For decades, a surprising number of people believed a giant hidden planet was hurtling toward Earth and that governments were covering it up. This episode traces the Nibiru cataclysm strictly as a cultural and historical phenomenon, from Nancy Lieder's 1995 ZetaTalk website and her claims of an implant from gray aliens, through her denial of Comet Hale-Bopp and her failed May 27, 2003 doomsday, to the merger of her Planet X with Zecharia Sitchin's disputed Sumerian translations in The Twelfth Planet, even though Sitchin's own timeline put Nibiru's return around the year 2900.

We follow how the myth attached itself to the 2012 Mayan calendar panic and then to David Meade's 2017 predictions built from Book of Revelation numerology and Great Pyramid measurements, with dates that kept moving from September 23 to October 5. Then we turn to the p ...