Herald Sun: Searching for Planet X [03mar02]

Searching for Planet X
By GRAEME HAMMOND
03mar02

IT'S out there somewhere, big, brown and dangerous -- and it's heading our way.

It's Planet X, the fabled 10th planet of the solar system.

Noted 19th century English astronomer John Couch Adams was the first to begin plotting its likely position after noticing strange deviations in the orbit of Uranus -- at that time the most distant planet known -- that suggested it was being tugged by the gravity of another body.

Since then dozens of eminent astronomers have followed the same hunch. The search has thus far yielded two further planets -- Neptune (1846) and Pluto (1930) -- but not the supersized "brown dwarf" they still think exists.

Will a 10th be found? There are as many sceptics as believers. If it's out there, says John Anderson at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it has a mass five times that of Earth's, takes as long as 1000 years to orbit the Sun and is so far away its effects on the outermost planets won't be detected again until 2600.

But here's where the mystery thickens. If it does exist and is coming back, what will the effects be for Earth. Could it be that it was Planet X that killed the dinosaurs?

More to the point, if the world's best astronomers do prove its existence and know it is returning, would they tell us?

Australian author Stephanie Relfe is among a band of New Age activists who are convinced there is a conspiracy of silence.

Relfe, whose books include The Mars Records: Biofeedback Meter Sessions Where a Man Regained Hidden Memories of Military Service on Mars and The Dangers of Eating Microwave Food, has amassed a catalogue of evidence that suggests Earth is due for a closer encounter than it would wish with Planet X in late 2003.

Among the claims on her website, http://www.metatech.org/:

NASA discovered and excitedly disclosed the existence of Planet X on December 30, 1983. A Washington Post article the next day quoted space researcher Dr James Houck speculating that the object was as close to Earth as 80 billion kilometres -- "if it really is that close, it would be part of our solar system," he said. Media controllers quickly gagged the scientists responsible. One NASA expert, Dr Robert Harrington, who continued to speak about a strange find, met an untimely death in 1993.

OBSERVATORIES continued to sight the planet last year. To quash concerns, NASA announced it had found "the largest asteroid in history" beyond Neptune.

PLANET X has intentionally been made to sound ridiculous and confusing in a bid to deflect interest.

DRAMATIC changes in weather patterns and an upsurge of earthquakes and volcanoes since the 1990s are a precursor of what's to come. X's mass, magnetism and density is such that it disrupts the surface of every planet it passes.

NASA and US military chiefs are quietly building dome homes to survive the coming cataclysm. "As many know, NASA has covered up evidence of UFOs, ETs and structures on the Moon and Mars for quite some time," writes co-conspiracist Mark Hazlewood at his website, http://www.prep2003.com/. He believes the devastation will wipe out all but a few hundred million people on Earth.

How do we survive? Head for the hills, says http://www.zetatalk.com/, which predicts that Planet X's passing will exert such a dramatic effect on the magnetic poles and tectonic plates of Earth that all but the eastern third of Australia will disappear under the waves.