I’ve been answering questions from many people who believe in Nibiru over the last year or so, and I think most of them believe it as a result of a kind of propoganda effect. You have to be someone who flunked physics at high school for it to be possible to believe in it at all. But much of what they say also goes against basic common sense.

I think that’s especially clear when they say that we have a second sun. You don’t need to be a physics professor or a maths whiz kid to see that this is just false. You only need basic common sense. Go out, and you see that we have one sun. If you need to, hold your finger in front of it (don’t stare at it as you can damage your eyes without knowing, because you have no pain receptors in your retina). With the sun blocked, you can check easily that we have only one sun there.

Yet I get people contact me who believe the Nibiru enthusiasts when they say that we have two suns. They use similar methods to those of advertising and propoganda - stirring music, impressive videos (well, silly and embarrassing to astronomers, but impressive to their target audience) and a convincing voice over. And most of all, they use repetition. Once you start searching for Nibiru, google, youtube and facebook will optimize their search results to show you articles about Nibiru, just as they do for anything that interests you which you search for. And then every time you go on line you may see yet another Nibiru video. Over time you get the message repeated so many times, that we have two suns, in many different ways, that you start to believe it. Propoganda is very effective. You can almost come to believe that black is white with enough repetition and impressive sounds and imagery.

They are especially impressed by two things. By youtube videos and by journalist stories. Most of you probably don’t realize this, but once you start searching for them, you find new doomsday stories every one or two weeks. It can start to seem as if everyone world wide is predicting doomsday. But they are not, it’s just that amongst the thousands of articles published every day, then every one or two weeks one of them will be a doomsday story which may get taken up and repeated by a few of the more sensationalist newspapers with less careful fact checking, and every few months or so, main stream journalists get taken in as well and may run it as a story, especially in the “silly season” in the summer when they are short of material to publish. Most people will never see most of these stories and if they happen on one of the ones that get more widely propagated, will just click away and probably forget it, but if you have been primed to look for it, you see many stories of this type every year.

With the youtube videos, many, though not all, earn their creators ad revenue. So there’s an economic incentive there, to make scary doomsday videos. If you can get millions of views, it corresponds to thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars of ad revenue.

It’s a serious issue as some people actually get suicidal as a result. Many of them can’t stop worrying about it, and get sleepless nights, unable to concentrate at work, and may have to give up their jobs out of fear of this totally BS “Nibiru”. I think the youtube videos and the journalist petitions are big factors in this.

So, I’ve made a couple of petitions on Change.org to try to do something about it.

• Youtube: Petition to Youtube to Halt Ads on Doomsday Videos
• To Journalists & Lawyers: Let's End Dramatized Reporting of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal - Video is David Morrison's Cosmophobia talk from 2012

Do sign those petitions and share them. I don’t know who to send them to, if they reach impressive numbers then I can send to the journalists and to Youtube itself. Meanwhile I hope that just signing them will help draw attention to the issues. Any thoughts on this, do say!

My Nibiru debunking articles are here

• Simple Ways To See Nibiru Is Totally Nuts - And Limits On Planets Hiding In Our Solar System
• Why An Extra Planet Can't Be Hidden Behind The Sun Or Above The South Pole
• "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
• Why This New "Planet X" Is No Threat To Earth :).
• No, There Isn't A Planet Called Nibiru, Soon To Hit Earth, And Often Visible In Your Photos Of The Sun :)
• Kudos To "The Independent" Newspaper For Debunking Nibiru "Blood Moon" Hoax
• No, We Were Not Hit By A 500 Kilometer Asteroid On March 8th. Nor Will We Be Hit By Nibiru Any Time - It's BS!
• Petition: Let's End Dramatized Reporting Of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal
• World Did NOT End On 29th July! AWFUL "Silly Season" Story - Journalists Please Be More Responsible
• Petition To Youtube To Halt Ads On Doomsday Videos - They Make The Vulnerable Suicidal

And you can tell from the hundreds of comments on those articles how many scared people there are, genuinely worried by Nibiru. It’s so sad, that they are so scared of such a daft idea, which I think most of them would admit is rather daft if they could just calm down enough to be able to connect to their basic common sense and good judgement. Especially young people and people who don’t have a strong background in science or astronomy.