In a world incapable of telling truth from fable, NASA felt a duty to release a statement assuring moviegoers that the disaster film “2012,” coming to theaters this Friday, is just a movie fantasy and not a special effects simulation of real events to follow two years hence.
The film is based on the theory that our solar system contains a tenth planet with an unusually long elliptical orbital around our sun. In 1995, founder of the website ZetaTalk, Nancy Lieder, borrowed the name Nibiru from an ancient Babylonian religious text to describe the rouge planet. Lieder insisted Nibiru would return to our inner solar system and pass so close its gravitation influence would cause the Earth’s crust to shift, sending the north polar south. There were two small problems with Lieder’s theory: first, her original prediction slated May 2003 as doomsday. Second, Lieder unimpeachable source was her extraterrestrial friends in the Zeta Reticuli star system. With a little more reading, however, and a few more consults with the inaccurate astronomers on Zeta Reticuli, doomsday was rescheduled for 2012 – the year the Mayan calendar stops counting the days.
In a statement published on NASA’s website, the nation’s space agency said:
“Just as the calendar you have on your kitchen wall does not cease to exist after December 31, the Mayan calendar does not cease to exist on December 21, 2012. This date is the end of the Mayan long-count period but then -- just as your calendar begins again on January 1 -- another long-count period begins for the Mayan calendar.
“There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades, Earth will not cross the galactic plane in 2012, and even if these alignments were to occur, their effects on the Earth would be negligible. Each December the Earth and sun align with the approximate center of the Milky Way Galaxy but that is an annual event of no consequence.”
Don Yeomans, a Senior Research Scientist and manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office, assures the public it has nothing to fear:
“Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.”
Sorry folks, if you’re expecting a disaster to befall Earth from deep space in 2012, you are in for a big disappointment. But there lurks a potential disaster that may befall us in 2012, and we have the power to stop it. We can prevent a national cataclysm by not re-electing Barack Hussein Obama president in 2012.
-- Mr. Curmudgeon
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