Regular Episode
#121 – ONE ROGUE PLANET: A STAR WARRIOR’S STORY
January 11, 2017

#121 – ONE ROGUE PLANET: A STAR WARRIOR’S STORY

🎙️ Blake Smith and Karen Stollznow continue MonsterTalk’s two-part look at Zecharia Sitchin and the Planet X / Nibiru mythos by welcoming astronomer Dr. Stuart Robbins, host of the Exposing PseudoAstronomy podcast. Where Part 1 (with Dr. Michael Heiser) dismantled the ancient-languages basis for Sitchin’s claims, Part 2 takes on the astronomy — and finds equally little to support the idea that a rogue death-planet is headed our way.

Dr. Robbins is an astrogeophysicist and research scientist whose work has focused on impact craters on Mars, the Moon, Mercury, and Saturn’s moons. He’s also a tireless astronomy educator, better known online as Astro Stew. This episode was recorded in mid-December 2016.

🪐 What “Planet X” Actually Means (and Doesn’t)

Robbins describes Planet X / Nibiru as a catch-all for a broad class of pseudoscience — ancient aliens, apocalyptic rogue planets, and claimed secret knowledge in ancient texts — whose adherents often hold mutually exclusive ideas while imagining they all agree because they’re against the mainstream.

The real astronomical picture is more nuanced. Surveys of the entire sky have ruled out any Jupiter- or Saturn-sized object within a certain distance. However, orbital analyses of distant Kuiper belt objects have led some researchers to hypothesize a large, undiscovered planet far beyond Pluto — sometimes called Planet Nine. Robbins notes this is a legitimate (if not yet convincing) scientific question, but it bears no resemblance to the object any Planet X claimant has ever described.

📅 The Leder Problem: Timelines That Don’t Add Up

Blake raises Nancy Lieder (of ZetaTalk fame), who began promoting a Planet X threat around 1995 — predicting catastrophe in 2003. Robbins clarifies that Lieder doesn’t describe herself as a simple contactee; she claims aliens implanted a telepathic communications device in her brain as a child. He also notes that while Sitchin predated Lieder, the two camps have become inextricably merged in popular culture despite being mutually contradictory: Sitchin put Nibiru’s return around 2186, Lieder said 2003, and others piled on with 2012. A planet that swings through the inner solar system every five years or so would have an average orbital distance inside the asteroid belt — and would be visible to the naked eye at all times.

🌍 Could Life Survive on a Rogue Planet?

A listener question: could a planet with such a wildly elliptical orbit support life? Robbins explains that a true rogue planet — one untethered to any star — could potentially host life underground, warmed by radioactive decay (which accounts for more than half of Earth’s internal heat by most estimates). The catch: the planet would need to be larger than Mars, since Mars appears to be geologically dead, having shed its internal heat source. Any object big enough to stay warm long enough is also big enough that we would almost certainly have already detected it.

🔭 Why You Can’t Hide a Planet (And Why Amateurs Matter)

One of the most persistent features of Planet X mythology is that governments or astronomers are suppressing the evidence. Robbins is unimpressed: tens to hundreds of thousands of amateur astronomers scan the sky every clear night, motivated in part by the fact that discovering a comet still gets your name on it. A planet-sized object anywhere near the inner solar system would be found almost immediately — and there is no plausible mechanism for silencing that many independent observers spread across every country on Earth.

The conversation broadens into a genuinely interesting digression on why amateur astronomers contribute so effectively to professional science (variable star monitoring via organizations like the AAVSO) compared to amateur cryptozoologists. Robbins’s answer: astronomy is still largely in a data-collection phase for many subfields, whereas interpretation — which requires deep professional training — is where amateurs hit a ceiling.

🏛️ Ancient Astronomy and the Sitchin Contradiction

Asked about how ancient peoples actually used astronomy, Robbins notes the obvious practical drivers: calendar-keeping, agricultural timing, and — once you can predict seasons — the tempting extension to predicting wars and the fates of kings (i.e., astrology). He then flags a delicious internal contradiction in Planet X mythology: believers invoke ancient Babylonian records as proof that Nibiru was known, yet those same believers must then explain why every other ancient culture that obsessively tracked the sky — the Chinese, the Greeks, the Maya — somehow missed a planet that supposedly comes screaming through the solar system on a regular schedule.

⚗️ Velikovsky, Von Däniken, and the Armchair Researcher Problem

Robbins brings up Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken as predecessors in the “ancient gods were really planets/aliens” tradition. He notes that Velikovsky’s mythology hinges on Venus having sprung from Jupiter — a claim Velikovsky attributed to Greek myth, except it’s wrong: it was Athena who sprang fully formed from Zeus’s head, not Aphrodite. Whether Velikovsky made an honest mistake and then doubled down or never noticed at all, the error sits at the foundation of his whole edifice.

The broader point: pseudoscientific claims in astronomy (and elsewhere) consistently rely on a single armchair researcher having spotted something that thousands of credentialed specialists somehow missed. Statistically, that framing should raise suspicion rather than excitement. Robbins draws a sharp contrast with how working scientists actually behave when peer reviewers find problems — a process he describes with considerable personal candor.

📚 Further Reading

– 📚 The Twelfth Planet 💵 by Zecharia Sitchin (the primary source for Nibiru claims, examined critically in this episode)
– 📚 Worlds in Collision 💵 by Immanuel Velikovsky
– 📚 Chariots of the Gods 💵 by Erich von Däniken

🔗 Related Links

– Exposing PseudoAstronomy Blog — Dr. Stuart Robbins
– Exposing PseudoAstronomy Podcast — Dr. Stuart Robbins
– Planet X / Nibiru Cataclysm — Wikipedia
– Kuiper Belt — Wikipedia
– Oort Cloud — Wikipedia
– Planet Nine (hypothetical) — Wikipedia
– Rogue Planet — Wikipedia
– American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
– Very Large Array (VLA), New Mexico — Wikipedia
– ZetaTalk / Nancy Lieder — Wikipedia
– Billy Meier (UFO contactee) — Wikipedia
– Dunning–Kruger Effect — Wikipedia

Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.

In this episode of MonsterTalk, we continue with Part 2 of our coverage of Zecharia Sitchin and “Planet-X” aka “Nibiru” by talking with astronomer Stuart Robbins, host of the Exposing PseudoAstronomy pocast. We discuss rogue planets, exo-planets, and the curious history of “Planet-X” apocalypse stories.

Items of Interest

Music

  • Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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