There are a number of planetary objects proposed in religion, astrology, ufology and pseudoscience whose existence is not supported by scientific evidence.
Kolob is a star or planet described in the Book of Abraham, a sacred text in many traditions of the Latter Day Saint movement. Kolob is also mentioned in a Latter-day Saint hymn. The Book of Abraham refers to Kolob as a "star", however, it also refers to several planets as stars, and Kolob is commonly viewed as a planet by Latter Day Saints today.
Kolob is described as the heavenly body closest to the throne of God. Joseph Smith also claimed it "signified" the first creation.
Lilith
This article is about the astrological Earth moon. For the asteroid, see 1181 Lilith. For the scientific hypothesis of Earth's second moon, see Claimed moons of Earth.
Lilith is a fictitious invisible moon of Earth, supposedly about the same mass as the Earth's Moon, proposed in 1918 by astrologer Walter Gorn Old, who called himself Sepharial. Sepharial applied the name Lilith from medieval Jewish legend, where she is described as the first wife of Adam.[1] Sepharial claimed that Lilith was the same second moon that scientist Georg Waltemath claimed to have discovered twenty years earlier, but which had never been confirmed.[2][3] Sepharial also claimed to be the first person in history to observe Waltemath's moon as it crossed the Sun, and rationalized that it was too dark to be otherwise visually detected.[4]
Sepharial's comments ignored the fact that Waltemath's proposed moon had already been discredited by the scientific community at the turn of the century.[5]
There are many readily apparent holes in the arguments supporting Lilith's existence, and its existence is believed only by fringe groups; astrologers now generally use the name for the position of the actual Moon's apogee.[5]
In modern astrology
In present-day astrology, the name Lilith or Black Moon Lilith is usually given to a point on the horoscope of the actual Moon's apogee. When considered as a point, this Lilith is sometimes defined as the second focus of the ellipse described by the Moon's orbit; the Earth is the first focus, and the apogee lies in the same approximate direction as the focus. It takes 8years and 10months for this point to complete a circuit through the zodiac tracking the apsidal precession.[6]
Ummo (IPA:[ˈumo]) is a hypothetical planet believed to be located in the Constellation Virgo. Ummo and its civilisation are described in a decades-long series of claims that aliens from the planet Ummo were communicating with people on the Earth. Most Ummo information was in the form of detailed documents and letters[12] sent to various esoteric groups or UFO enthusiasts. The Ummo affair was subject to much mainstream attention in France and Spain during the 1960s and a degree of interest remains regarding the subject. Ummoism is the term used to define different groups interested in the study of the ideas and concepts presented in the Ummo letters[13]). The culprit (or culprits) is unknown, but José Luis Jordán Peña has claimed responsibility for writing the letters and instigating Ummoism,[14] leading many to think that Ummo could be an elaborate hoax. However, twenty years ago, there were still a few small groups of devotees, such as "a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo".[15]
Jacques Vallée has said that the author(s) of the Ummo documents might be a real-world analogue of the fictional creators of Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".[16] Historian Mike Dash writes that Ummoism began on 6 February 1966, in Madrid. On that day, Jordán Peña claimed to have had a close encounter of the first kind when he saw "an enormous circular object with three legs and, on its underside, a curious symbol: three vertical lines joined by a horizontal bar. The two exterior lines curved outward at the edges, which made the pictogram resemble the alchemical sign for the planet Uranus." (Dash, 299) Peña's report generated a fair amount of excitement, but it was only the beginning. Not long afterwards, a Madrid author of a UFO book received several photographs in an anonymous mailing. The photos were of a craft similar to the one reported by Peña, and bearing the same symbol. Within a few weeks, "a leading Spanish contactee named Fernando Sesma Manzano became involved when he began receiving lengthy, typewritten documents which purported to come from a spacefaring race called the Ummites." (Dash, 299)
Since 1991, the well known french researcher Jean-Pierre Petit has claimed to have detected signs of superior intelligence in some of the Ummite writings he says he has received. He also claims that the scientific subjects addressed in the ummite letters are totally innovative and have directly inspired him in his research in cosmology and magnetohydrodynamics..[17][18][19]
On the basis of letters, it is difficult to speak of an Ummite language. All we have, apart from a few complete sentences, is a lexicon, a set of vocables, the vast majority of which are given to us in isolation. Antonio Ribera mentions 403 words ummites in a 1978 compilation[20] and Jean Pollion, in Ummo, de vrais extraterrestres (2002), lists over a thousand words considering that every doubling of a letter in a word is significant.
Two theories have been formulated by analysts of Ummite letters:
the first, defended by Jean Pollion pseudonyme, considers that each letter (sound or phoneme) in words transcribed in typewritten form is signifying, and he has called these sounds "soncepts". He considers this to be an "ideophonemic" language:[21]
"By analogy with ideographic languages, which proceed by assembling ideas corresponding to written and pronounceable signs, I have chosen to attribute to this language the "ideophonemic" character. To date, I have counted 17 "soncepts" by associative combinations of these phonemes, almost all of which are relational."
The second considers that differences in spelling (especially the doubling of letters) are of little significance, and that they are due to differences in the understanding of foreign sounds by the typist(s), or to difficulties in alphabetic transcription. They consider that language is made up of word-objects and not of "soncepts."
Currently, more than 1300 pages of those letters have been registered, but it is possible that many other letters exist. In a 1988 letter, reference is made to the existence of 3850 pages, copies of which have been sent to several individuals, representing perhaps up to 160,000 pages of total Ummo documents. The true identity of the authors of those reports remains unknown.
Dash notes that "few ufologists outside Spain took Ummoism seriously—the photographic evidence was highly suspect, and, while the Ummite letters were more sophisticated than most contactee communication, there was nothing in them that could not have originated on Earth." Still, Dash allows that, whatever their origins, "considerable effort had gone into the supposed hoax." (Dash, 299)
Many scientific subjects are described in detail in the letters, including network theory (or graph theory), astrophysics, cosmology, the unified field theory, biology, and evolution. Some of this information is thought to be dubious pseudoscience, but much of it is scientifically accurate. However, Jerome Clark (Clark, 1993) notes that Jacques Vallée argued that the scientific content of the Ummo letters was knowledgeable but unremarkable, and compared the scientific references to a well-researched science fiction novel—plausible in the 1960s, but dated by the standards of the 1990s.
The controversy over an "error" in the distance from Wolf 424 arose from the first letter, referenced D21 (May 1966), which states: "The first distance is the one used by terrestrial astronomers for their calculations (disdaining the curvatures of light as it passes through fields of high gravitational intensity), such a distance is "constant" for two bodies fixed in space. The second distance is a function of time, measured in an N-dimensional space with a certain periodicity. Its measurement is very important as it relates to our galactic travels. DISTANCE FROM IUMMA TO THE SUN. The apparent distance, i.e. that which a coherent beam of waves would follow in three-dimensional space, on 4 January 1955, was 14.437 light-years. The real distance (straight distance in decadimensional space) on the same date, according to our measurements, was 3.685 light-years". Further on, after giving some characteristics, the author adds "The result is that it is impossible, even with the most careful axis translation, to identify the same star coded by us with another catalogued by Earth astronomers. We believe, however, that our IUMMA may still be the star you've registered as WOLF 424, as its coordinates are similar to those we've given you."
Thus, ill-informed or ill-intentioned critics have amputated the original writings, arguing that the author of the letters relied on an erroneous measurement, this distance coinciding with that measured by Yerkes' laboratory in 1938 (3.6 to 3.8 al) for Wolf 424, although Yerkes corrected it in 1952).
The work of Zecharia Sitchin has garnered much attention among ufologists, ancient astronaut theorists and conspiracy theorists. He claimed to have uncovered, through his retranslations of Sumerian texts, evidence that the human race was visited/created by a group of extraterrestrials from a distant planet in the Solar System. Part of his theory lay in an astronomical interpretation of the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, in which he replaced the names of gods with hypothetical planets. However, since the principal evidence for Sitchin's claims lay in his own personally derived etymologies and not on any scholarly agreed interpretations, academics consider it pseudoscience and pseudohistory, if they know it at all.[22][23][24]
Sitchin's theory proposes the planets Tiamat and Nibiru. Tiamat supposedly existed between Mars and Jupiter. The planet's orbit was disrupted by the arrival of a large planet or very small star (less than twenty times the size of Jupiter) which passed through the planetary system between 65 million and four billion years ago. The new orbits caused Tiamat to collide with one of the moons of Nibiru. The debris from this collision are thought by the theory's proponents to have variously formed the asteroid belt and the current form of planet Earth.
Sitchin claims that the Babylonians associated Nibiru with the god Marduk; the word is Akkadian and the meaning is uncertain. Sitchin hypothesized it as a planet in a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, with a perihelion passage some 3,600 years ago and assumed orbital period of about 3,450 years; he also claimed it was the home of a technologically advanced human-like alien race, the Anunnaki, who apparently visited Earth in search of gold. These beings eventually created humanity by genetically crossing themselves with extant primates, and thus became the first gods.
Beginning in 1995, websites such as ZetaTalk have claimed that Nibiru or "Planet X" is a brown dwarf currently within our planetary system, soon to pass relatively close to Earth. Sitchin disagreed it is a star, with the timing and parameters of passage.[25]
Sitchin also postulated that Pluto began life as Gaga, a satellite of Saturn which, due to perturbation caused by Nibiru's passing, was flung into orbit beyond Neptune.
Project Serpo is an alleged top-secret exchange program between the United States government and an alien planet called Serpo in the Zeta Reticuli star system. Details of the alleged exchange program have appeared in several UFO conspiracy stories, including one incident in 1983—in which a man identifying himself as United States Air Force Sergeant Richard C. Doty contacted investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe claiming to be able to supply her Air Force records of the exchange for her HBO documentary The ET Factor, only to pull out without providing any evidence to substantiate his story—and one incident in 2005 when a series of emails were sent to a UFO discussion group run by Victor Martinez claiming that the project was real.[26] Some variations on the conspiracy story state that the name Serpo is the nickname of the extrasolar planet.[26] Other versions state that it is a mispronunciation of either Serponia or Seinu by authorities involved in the project.
The first mention of a 'Project Serpo' was in a UFO email list maintained by enthusiast Victor Martinez. Various versions of the conspiracy theory circulated and were later detailed on a website. According to the most common version of the story, an alien survived a crash near Roswell in the later 1940s (see Roswell UFO incident). This alien was detained but treated well by American military forces, contacted its home planet and eventually repatriated. The story continues by claiming that this led to the establishment of some sort of relationship between the American government and the people of its home world, said to be a planet of the binary star system Zeta Reticuli.[26]
Zeta Reticuli has a history in ufology (including the Betty and Barney Hill abduction and the Bob Lazar story), having been claimed as the home system of an alien race called the Greys.
The story finally claims that twelve American military personnel visited the planet between 1965 and 1978 and that all of the party have since died, from "after effects of high radiation levels from the two suns".[26] Another version of the story claims that "Eight (8) Team Members returned on the seven (7) month trek home. Team Member #308 (Team Pilot #2) died of a pulmonary embolism en route to SERPO on the 9-month journey; 11 arrived safely. One (1) died on the planet – and both of their bodies were returned to Earth – while two (2) others decided to remain on the ALIEN homeworld of SERPO."[27]
One criticism of Project Serpo stems from the lack of veracity of one of its alleged witnesses, Sergeant Richard Doty. Doty has been involved in other alleged UFO-related activities (see Majestic 12 and Paul Bennewitz), and thus is a discredited source (or a purposeful provider of disinformation).[26] Additionally, there is no physical evidence supporting the project's existence.[26] According to Tim Swartz of Mysteries Magazine, Doty, who promised evidence to Moulton Howe before backing out, has been involved in circulating several other UFO conspiracy stories.[26] Swartz also expressed that the details of Project Serpo have varied considerably with different accounts.[26] It has been alleged that the entire series of posts were designed to be viral marketing for a new book by Doty.[28]
Bill Ryan, a chief proponent of publicizing the Project Serpo claims, announced on 5 March 2007, that he was stepping down from his role as webmaster for the Serpo material. Ryan nevertheless maintains his belief that an extraterrestrial exchange program did occur, although he states that the Serpo releases definitely contained disinformation.[29]
↑ Graves, Robert; Patai, Raphael (1964). Hebrew Myths: The book of Genesis. New York, NY: Doubleday. pp.65–69. ISBN978-1-85754-661-3., ISBN1-85754-661-X, Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd. (1 October 2004); Graves & Patai cite "Yalqut Reubeni ad. Gen.II.21; IV.8.", for which see"Lilith". Gnosis.
1 2 Cheung, Samson H. "The Earth's second moon, 1846–present" (personal academic webpage). Davis, CA: University of California. The original idea was that the gravitational field of the second moon should account for the then-inexplicable minor deviations of the motion of our big Moon. That meant an object at least several [thousands of?] miles large – but if such a large second moon really existed, it would have been seen by the Babylonians.
↑ deGravelaine, Joëlle (2006). "Lilith und das Loslassen". Astrologie Heute (in German). No.23;summary at"Lilith - the dark moon". Astrodienst. Retrieved 9 October 2011;see alsodeGravelaine, Joëlle (1990). Lilith. Der Schwarze Mond: Die Große Göttin im Horoskop (in German). Wettswil, DE: Edition Astrodata. ISBN978-3907029138. ISBN3907029135
↑ Some forty originals of the letters can be downloaded from the second column (Original PDF scan) on the spanish web site https://ummo-ciencias.org/cartas.html page.
↑ Antonio Ribera Les Extra-terrestres sont-ils parmi nous? Le véritable langage Ummo (original Spanish title: El misterio de Ummo in 1979), translated by J. J. Pastor, Éditions du Rocher, 1984 and 1991, ISBN2-268-012-905; p.217
↑ Jean Pollion, Ummo, de vrais extraterrestres!, Éditions Aldane, June 2002, page 281.
Comet Hale–Bopp is a long-period comet that was one of the most widely observed of the 20th century and one of the brightest seen for many decades.
Zecharia Sitchin was an author of a number of books proposing an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributed the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he claimed was a race of extraterrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He claimed that Sumerian mythology suggests that this hypothetical planet of Nibiru is in an elongated, 3,600-year-long elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages.
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the United States government, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlled by a non-human intelligence or built using alien technology. Such conspiracy theories usually argue that Earth governments are in communication or cooperation with extraterrestrial visitors despite public disclaimers, and further that some of these theories claim that the governments are explicitly allowing alien abduction.
Majestic 12, also known as Majic-12, and MJ-12 for short, is a purported organization that appears in UFO conspiracy theories. The organization is claimed to be the code name of an alleged secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, formed in 1947 by an executive order by U.S. President Harry S. Truman to facilitate recovery and investigation of alien spacecraft. The concept originated in a series of supposedly leaked secret government documents first circulated by ufologists in 1984. Upon examination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) declared the documents to be "completely bogus", and many ufologists consider them to be an elaborate hoax. Majestic 12 remains popular among some UFO conspiracy theorists and the concept has appeared in popular culture including television, film, video games, and literature.
Ancient astronauts refers to a pseudoscientific set of beliefs that hold that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents of the theory suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans.
The Anunnaki are a group of deities of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which come from the Post-Akkadian period, the Anunnaki are deities in the pantheon, descendants of An and Ki, the god of the heavens and the goddess of earth, and their primary function was to decree the fates of humanity.
Grey aliens, also referred to as Zeta Reticulans, Roswell Greys or Greys, are purported extraterrestrial beings. They are frequent subjects of close encounters and alien abduction claims. The details of such claims vary widely. That said, Greys are typically described as being human-like with small bodies, smooth, grey-colored skin; enlarged, hairless heads; and large, black eyes. The Barney and Betty Hill abduction claim, which purportedly took place in New Hampshire in 1961, popularized Grey aliens. Precursor figures have been described in science fiction and similar descriptions appeared in early accounts of the 1948 Aztec UFO hoax and later accounts of the 1947 Roswell UFO incident.
Robert Scott Lazar is an American conspiracy theorist. In 1989, Lazar claimed to have been part of a classified US government project concerned with the reverse engineering of extraterrestrial technology; he also purported to have read government briefing documents that described alien involvement in human affairs over the past 10,000 years. A self-proclaimed physicist, Lazar supposedly worked at a secret site near the United States Air Force facility popularly known as Area 51. His story brought additional public attention to the facility and spawned conspiracy theories regarding government knowledge of extraterrestrial life.
The extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) proposes that some unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are best explained as being physical spacecraft occupied by extraterrestrial intelligence or non-human aliens, or non-occupied alien probes from other planets visiting Earth.
Xenoarchaeology, a branch of xenology dealing with extraterrestrial cultures, is a hypothetical form of archaeology that exists mainly in works of science fiction. The field is concerned with the study of the material remains to reconstruct and interpret past life-ways of alien civilizations. Xenoarchaeology is not currently practiced by mainstream archaeologists due to the current lack of any material for the discipline to study.
Zeta Reticuli, Latinized from ζ Reticuli, is a wide binary star system in the southern constellation of Reticulum. From the southern hemisphere the pair can be seen with the naked eye as a double star in very dark skies. Based upon parallax measurements, this system is located at a distance of about 39.3 light-years from Earth. Both stars are solar analogs that have characteristics similar to those of the Sun. They belong to the Zeta Herculis Moving Group of co-moving stars that share a common origin.
The Nibiru cataclysm is a supposed disastrous encounter between Earth and a large planetary object that certain groups believed would take place in the early 21st century. Believers in this doomsday event usually refer to this object as Nibiru or Planet X. The idea was first put forward in 1995 by Nancy Lieder, founder of the website ZetaTalk. Lieder claims she is a contactee with the ability to receive messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain. She states that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 causing Earth to undergo a physical pole shift that would destroy most of humanity.
A UFO religion is any religion in which the existence of extraterrestrial (ET) entities operating unidentified flying objects (UFOs) is an element of belief. Typically, adherents of such religions believe the ETs to be interested in the welfare of humanity which either already is, or eventually will become, part of a pre-existing ET civilization. Other religions predate the UFO era of the mid 20th century, but incorporate ETs into a more supernatural worldview in which the UFO occupants are more akin to angels than physical aliens, but this distinction may be blurred within the overall subculture. These religions have their roots in the tropes of early science fiction and weird fiction writings, in ufology, and in the subculture of UFO sightings and alien abduction stories. Historians have considered the Aetherius Society, founded by George King, to be the first UFO religion.
Phaeton was the hypothetical planet hypothesized by the Titius–Bode law to have existed between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, the destruction of which supposedly led to the formation of the asteroid belt. The hypothetical planet was named for Phaethon, the son of the sun god Helios in Greek mythology, who attempted to drive his father's solar chariot for a day with disastrous results and was ultimately destroyed by Zeus.
Claims of the existence of other moons of Earth—that is, of one or more natural satellites with relatively stable orbits of Earth, other than the Moon—have existed for some time. Several candidates have been proposed, but none have been confirmed. Since the 19th century, scientists have made genuine searches for more moons, but the possibility has also been the subject of a number of dubious non-scientific speculations as well as a number of likely hoaxes.
The Hollow Moon and the closely related Spaceship Moon are pseudoscientific hypotheses that propose that Earth's Moon is either wholly hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. No scientific evidence exists to support the idea; seismic observations and other data collected since spacecraft began to orbit or land on the Moon indicate that it has a solid, differentiated interior, with a thin crust, extensive mantle, and a dense core which is significantly smaller than Earth's.
Dr. Georg Wilhelm Waltemath was an astronomer from Hamburg, best known for his 1898 claim of a second moon of Earth as well as a system of tiny moons. It is widely held to be false.
The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin is in near-polar orbit of the Earth, and that NASA is covering up its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative.
Barney and Betty Hill were an American couple who claimed they were abducted by extraterrestrials in a rural portion of the state of New Hampshire from September 19 to 20, 1961. The incident came to be called the "Hill Abduction" and the "Zeta Reticuli Incident" because two ufologists connected the star map shown to Betty Hill with the Zeta Reticuli system. Their story was adapted into the best-selling 1966 book The Interrupted Journey and the 1975 television film The UFO Incident.
David Meade is the pen name of an American end-times conspiracy theorist and book author who has yet to disclose his real name. Meade, who describes himself as a "Christian numerologist", claims to have attended the University of Louisville, where he "studied astronomy, among other subjects"; because his real name is unknown, The Washington Post reported that the university could not confirm whether he had ever been a student there. He is also a writer, researcher and investigator who has written and self-published at least 13 books. He made appearances and interviews on Coast to Coast AM, The Washington Post, Glenn Beck Program, YouTube with pastor Paul Begley, and the Daily Express. He is best known for making numerous failed predictions, which have passed, regarding the end times, including that a hidden planet named Nibiru would destroy the Earth.
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