The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (8 page)

In
1999, two researchers presented findings that might indicate the existence of a
small brown dwarf orbiting the sun. One of them, Dr. John Murray of the Open
University in England, initially found it difficult to even get his paper
published. Perhaps that was because he wasn’t an astronomer, but an Earth
scientist. More likely was the nature of his proposal, which subsequently
brought much criticism his way. As well as a lot of publicity, because any
suggestion of an undiscovered planet in our solar system is inherently
newsworthy. Popular interest and academic disdain often go hand in hand.

John
Murray looked at the trajectories of long-period comets and analyzed them to
see if any patterns emerged.
¹⁷
Long-period comets are thought to
originate in the Oort Cloud, an hypothetical, but generally accepted spherical
distribution of comets beyond about 2000 Astronomical Units.
¹⁸
The
comets in question emerged from the outer Oort Cloud, which extends from about
20,000AU onwards to the very limit of the sun’s influence. These are very
considerable distances indeed.

In his paper, John Murray explained why he thought a very massive
planet might be orbiting the sun out among these distant comets: the comets had
arrived from points in the sky that indicated a pattern to their origins. He
noted that whilst other explanations for this were possible, the cometary
orbits were most likely to have attained these configurations because of the
presence of an unknown distant object circling the sun between thirty and fifty
thousand astronomical units away.
¹⁷
This is an immense distance and
a great circular orbit around the sun out there would take millions of years to
complete.

He made a strong case for the following argument: The Oort Cloud
should have a random, but spherical distribution around the sun, rather like a
very thick skin on an orange. Assuming comets are dislodged randomly from the
cloud to move into the planetary zone of the solar system, then the sky
locations from which they came should be randomly distributed, as well as their
original distances from the sun. His analysis showed that this was, in fact,
not the case, but that there was a statistical aberration. That clustering
calls for another influence affecting the comets that were disturbed from their
meandering distant orbits around the sun. A likely contender appears to be a
massive ‘Perturber’ among these distant comets.

Dr. Murray then predicted an approximate sky location for the
massive planet, or brown dwarf, based upon its perceived retrograde motion
around the sun. When I read his paper I was amazed. This position was somewhat
north of Sagittarius, in the small constellation of Delphinius. The planet
appeared to be acting in a very similar way to the orbit described by Zecharia
Sitchin for Nibiru.

It was moving the wrong way around the sun, compared to the other
planets. It was inclined to the plane of the planets by 30 degrees, as proposed
by Sitchin. And it was in the right part of the sky. To my mind, this ‘Dark
Star’ of Dr. Murray’s was Sitchin’s Nibiru. He had found physical evidence to
show that this fabled planet exists.

My
excitement was compounded by the fact that I had already independently proposed
that the way in which Nibiru was described in the myths correlated well with
our understanding of a brown dwarf, or failed star. In the Enuma Elish, the
Babylonian ‘god’ Marduk, whose 49th Name is Nibiru, was described using words
that have a strong cosmological flavour.
¹⁹
The description seemed to
tally with an extraordinary and massive planet which emitted fire and
lightning. In other words, it was a planet more massive than Jupiter with
certain stellar characteristics.

Its
dramatic incursion into the myth seems to indicate to us that Marduk had once
entered the solar system for the first time, blazing with fire and shining like
the sun. There is an even clearer reference to Marduk’s sun-like attributes in
these lines, and is quite literally called the "Son of the Sun":

“MARDUK, as Anu, his
father, called him from his birth; Who provides grazing and drinking places,
enriches their stalls,

Who with the flood-storm,
his weapon, vanquished the detractors,

And who the gods, his
fathers, rescued from distress. Truly, the Son of the Sun, most radiant of gods
is he. In his brilliant light may they walk forever!”

Tablet
VI Lines 124-9.
²⁰

I
believe this designation as the ‘Son of the Sun’ is of great significance. If
the ‘Dark Star’, which seems to be synonymous with the Babylonian god Marduk in
the Babylonian creation myth exists, then our solar system is a long-standing
binary system, whose smallest ‘star’ is now old and cold. But at the time of
its dramatic entry into the sun’s domain, it was a radiant and powerful planet
whose stellar attributes are clearly described. The planet represented by
Marduk seemed to have once shined like a small star, becoming the ‘Son of the
Sun’.

Sumerologists
and skeptics in general argue that the Enuma Elish should not be interpreted in
terms of an astronomical framework, that the gods described in the Creation
Myth are not synonymous with stellar deities, whether in the form of planets,
stars, or constellations. They take issue with Zecharia Sitchin for making this
connection.
²¹
Yet, the Enuma Elish is packed full of cosmic
descriptions, in keeping with the advanced knowledge of astronomy of the
Babylonians.

This
is an old argument that has raged for many years. Although many of the gods of
the ancient pantheons are directly related to planets, the sun and the Moon,
scholars generally don’t interpret that as meaning that the ancients were
trying to tell us about the physical nature of the solar system: myths are
myths, nothing more.

Yet, we are becoming more aware of the remarkable astronomical
knowledge of ancient peoples, through the complex archeo-astronomical
alignments of many of the monuments dating back from megalithic times.
^22,
23
The myths seem to be an excellent vehicle for the transmission of an
oral tradition about the astronomical knowledge that the ancient people all
round the world clearly exhibited. Such an argument lies at the heart of an
illuminating thesis by the scholars Georgio de Santillana and Hertha von
Dechend entitled, "Hamlet’s Mill".
²⁴

These ideas have become part of my own approach to understanding
what the myths can tell us about our solar system, and I believe we still have
more to learn from them than our present scientific knowledge suggests. To my
mind, the existence of an undiscovered planet of massive proportions was
suggested by many different legends and traditions, which have been chronicled
across the globe.
²⁵

Just months before the release of John Murray’s paper, I had
reviewed a lecture given by the British researcher Alan Alford, and had used
this short review as a vehicle to formally propose the connection between
Sitchin’s planet Nibiru and a brown dwarf. Alan had once entertained the ideas
of Zecharia Sitchin and had written a very popular book on the subject.
²⁶
He
then retracted those ideas, and had made his criticisms of Sitchin’s work
apparent during a lecture he gave in Gloucestershire in the summer of 1999.

The
criticisms included, quite rightly in my opinion, the difficulties that Nibiru
would have sustaining life in the solar system beyond Neptune. In a letter
published by the British newsstand publication UFO Magazine, I discussed Alan
Alford’s lecture and suggested that Sitchin’s dilemma could be solved by
Nibiru’s planetary status being upgraded to that of a small brown dwarf, thence
allowing life to exist on its attendant moons:

“Here
is the crux of the problem ― the world’s most ancient race, the
Sumerians, said that the gods came to Earth from a planet, describing a
comet-like orbit around the sun. To generate sufficient heat to have liquid
water, the planet must either be too massive gravitationally, or too
radioactive to support life. Case closed.

But
modern astronomers are trying to grapple with the facts that the solar system
exhibits too much gravity, and that there is a huge amount of missing mass in
the universe. Brown dwarf stars have been proposed to account for both
anomalies. If our sun has a tiny sister star that is too faint and distant to
have been detected, then maybe this star is the twelfth planet.

So
why would the Sumerians call a star a planet? In fact, they already included
the sun as a planet, as well as our Moon. That’s how they arrived at the number
twelve as the total number of planets in the solar system. They also said that
the Twelfth Planet had a number of ‘attendants’, which we could then consider
to be the brown dwarf star’s own planetary system. They said that the Twelfth
Planet was glorious to behold, with a great halo. Well, maybe they were
describing a brown dwarf that became visible to the naked eye as it traversed
the outer solar system as part of its eccentric orbit around the sun.”
²⁷

Although
I would have written this somewhat differently now, the basic points continue
to stand, and formed the basis of later articles released over the Internet
that would change many people’s notions about the nature of Sitchin’s Nibiru.

The reason for including this here is to demonstrate that the
ideas behind the Dark Star Theory were published two months before John
Murray’s paper on his proposed Planet X, which was described by him as being
large enough to potentially be a small brown dwarf. We were tackling the
problem from different angles, certainly, but coming to similar conclusions at
the same time. Of course, the first mention of a ‘Dark Star’ orbiting the sun
as a binary companion was made as long ago as 1982, so none of this is entirely
new! But at the time, in 1999, this development seemed newsworthy.

There was a synchronicity at play there, certainly, but I would
also like to emphasize the fact that I had not taken John Murray’s paper and
used that to re-write Sitchin. Rather, I had independently thought through the
‘habitable planet’ problem, come up with a viable solution, and then discovered
later that the basis for that idea could corroborate Dr. Murray’s scientific
work.

Had my letter not been published in UFO Magazine in the late
summer of 1999, I would have difficulty proving this course of events, and I
have always been grateful to the late Graham W. Birdsall for its inclusion in
his magazine at the time, as well as a major follow-up article a couple of
years later.
²⁸

A second synchronicity also occurred at that time, because it was
not just John Murray who had been looking closely at the patterns of
long-period comets. In the United States, John Matese’s research team had
carried out a similar analysis, and independently come to a similar conclusion.
His paper was published at exactly the same time as Murray’s, although the
details of their work varied somewhat. John Matese is a Professor of Physics at
the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and he was joined in this research
effort by Patrick Whitman and Daniel Whitmire. The latter famously co-wrote the
1984 Nature paper on the proposed ‘Nemesis’ body, and its link to the 26
million year extinction cycle.
⁷

Like John Murray, they concluded that a massive planet or small
brown dwarf could be orbiting the sun, sending comets our way. Unlike Dr.
Murray, they stopped short of postulating a possible location for the object.
Other details were different too, including the approximate distance, and the
orbit. They also considered it likely that the effect supplemented that of the
galactic tide, which was the dominant feature in the statistical aberrations.
²⁹

In the paper it was also speculated that the orbit of this planet,
which they call the ‘Perturber’, would, on occasion, bring it fairly close to
the outer planetary zone. This was because an orbit that was at the distance of
25,000AU was not one which could be sustained for the lifetime of the solar
system, a point also conceded by John Murray.
¹⁷
Citing a very
interesting paper by Jack Hills from 1985
³⁰
, they noted that any
orbit in the outer Oort cloud was liable to be altered by the action of the
galactic tide over hundreds of millions of years.
²⁹

As the sun rotates around the centre of the galaxy, it bobs up and
down through the galactic plane rather like the horse on a fairground carousel
ride. The periodic changes to the orbit of the perturber, known as
‘oscultations’, are related to this motion with relation to the galactic plane,
and, according to Dr. Matese’s calculations, could at times lead to a minimum
distance from the sun of just 125AU. This is an important point. Let us say
that the sun was formed in conjunction with a distant binary brown dwarf that
initially formed at the sort of distances that comets are now located at. Over
several hundred million years the action of the galactic tide would cause the
brown dwarf to drift inwards towards the planetary zone of the sun.

This is precisely what I think took place 3.9 billion years ago,
some 700 million years after the formation of the solar system. The sun’s
binary companion fell down towards the sun as a result of the galaxy’s
gravitational interaction, destabilizing its orbit. It then swept
catastrophically through the solar system as described by the Babylonian myths,
before migrating out towards the comets once again.

Furthermore, Dr. Matese argued that this situation would repeat
itself over time, without significantly destabilizing the orbits of the other
planets in the solar system.
²⁹
Incredible, isn’t it? The
mathematical calculations carried by Dr. Matese and his colleagues created a
model to describe how a distant binary companion could, on occasion, end up
wandering near to the sun.

If a small brown dwarf sometimes approaches the planetary zone to
within 3 times the distance of Pluto, even though for the vast majority of the
time it is located much further away, then it would significantly affect the
minor planetary bodies of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. As we shall see, this is
exactly what has been observed in the last few years. Where the brown dwarf has
wandered, there is an absence of comets known as the "Kuiper Gap".

Finally, it is clear that a brown dwarf in a loosely bound orbit
around the sun is subject to other external factors that can change its orbit.
Indeed, to have even arrived in the outer Oort cloud in the first place, the
Matese team were speculating that the brown dwarf had accreted, or formed from
proto-planetary disc matter, closer to the sun ― and then migrated out as
a result of stellar impulses over the history of the solar system.
³⁰
There is a dynamic process at play that complicates matters.

If the orbit of the Dark Star fluctuates over time then, the
binding relationship between it and the sun within the binary system also
changes over time. This potentially has dramatic consequences for the rest of
the solar system. I will argue that dynamic process creates a unique mechanism
for Catastrophism here on Earth, including the ebb and flow of the great Ice
Age eras.