It’s just fake news. People click on these stories and share them and chatter about them and so you get talk about them. But unlike the 2012 fake news stories, there isn’t that much talk about this. You must have clicked on many such links, or avidly follow fake news sites like “Before It’s News” or the conspiracy reddits etc to see it at all. Or perhaps you read the sensationalist UK red top tabloids or watch US tv programs that favour such stories like “Coast to Coast FM”

People are just gullible and can easily be lead to believe fake news, especially if they don’t know much about the subject. It seems absurd to us now, but back in 1957 there was no internet, much less travel than today, and many people were convinced, on April fools day, that spaghetti grows on trees as a result of watching this video.

For more on this with modern examples, see my Debunked: How can the videos and photos be hoaxes when so many people believe them?

Also, I think I should debunk your two points and explain why they are neither of them anything to be scared about.

First on the eclipse. We get an eclipse of the sun every year or two. Many of them are total. It is very common for the eclipse to span midday at some point along its track too. ~An eclipse of the sun is just the small shadow of our Moon moving over the surface of Earth. Sometimes the shadow cone doesn’t quite touch Earth and we get an annular eclipse. And sometimes it does touch it and we get a total eclipse. But it will only go dark for at most a minute or two, and you have to be inside the shadow when it passes by to see the total eclipse. It is just a shadow and can’t harm you, but is a spectacular natural event. “Eclipse chasers” will travel hundreds of miles to see one.

If you watch the eclipse - be sure to get eclipse glasses. Only cost of the order of dollars. You may also be able to get them on the cover of astronomy magazines. You don’t sense any pain even when the back of your eye is burning - or more likely - getting bleached by UV light. You can lose your eyesight in the center of your vision temporarily, and in rare cases, permanently, by staring at the sun without protection.

The only time it’s safe to stare at the sun without eye protection is when the sun is completely blocked by the Moon and you see the corona (see below).

Though they are common, because the shadow is small, then it’s rare to see an eclipse anywhere particularly. You have to be standing within the blue eclipse track shown on the map here: this shows the eclipses from 2001 to 2020 including the US one.

The last total eclipses in the US were back in the 1960s and 1970s so young people will not have seen one. Even older people won’t have seen it unless you traveled to the eclipse track. Here is the map for those US eclipses. All the blue lines here are total eclipses. The red ones are annular, meaning that the sun is not totally blocked out.

This is NASA’s eclipse page, with lots of maps like that in the map section. Solar Eclipse Page

Because they always happen at new moon, you won’t see the moon until it starts to take a bite out of the sun. It’s lit up from behind. In the same way if you stand in the shadow of anything, you will see the darker side of it, not the sunlit side. There’s no scattered light in space, apart from a bit of light from the Earth, so the shaded side of the Moon is pitch black. It is, quite literally, behind the blue sky, so you don’t see anything of it until it passes between you and the sun.

Some people worry because there will be a total eclipse around midday - because of some Bible passage about darkness at noon. Well eclipses that span midday are very common.

Solar eclipse of August 11, 1999

This eclipse was maximum at 11 am in Romania but was still total over India around midday. This was the last total eclipse in the UK

Photograph of the 1999 solar eclipse by Luc Viatour

That photograph shows the corona - white rays radiating out from the Sun which you only see at times of total eclipse. If you are lucky enough to have a clear sky, you may see this awesome sight. The sky goes dark and you will even see the brightest stars in good viewing conditions.

It's rather spectacular if you get to see a total eclipse - "eclipse chasers" travel around the world to see eclipses. There are several stages to it, first partial eclipse. Then as the moon covers the sun, you get "Bailey's beads" when light shines between gaps in the mountains around the Moon often ending with a single "diamond ring" when just a tiny patch of sun is left. Then it goes dark and the sun's corona shows and you may see the brightest stars. And yes it turns dark in the middle of the day but only for a minute or so and you have to be exactly on the eclipse track to see this.

Solar eclipse of June 21, 2001

This one had greatest eclipse at 12:04:46 so as close to noon as makes no difference - that’s when the eclipse lasted the longest for this one.

Wikipedia has lists of eclipses, so you can follow through to find any other eclipses that you are interested in: Lists of solar eclipses

This is what an eclipse looks like from space - the dark patch here includes some of the area of partial eclipse - it’s only seen as total from the very center and darkest part of the shadow.

You have to be on the narrow path of the Moon's shadow - the Moon is small and the Sun is huge, and the Moon's shadow is shaped like a cone and only just touches the Earth which is why it is so tiny. You have to be positioned within that tiny shadow to see an eclipse.

You have to travel to the eclipse track to see a total eclipse (unless you are already on it). Most people in the US will only see the sun partly covered - a partial eclipse. But if you are on the eclipse track, you will see a total eclipse.

It's well worth going to see if it is reasonably close to you, many people say it is a sight of a lifetime. Unless it is clouded over. In that case it just gets dark for a minute or two and you don't see anything much else.

If you do see it, then the sun gets blocked out by the moon and then you see white rays emanating from the shadow. That's the solar corona. So not totally black, you see the corona and you may see the brightest stars. If you are lucky enough to have a clear sky that is.

This can help you find the best place to see it. You need to be inside the shadow. You also need to have clear skies. So best if you can go to a place that has clear skies more often.

As for David Meade, his book is just complete BS, he believes every conspiracy theory that is going around, and presents it without any fact checking at all. E.g. he trots out the conspiracy theory that the catholic church built a gigantic telescope to watch Nibiru. Actually it is a small telescope that happens to be on the same mountain as one of the very largest telescopes in our world, and the Catholic church has a long term interest in astronomy, has been running small observatories for centuries, so there is no surprise there at all.

Modern telescopes tend to be built, if you have the choice, in a few favoured sites that have exceptionally good seeing so it’s also not much of a coincidence that they built their telescope on the same mountain as a much larger one. The big telescope has no connection at all with the Catholic church and is run by an international consortium of astronomers.

For more on this, as it would make this answer very long to go into it all here:

• Debunked - an alignment of the visible planets behind the sun on 23rd September 2017 is a sign of the end of the world.
• Debunked: Nibiru will hit or fly past Earth in September (or October or November) 2017 - David Meade’s “prophecy”

This answer uses my article: Why the eclipse this August is a wonder of nature and not something to be scared of

See also List of the articles in my Debunking Doomsday blog to date