“There apparently is a great deal of interest in celestial bodies, and their locations, and trajectories at the end of the calendar year 2012. Now, I for one love a good book or movie as much as the next guy. But the stuff flying around through cyberspace, TV, and the movies is not based on science. There is even a fake NASA news release out there…” – Don Yeomans, NASA senior research scientist…“Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye” (NASA).
There’s also a recent NASA image of Mount Everest “out there” which NASA has admitted was actually a depiction of Saser Muztagh in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India which is considerably smaller than Earth’s tallest mountain (source). The picture spread rapidly via Twitter and was picked up by media around the world, including the US-based magazine The Atlantic, astronomy website Space.com, and US cable news channel MSNBC. But Nepalis smelt a rat and voiced their suspicions on social media. Journalist Kunda Dixit, an authority on the Himalayas, tweeted: “Sorry guys, but the tall peak with the shadow in the middle is not Mount Everest.” NASA confirmed on Thursday (Dec. 6) that it had made a mistake and removed the picture from its website. “It is not Everest. It is Saser Muztagh, in the Karakoram Range of the Kashmir region of India,” a spokesman admitted in an email to AFP. “The view is in mid-afternoon light looking northeastward.” He did not explain how the picture from the space station, a joint project of the US, Russia, Japan, Canada, and Europe, had been wrongly identified (source).
Hmm. If NASA can’t even accurately identify the tallest mountain on Earth from space, why should we trust its claim that stories about wayward planets in outer space are bogus? The next thing you know, NASA will call Santa Claus bogus! The UCSB Department of Geography wishes you a December 25 Merry Christmas either way…
Editor’s note: Thanks to Val Noronha for slyly suggesting this topic. For more on the subject of “the long-awaited, much-hyped, and entirely farcical Maya apocalypse,” see the in-depth NASA article regarding the subject.
