every 3,600 years. Wormwood from the Bible's Book of revelations had also spoken about "a great star, blazing like a torch, falling from the sky and poisoning a third of the world's watercourses." True enough in 1983, NASA's Infrared Astronomical Satellite found an indentified planet-like object as big as Pluto and seemingly moving towards Earth. This unidentified planet was said to be responsible for the unusual changes in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.
There are other oracles and conspiracy theorists that predicted the end of the world but failed. But while these theories about the Nibiru and Planet X can be immediately dismissed as pure fiction, there are authentic scientific discoveries that have actually fueled them.
Just this October 2015, astronomists discovered V774104, a planet-like entity that is 3 times more distant than Pluto but seemingly orbiting towards Earth. "We don't know anything about it's orbit. We just know it's the most distant object known," Scott Sheppard, from the Carnegie Institute of Washington, was quoted as saying in the New Scientist. The discovery of the V774104 was made on Nov. 10 during the assembly of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences.
Moreover, two other planet-like bodies were discovered in 2003 and 2012. Their orbits cannot be explained by things in the known solar system. "You don't know whether it's just a gee-whiz record holder or something super cool. I've got my fingers crossed for super cool," said Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology.