Yes, they are fake. Some are just out and out frauds doing it for the youtube ad revenue (which can be a lot, thousands of dollars a month for the most popular Nibiru channels, according to the estimates of SocialBlade), or who knows what reason. Some fancy themselves as prophets, maybe they predicted that Trump would be president and are so impressed by the accuracy of their own prediction that they start believing that anything they predict is true. Or they hear voices which they think are extra terrestrials, and think they are telling them the truth, or they use ouija boards and think they are contacting demons who for some reason can see the future and also tell them the truth about the future.

There’s one example we’ve been discussing recently on the facebook Nibiru debunking pages, of a lady who seems to be a legitimate particle theorist with a doctorate, but if so, she doesn’t seem to know the first thing about astronomy, saying absurd things about brown dwarfs. She claims to be Doctor Claudia Albers, who is a genuine professor at Witts university in South Africa. Does anyone reading this know if she is indeed the same person?

Anyway, whoever she is, she says that white dwarf stars (eventual end state of a star like our Sun billions of years into the future) eventually turn into “brown dwarf stars” - a category of star she has made up herself, consisting of a white dwarf star obscured by gas and dust - then into brown dwarfs proper. She claims that brown dwarfs have a dense solid core like a white dwarf surrounded by gas and dust - so presumably electron degenerate matter, without atoms or molecules as we understand them. This is a very eccentric theory as white dwarfs have a mass similar to that of the sun, forming at a late stage, and are able to have such dense cores because they are so massive. All the evidence points to brown dwarfs being “failed stars”- large planets similar to Jupiter but more massive, but not nearly as massive as even the smallest proper star. A brown dwarf by definition didn’t have enough mass to initiate hydrogen burning as a normal star, but may have had some deuterium fusion at an early stage until it sputtered out, which is how it got warm enough to be spotted in infrared. It has a dense core, like Jupiter, but not nearly as dense as a white dwarf star. A brown dwarf’s core is still made of normal non degenerate matter.

Even more absurdly though, she says that our solar system has numerous brown dwarfs in it, and because they are warm, and most easily detected in the infrared, therefore they are invisible. Nonsense! Since when did warming something up make it invisible? The coldest darkest brown dwarf known, at the distance of Jupiter, would be as bright as Betelgeuse, the bright reddish star in the shoulder of Orion. That’s because, being visible, it would shine by reflected light. The Moon is made of dark rock, as dark as worn asphalt, but is of course easily visible in our night sky, so something being dark in colour doesn’t make it invisible either.

She then goes on to say that these invisible brown dwarfs in our sky make our sunsets red. See this point in this video. If their light makes our sunsets red, given that red light is visible light, then how can this light at the same time originate from invisible brown dwarfs? Meanwhile the reason the sunsets are red is well understood, as because the light from the setting sun passes through so much atmosphere, that it is scattered by Raleigh scattering, for the same reason that the daytime sky is blue. That’s just a sample of many absurdities. She can’t seem to say more than a few sentences without putting her foot in her mouth, showing pretty much total ignorance of basic astronomy, though sprinkled with many things she says that are true. She must have read around in the subject, but apparently, not understood some of the most basic ideas that inform it.

It’s embarrassingly bad science. Her ideas just make no sense and I find it hard to credit that someone so qualified could come to believe such things. If she is indeed the same person as that professor, perhaps it is an example of how over specialization can lead academics sometimes to have a very narrow range of knowledge, mainly limited to their particular field of expertise? Her speculations in this area of course are not peer reviewed and haven’t been submitted to scientific journals. Yet she gives youtube video presentations, in which she claims that her ideas are correct. Could be an eccentric physicist crank, as you do get such sometimes, speculating beyond their sphere of expertise and then coming to believe those speculations as the truth. Or it could be someone else impersonating a genuine physicist who has nothing to do with these ideas. Hard to say. If anyone knows more about this, do say. Incidentally her videos have a link at the top of the video description, which you can use to send a donation to help the professor, so she has a financial incentive for posting them.

I did a short checklist some time back of things they say in these youtube videos and the conspiracy websites, that may seem impressive to those with no background in astronomy, but immediately disqualify them as people who know about the subject, if you have a basic understanding of astronomy.

Here is an article I did to help:

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Nibiru Bullshit Tester - How to check if they know anything about astronomy by Robert Walker on Debunking Doomsday

Many of the Nibiru website authors claim to be very knowledgeable about astronomy. It is easy to test though, and find out that they don't understand this stuff. Here are some things they may say which immediately show they are mistaken, don’t have the most basic understanding of astronomy, and don't check their sources.

• If they say IRAS found a planet in 1983 - they are wrong - just follow the links that the debunkers give and you can confirm for yourself that IRAS did not find any planets
• If they say Robert Harrington found planet X and was silenced - they are wrong - his theory was proven to be false six months before he died by Myles Standish
• If they say a planet can hide behind or near the sun for years on end then suddenly appear, they are wrong. This is easy to show to be nonsense. Nothing in a long period orbit like 3600 years can hide behind the sun for any length of time, because Earth goes around it once a year.
• If they say that the Earth's geographical poles have shifted, easy to show they are wrong by checking any starry night, couple of observations and you see that our pole star is still due North. (Magnetic poles do swap places every few tens of thousands of years but there is no sign of that at present and it would not cause earthquakes if they did)
• If they publish a lens flare or an offset lens reflection or sunlight lighting up a patch on clouds, and claim it is Nibiru this shows they are very gullible and don’t understand the basics of astronomy.
• If they post a distant object in Google sky, such as a planetary nebula, hundreds, or thousands of light years away and claim it is Nibiru they are wrong
• If they claim we have two suns, easy to check, just block out our sun with one finger, and you can see they are wrong

This rather dramatic image has gone the rounds a bit and been posted as a photograph of a double sunset in China. It's actually an artist's impression from NASA of a double sunset over an alien planet.

If someone tells you that we have two suns - then you know they are speaking BS. Click away as that means they don’t have the first clue about astronomy.

It is dead easy to check that we have only one sun. Hold a finger in front of it (don’t stare at the Sun as you won’t know if your eyes get damaged) With the sun blocked, do you see a second sun to either side, or above or below? No! Therefore we have only one sun. It really is as easy as that to debunk this one.

• If they say that the astronomers' Planet X or Tyche or Nemesis are Nibiru, they are wrong as all the astronomer's hypothetical planets are hypotheses for planets that orbit permanently way beyond Neptune - if they exist they are no more of a danger to Earth than Neptune or Jupiter.
• If they say that the Nemesis theory predicts end of Earth in the near future they are wrong - the theory (which is more or less disproved now) predicted a possibility of mass extinctions at various dates around 15 million years into the future.
• If they say that Nibiru is in a 3600 year orbit that goes from outside Pluto to Earth, that's an orbit that is not stable for as long as a million years so they are wrong
• If they say that “Planet 9” is Nibiru, then they are wrong as it always orbits well beyond Neptune, if it exists at all.
• If they say a brown dwarf is invisible they are wrong - a brown dwarf is no more invisible than you or me (we also are infrared sources as we are quite warm). Warming something up won’t make it invisible.

If anyone says any of these things and claims to be an expert in astronomy - that’s like someone telling you that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player and won Wimbledeon and then claiming to be an expert on sport.

That wouldn’t lead you to suddenly wonder if he really is a tennis player and wonder if all the Olympic finals were faked to make him out to be a sprinter. You’d just look at the person who said this askance, or indeed aghast, and then from then on you’d probably never trust anything they say on matters of sport.

Usain Bolt winning the 100 meters in Bejing in 2008. If someone told you he was a top seeded tennis player - that would just lead you to treat that person as someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about in matters of sport.

So - it’s like that if you have even a basic understanding of astronomy and someone says any of those things I listed, or posts them on a website, or a youtube video, you immediately know that this person knows nothing at all about astronomy. They know as much about astronomy as the person who said that Usain Bolt was a tennis player knows about sport.

There are many other things they say that are immediate giveaways that they don't have the first clue about astronomy. Indeed if an article claims to be astronomical and uses the words Nibiru or Hercobulus or Wormwood, then unless it is a debunking site, that is a giveaway sign that the author knows nothing of modern astronomy. But what I've listed there already deals with 99% of them probably. That is except for the ones that have no astronomy and just base their prophecies on miracles and the Bible or such like.

If anyone says any of those things, they don't understand astronomy, just click away. See also my Debunking: You can’t trust anyone except the Nibiru people - everyone else is a paid shill of the government or in some other way motivated to propogate falsehoods

And for why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see

Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]

Also, I did a petition to youtube, to ask them to stop ads on doomsday videos, to remove the profit motive for predicting the end of the world on youtube. I think it is unethical to reward people with ad revenue for predicting the world will end in click bait titles. They do have a policy of no ads on ethically problematical videos, so it is consistent with that. It’s not restricting free speech in any way, as the people who upload these videos would continue to be free to say on youtube that the world will end, just won’t get ad revenue for it.

If you agree do sign it, here

Youtube: Petition to Youtube to Halt Ads on Doomsday Videos