Read Online The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence by Andy Lloyd - Free Book Online

comet clouds.
This, in turn, could create a periodic extinction cycle.
    This idea was not a particularly new one, even in 1985. A
controversial article in Newsweek (28th June 1982) described the possibility
that there may be a binary dark star at some considerable distance beyond the
orbit of Pluto. Furthermore, a tenth planet might be orbiting around this
binary system:
    “A 'dark companion' could produce the unseen force that seems to
tug at Uranus and Neptune, speeding them up at one point in their orbits and
holding them back as they pass...(John) Anderson (of JPL.) thinks the best bet
is a dark star orbiting at least 50 billion miles beyond Pluto, which is 3.6
billion miles from the sun. It is most likely either a brown dwarf ― a lightweight
star that never attained the critical mass to ignite ― or a neutron star,
the remnants of a normal sun that has burned out and collapsed”. 4
    Catastrophism was enjoying a revival in the early 1980s. It was
around this time that the world was coming to grips with the notion that
dinosaurs had been wiped out by an asteroid or comet impact, as proposed by
Luis and Walter Alvarez. 5 It was a phenomenal notion, based upon the
remarkable quantities of iridium found at the K-T boundary. In 1984 two
paleontologists, David Raup and John Sepkoski, then proposed that there was a
pattern to extinction events on Earth. 6 A cycle of 26 million years
appeared to have emerged from their data.
    This
seemed to call for some kind of cosmic-scale periodicity to explain it. The
idea of a ‘Nemesis’ dark companion orbiting the sun every 26 million years was
proposed in Nature by two independent teams of physicists; Daniel Whitmire and
Albert Jackson 7 , and M. Davis, et al. 8 The orbit of this
massive companion, a ‘black dwarf’, might pass through the Oort Cloud
periodically, showering the solar system with comets, and causing a clockwork
extinction pattern in tune with Raup and Sepkoski’s data. 9

IRAS
    One
can see the amount of speculation about Planet X, and/or a distant ‘Dark Star’,
was quite considerable in the mid-eighties, prior to the sceptical paper by E.
Myles Standish. But doubts about the proposed Nemesis object were already
widespread among many mainstream scientists, and the catastrophists were in a
minority to begin with. The fact was that such an object had not been
discovered by the 1983 IRAS survey, which had methodically scanned the heavens
in the infrared band seeking invisible, but warm objects. This sky survey, it
was widely argued (and still is...) should have found any undiscovered planets.
    After
all, the infrared telescope which was carried by IRAS (the InfraRed
Astronomical Satellite) was quite capable of seeing ‘through the dust and gas
that obscures stars and other objects when viewed by optical telescopes’. 10 One would have expected Planet X, if it was out there, to shine like a beacon
in the dark.
    In
fact, news did break at the time regarding a ‘sighting’ of Planet X by the IRAS
team, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. The Washington Post science team
broke the story, declaring that “a heavenly body possibly as large as the
planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this
solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an
orbiting telescope called the Infrared Astronomical Observatory”. 11
    According
to JPL’s Public Relations Office, which was contacted by Zecharia Sitchin in
1984, the finding had been ambiguous. Presumably, was that their way of
accusing a reporter from the Washington Post of overstating the case? This
report in the Washington Post has been reproduced many, many times over the
Internet, and has indeed become the focal point for many who believe that
knowledge of a tenth planet exists within official circles, but has been
withheld from the public.
    Part
of that belief no doubt stems from a misguided understanding of the efficacy of
the IRAS sky survey. This has not