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Episode 51: The Fake Story of Planet X, Part 4 (Nancy Lieder)

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Recap: Up through mid-2003, Nancy Lieder claimed Planet X would come close to Earth and cause major catastrophes. It didn't happen. She's still active, claimes Planet X is still there, and while many don't take her seriously, we can learn a lot about the 2012 phenomenon from what happened with her in 2003 and the subsequent years.

Solution to Episode 50's Puzzler: First: "While the Moon causes tides on Earth, there will also be tides on the Moon. When are tides largest on the Moon? Same time their largest on Earth, or at a different time -- why?"

Congratulations to Jan S. for being the first to send in a correct response. The solution is that yes, Earth causes tides on the Moon, but because the same face is towards Earth, the high tide stays in roughly the same spot. Since the Moon wobbles in its orbit, it moves around a bit, and since the Moon changes distance to Earth, the height changes, too. But, there is still a tidal effect, and this can be realized with simply Newton's Third Law: When a body exerts a force on another body, that second body exerts an equal and opposite force on the first.

Second: "We don't think that Mars has any plate tectonics. Would it experience quakes, and if so, what could cause them?"

Jan wrote in for that one, too, and suggested that a large enough impact on Mars would be seismologically detectable and cause a quake, which is correct.

David S. wrote in and corrected me saying they would be called Marsquakes, not earthquakes ... except I listened to the episode again and I said "quakes," not earthquakes, so the correction was unwarranted. And David's answer for the puzzler solution was wrong, so there.

As I said, Jan was right, an impact would cause a quake. A landslide would cause a quake. Not present-day, but in the past, Mars has had active volcanism, and that would have caused quakes.

You can still have a quake even without plate tectonics -- basically, anything that makes the crust vibrate will cause that vibration ... by definition ... and that vibration is technically a quake.

Puzzler: Nancy Lieder claimed that it's 23x the size, so we'll assume diameter, of Jupiter, and that it's 4x the mass of Jupiter. She also said its gravity is 50% more than Earth's - we'll assume she means surface gravity - and that it is a water world with just a few landmasses. Is what she said plausible based on what we know from basic physics?

Q&A: There was no Q&A for this episode.

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Transcript

Claim: Nancy Lieder claimed between 1995 and up through May 2003 that a Planet X that would cause a geographic pole flip, leaving billions dead and significant landmass submerged, would happen by the end of 2003. Obviously this did not happen. She later went through a few different post-hoc ways of explaining it.

I also wanted to add a bit of a personal note to this episode: This was my first introduction to Coast to Coast AM, the first time I have ever heard Phil Plait's voice, and one of my first real exposures to pseudoscience. I was following some of Phil Plait's work at the time and was more interested in his forums and talking with other people about astronomy since it was my major in college at the time. Then Phil posted that he would be debating Nancy live, on air, on May 13, 2003. I listened in. This podcast episode is a bit of a "full circle" thing for me.

What this Episode Is NOT

So now, before we go any further, I want to point out two things that this episode is not.

First, it is not meant to make any conclusions nor statements about the mental health of Nancy Lieder, nor whether she really believes what she says or not. I'm presenting what she's stated compared with what the observable, independent facts show.

To that end, this is not a clip show of her faulty astronomy. That'll be an episode in a few months or so. There's a lot that she does not understand, and apparently the aliens that she channels do not understand, either. But that's another episode. This one is JUST on her claims regarding Planet X.

Background into Nancy Lieder

That said, since this episode focuses really on one person making a specific claim, it's important to give it context and talk a little about Nancy Lieder. Her bio that's usually read on Coast to Coast - and yes, there will be clips coming up - is that she was a computer professional and an enhanced UFO contactee.

Nancy claims that her soul agreed, before incarnating into Nancy - and she frequently refers to herself in the third person - that she would be a conduit for extraterrestrial communications in this life. But she didn't know that until her 50s; she describes herself as a sleeper until that time.

But, she says that she was enhanced in her 20s during surgery, when a group of aliens from many planets within the zeta Reticuli star system implanted a bit of their DNA into the telepathic regions of her brain. At that point, she still didn't know she was a sleeper agent, but she immediately noticed an increase in her telepathic abilities, manifesting in things commonly referred to by people like Rupert Sheldrake as "telephone telepathy," when you know who's calling you before you pick up the phone. I know who's calling me 'cause I have caller ID, though maybe she didn't have that in the 1970s.

But, she says that she was enhanced in her 20s during surgery, when a group of aliens from many planets within the zeta Reticuli star system implanted a bit of their DNA into the telepathic regions of her brain. At that point, she still didn't know she was a sleeper agent, but she immediately noticed an increase in her telepathic abilities, manifesting in things commonly referred to by people like Rupert Sheldrake as "telephone telepathy," when you know who's calling you before you pick up the phone. I know who's calling me 'cause I have caller ID, though maybe she didn't have that in the 1970s.

According to the bio on her website, Nancy came into her own in 1993, discovering that she was a contactee and communicator with the Zetas, for short. She met one of her hybrid alien children and eventually left her husband and job and went into the country to speak her Truth from the Zetas.

She started the ZetaTalk website in 1995, early in the internet and when I was in 6th grade. She was very active in newsgroups and the old alt.astronomy groups on the internet, and Wikipedia credits her with that year being the one to introduce the idea of a cataclysm from a rogue Planet X or Nibiru. Meanwhile, RationalWiki describes it as an apocalyptic alien-contactee cult started by free-range nutbar Nancy Leider, for whatever that's worth. As a side-note, I like RationalWiki, but I think it does itself a disservice when people choose to use that kind of language.

Moving on with this lengthy bio, Nancy says that she is not a medium and not a channeler, though she says she does channel the Zetas, but they don't take over her body. She describes her interaction as though they are holding up flash cards and she's reading off of them when she's speaking for them. When doing this channeling, she will start by saying, "This is the Zetas on that ..." and then go into it, and she'll end with something like, "This is the end of ZetaTalk." She's very good at branding.

Her description of how she says she channels is actually quite ingenious, in my opinion. Because she has to communicate questions to the Zetas, and they have to prompt her with concepts that she puts into words back to us, she says that if she forgets the question or doesn't understand it, then she can't relay it to the Zetas. So if I, for example, were to ask her to ask the Zetas about quantumchromodynamics to see if they really were advanced aliens, she wouldn't do it because she doesn't understand it, therefore she can't relay it to the Zetas.

This is also her excuse for when she says things that are factually wrong. She claims that since the Zetas aren't giving her exact English words to say, that if she has a wrong impression in her head, they can't get their message through. To quote her: "I am a true translator. You know, I'm a participant. If I have something in my head that's wrong, they have a hard time getting their concepts through that veil. So sometimes I will stumble. If I don't understand the topic, if I'm not on the same page, and I don't have a background in it, I can-- I can really bloop."

This also accounts for her word choice slips when channeling, sometimes using "I" instead of "we" when she's supposed to be talking from them. Otherwise, like other channelers - even though she says she isn't one - she does try to slip into a slightly different word pattern when channeling, generally just speaking faster but putting in a lot of "um"s and "uh"s because she can't quite keep up with herself.

So that's the background on Nancy, and with that in mind, we can look into her claims of a 2003 apocalypse.

It Didn't Happen

Perhaps the most obvious statement is that, obviously and quite demonstrably, what she said would happen in 2003 did not actually happen. So I could end the podcast now. But I think it's informative to go further, and you'll be able to see parallels with it and with the 2012 stuff we're going through now.

Leading Up to May, 2003

By way of a deadline, Nancy said that Planet X would cause a pole flip in 2003 and lots of bad stuff would happen. The deadline was in the weeks surrounding May 15, with a closest approach of May 27, 2003.

Leading up to this event, Nancy borrowed on several other mythologies to build her own.

One was that of Zecharia Sitchen, whom I discussed in Episode 23, and who is generally credited with the 3600-year orbiting Planet X with Anunaki aliens who came to Earth to mine gold. Nancy adopts both the aliens who live on Planet X as well as the 3600-year planet, though she says it's actually on a 3657-year orbit.

Another mythology she goes with is that of Velikovsky, whom I talked about in Episode 46. From Velikovsky's ideas of great cataclysms in the past being due to Venus, Nancy took upon the idea that Planet X would cause lots of cataclysms on Earth as it got close.

She also went to the Bible, claiming that Moses actually described plagues in Egypt that lasted for 7 years, and these were 7 years leading up to the arrival of Planet X, which happened last during the Exodus talked about in the Old Testament of the Judeo-Christian Bible.

So from all of these ideas, Nancy put together a somewhat cohesive story that took a lot of aspects from the fringe, but ideas that were popular with anti-science mentality that we still see today.

Keep in mind that this was also during the early days of the internet. I'm not bringing that up for context of Nancy, but to emphasize this was a time of a communication revolution, the dawn of the "Information Age," as some people have termed it. News could spread much faster than it could before, and because of that, any news of things like volcanoes, weird weather, or earthquakes was made available to a worldwide audience much faster than ever before.

This is why many people will say that since the 90s, there's been a rise in earthquakes and what have been termed "earth changes." Rather, if they actually look at the statistics, they'll see no such increase in the 1990s. It was just that starting in the 90s, the local news in Iowa in the US could actually say, "Today, a 4.2 magnitude earthquake happened in Pursat, Cambodia."

Of course this leads into where I'm going with Nancy: She claimed that it was starting in 1995, when she happened to start her ZetaTalk website, and about 7 years before May 2003, that earth changes started to happen with increasing frequency. With news of more minor events being much more readily available, this grew her following.

Moving forward, in November of 2002, she went on Coast to Coast AM and stated, that Planet X would "be visible in the daylight sky 6-7 weeks before passage." She was next on Coast to Coast on April 25, 2003 and when George Noory, the host, reiterated that statement, Nancy changed it and said that it'll be a "sure thing" it'll be visible during daylight when it'll come up as a second sun, but only a week before passage, and that it would definitely be before June 1.

Nancy also pointed to several images that people sent her, saying that she's of course seen it many times, but that it's also visible in images taken by NASA and other people. What she actually pointed to was image noise and hot pixels, things I discussed in my two-part episode on image processing, Episodes 47 and 48. Nice when you can reference yourself.

Anyway, I could go on to more statements that she made, but there are really only two more in the April interview I want to make. First, she said that personally, there's a 0% chance that it won't happen. Second is this clip: [Coast to Coast AM clip from April 25, 2003, Hour 1, starting 11:35]

"I'm stickin' to my story, George."

Excuses After 2003: 2005

That of course made life a bit hard for Nancy when nothing happened in May and June of 2003. She wasn't on Coast for two years, and when she was on again the night of August 9, 2005, she complained that she felt that she was booted from Coast but the popularity of her website was growing.

George for once got right to the point and said that Nancy made the prediction, it didn't happen ... what happened? This is a long clip, but I think it's important to play the three minutes to demonstrate what she said. If you don't want to listen, fast-forward by about 2 minutes 50 seconds: [Coast to Coast AM clip from August 9, 2005, Hour 1, starting 3:05 and again at 5:16]

"Actually it showed up, it just didn't pass over our heads. It has a sling orbit, it actually, it passed two different suns. Our sun is a binary, but our binary is a dark, unlit sun, so therefor we really can't see it. According to the Zetas, it's 18.74 Sun-Pluto distances out into space, in the direction of Orion. And-- and when everything coalesced out of the Big Bang, this planet did not go 'round and 'round one sun, it started slinging past, and then both gravity forces were behind it so it slung back again. Whoops! now both gravity-- so like a pendulum. Back and forth, past these two suns, and it slings through our solar system every 3657 years, very close to Zecharia Sitchen's Ancient Sumerian, uh, interpretations, 3600 bashar. Well the last time it came through was the Jewish exodus period when there was all this red blood in the rivers and, we did in fact have a shift in our axis according to Portsdown University in, uh, Germany at that time. So we're due. Well, there's-- there's nothing in human astrophysics that explains this, uh, sling orbit, and that's, that's not because, um, our astrophysics [sic] are dumb, it's because we're relatively naïve and inexperienced. But it-- it, when it comes through, it dives straight for the sun, but there's a gravity repulsion force, which according to the Zetas why the moon stays up there - it's way too heavy and moving too slowly not to be dropping to Earth, it's NOT centrifugal force that keeps our moon up there."

"Actually, the reason this is a-a stealth planet and, and if you look in ancient documents like the Colbrin [bible], it states that when it does make its passage and roar over our head causing a pole shift 'cause it's a huge magnet - much bigger than we - it comes from the sun, from the direction of the sun, and hides the face of the sun as it makes its passage. Um, this-this is because it's shrouded by such a dust cloud-- huge red dust-- iron oxide dust that is like a fuzz ball in a fog bank. That's what we're looking at right now. When it was coming in in 2003, it was behind the sun to us, and light reflected off that fuzzball and bounced back to us and that was the season of the second sun, when many people saw two suns rising and setting during the summer of 2003. It's now so close to the sun that when we look at the sun, we see a fuzzball with light reflected back to the sun. But, it's the reason for all the earthquakes, the weather anomalies, the increasing volcanism, the melting from the bottom-up of the Earth of the permafrost, and the glaciers and the like -- it's because of Planet X."

Two things can be noticed immediately from that clip. First, she never really directly answered the question. Second, her knowledge of astronomy and physics is atrocious, but as I said, that's a different episode.

For those of you who had trouble parsing it, or who skipped to this point of the episode, basically, Nancy said that it did show up, but you couldn't see it 'cause it was behind the Sun as opposed to a close pass by Earth, and it's still there it's just hard to see, but you can see its effects with all the earth changes that're happening.

Excuses After 2003: 2007

In 2007, four years after the non-event, Nancy was on again. This time, she had a different explanation: The Zetas told a white lie: [Coast to Coast AM clip from May 3, 2007, Hour 1, starting 19:16]

"... and it creeps past the sun very slowly, but now it's on its outward bound pass, and, um, we can't-- we're like deer in headlights, we can't get out of the way. So they did this falsely. Was I devastated? You betcha. I mean, I just didn't know-- I was like catatonic for a week or so, just went on long walks in the woods, and-- and, uh, then when they came out and explained what they had done, and I was explaining to people, uh, the fanclub just kept coming in and asking for clarification. In the meantime, now, Zeta predictions one after the other have come true. Things that were made in '95, late '90s, etc."

Why did they tell this white lie? Because they don't like our politics. According to Nancy in 2007, they did it because Planet X really IS coming, and George W. Bush, then-president of the United States, knew about it. But, Bush and everyone else didn't know exactly when it would happen, so they were all following Nancy's stuff, and so this was all a ploy to bring them out of the woodwork and make them "fall on their swords." That by scrambling to make preparations for Planet X's arrival based on what Nancy said, they would reveal their hands.

And, that because of their betrayal, that at that time, in 2007, Bush had lost all control. That Bush had secretly ordered martial law, an invasion of Iran, but since 2003, the military simply was disobeying orders and didn't consider Bush to be the commander in chief. And, that because of this, soldiers were secretly leaving Iraq and coming home.

The host did not challenge her on that statement, but a caller came in and called her an utter fraud.

Nancy's Current Statements: 2011

Four years later, in 2011, Nancy changed her tune again. Not that she had made everything up, no -- Planet X was still here. It has 23x the mass and 4x the diameter of Jupiter, with oceans and a few land masses, though it was termed by Nancy to be a "brown dwarf." Think of Lantea if you're a Stargate: Atlantis fan. It also has 50% more gravity than Earth, so creatures are 50% larger, and men from there are hunks, according to Nancy.

Planet X was on the other side of the sun in 2003. The reason for all the second sun sightings on YouTube is that dust surrounding Planet X was bouncing light off our sun and reflecting it towards us. Now, in 2011, the situation is that it's between us and the sun, and we can't really see it well, except in some special photos verified only by Nancy but not really recognized for what they are by the people who take the photos.

Oh, and Planet X has stopped Earth in its orbit, it's holding us like in the arms of a grizzly bear due to disturbing particle flows from the Sun. As to why stars continue to move from one night to the next, even with the planet stopped, Nancy didn't provide that information.

The Zetas aren't actually allowed to tell us specific dates of when Planet X will come, so according to Nancy, they still had told her a white lie back from 1995 through 2003, but it wasn't so that Bush would fall on his sword, and she made no mention of the military ignoring their commander in chief.

Instead, it was so that the so-called "Power Elite" would fall on their swords, that Nancy's information would force the wealthy and those in power to "show their hands."

What Can We Learn?

There's a lot more to what happened, but those are the basic claims and facts surrounding the case. The root idea of Planet X coming by and doing bad stuff, causing a pole flip, didn't happen in 2003. Leading up to this event, about a week before it, Nancy came on another radio show and told listeners to kill their pets in anticipation of what was going to happen. When asked if she had killed her own pets, she replied that she had, and "The puppies are in a happy place." She also advised, "A dog makes a good meal."

We see the same thing happening now, in the few months leading up to December 21, 2012, which Nancy actually says is a non-event because the calendar correlations are not necessarily correct. At least she learned her lesson of not making specific dates her deadlines anymore.

But getting back to it, as I said, we see the same thing happening now, the same basic ideas of Planet X coming by and doing bad stuff transposed, nine years later, to the 2012 phenomenon. People are pointing to the exact same lines of faulty evidence: A supposed increase in earthquakes which isn't actually happening; increase in volcanoes which isn't happening; a second sun in photos which are just lens flares, reflections, or other things, and so on. And yet, the same idea that if there was a large, planet-like or star-like object nearby, astronomers would have seen it YEARS ahead of time, and there would be no way to keep it secret. At the time of this recording, three months before December, 2012, it would be the brightest object in the sky besides the sun and probably the moon. You can't hide that.

This was wrong in 2003, and it's wrong in 2012. And now, just like then, people who believe those who spread this kind of fear, are afraid themselves, and some are quitting their jobs, moving to what the gurus say will be safe places, killing their pets, and other things. I only hope that there aren't any cult-like mass suicides like there were with Comet Hale-Bopp in the few days before and after December 21, 2012.

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