The Nibiru cataclysm is a supposed disastrous encounter between Earth and a large planetary object (either a collision or a near-miss) that certain groups believed would take place in the early 21st century.

She states that she was chosen to warn mankind that the object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 (though that date was later postponed) causing Earth to undergo a physical pole shift that would destroy most of humanity.

The idea that a planet-sized object will collide with or closely pass by Earth in the near future is not supported by any scientific evidence and has been rejected by astronomers and planetary scientists as pseudoscience and an Internet hoax.

The idea of the Nibiru encounter originated with Nancy Lieder, a Wisconsin woman who claims that as a girl she was contacted by gray extraterrestrials called Zetans, who implanted a communications device in her brain.

"[8] She claimed that the Hale–Bopp story was manufactured to distract people from the imminent arrival of a large planetary object, "Planet X", which would soon pass by Earth and destroy civilization.

[8] After Hale–Bopp's perihelion revealed it as one of the brightest and longest-observed comets of the last century,[9] Lieder removed the first two sentences of her initial statement from her site, though they can still be found in Google's archives.

[12] She refused to disclose the true date, saying that to do so would give those in power enough time to declare martial law and trap people in cities during the shift, leading to their deaths.

In 2007, partly in response to Lieder's proclamations, Sitchin published a book, The End of Days, which set the time for the last passing of Nibiru by Earth at 556 BC, which would mean, given the object's supposed 3,600-year orbit, that it would return sometime around AD 2900.

[30][31] The specific focus of his prediction revolved around the Woman of the Apocalypse referring to a supposedly unique configuration on that date of the Sun, Moon, and planets in Virgo.

[32][33][34] Viral fake news stories circulated across the Internet, adducing non-existent confirmations by NASA of Nibiru's existence on a course "headed straight for Earth".

[41] Christopher M. Graney, a professor with the Vatican Observatory Foundation, noted that the supposedly unique event was, in fact, quite common, having occurred four times in the last millennium.

[42] Brazilian astronomer Duília de Mello called his predictions and conjectures rubbish, and also said Nibiru would have been seen during the eclipse and that Meade was using calculations based on the Gregorian calendar.

[44][45] Meade announced that, on October 5, Nibiru would eclipse the Sun, and North Korea, China and Russia would launch a combined nuclear attack on the United States.

[51] They point out that such an object so close to Earth would be easily visible to the naked eye and would cause noticeable effects in the orbits of the outer planets.

[54] Astronomer Mike Brown notes that if this object's orbit were as described, it would only have remained in the Solar System for about a million years before Jupiter expelled it, and, even if such a planet existed, its magnetic field would have no effect on Earth's.

"[56] In a 2009 interview with the Discovery Channel, Mike Brown noted that, while it is not impossible that the Sun has a distant planetary companion, such an object would have to be lying very far from the observed regions of the Solar System to have no detectable gravitational effect on the other planets.

[62] Another accusation made by websites predicting the collision is that the US government built the South Pole Telescope (SPT) to track Nibiru's trajectory, and that the object has been imaged optically.

[64] A purported "picture" of Nibiru posted on YouTube was revealed to be a Hubble Space Telescope image of the expanding light echo around the star V838 Mon, which is more than 19,000 light-years away from Earth.

[68] The discrepancies remained through to the 1990s when the astronomer Robert Harrington put forward his hypothesis for an extra planet beyond Neptune with, as one example, a semi-major axis 101.2 AU and eccentricity 0.411 which makes its perihelion 59.60, so the closest to the Sun it would get is one and a half times the distance to Pluto.

[69] Six months before Harrington died of throat cancer[70][71] in 1992, astronomer E. Myles Standish showed that the supposed discrepancies in the planets' orbits were illusory, the product of overestimating the mass of Neptune.

[72] When Neptune's newly determined mass was used in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Developmental Ephemeris (JPL DE), the supposed discrepancies in the Uranian orbit, and with them the need for a Planet X, vanished.

[82] Others have tied it to Tyche,[89] the name proposed by John Matese and Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette for an object they believe to be influencing the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud.

[90] In February 2011, Whitmire and his colleagues took their hypothesis to the public in an article in The Independent, in which they named the object "Tyche" and claimed that evidence for its existence would be found once data from the WISE infrared telescope was collated, leading to a spike in calls to astronomers.

[99] Nevertheless, in the leadup to its closest approach, claims spread on conspiracy websites concluded that it was on a collision course, that it was as large as Jupiter or even a brown dwarf, and even that the name of the discoverer, Leonid Elenin, was in fact code for ELE, or an Extinction Level Event.

[122] The hypothesis argues that an object far closer to the Sun than Nemesis could have a similar effect if its orbit precessed at a rate thousands of times slower than its actual speed, which would mean it might only interact with the Kuiper belt every 27 million years, potentially sending comets into the inner Solar System and triggering mass extinctions.

And it is not surprising; you devote so much time, energy and creativity to fascinating scientific research, and find yourself on the tracks of the most amazing and interesting things, and all the public at large is concerned about is some crackpot theory about clay tablets, god-astronauts and a planet that doesn't exist.

"[128] Similarly, Professor Brian Cox posted on Twitter in 2012 that, "If anyone else asks me about 'Nibiru' the imaginary bullshit planet I will slap them around their irrational heads with Newton's Principia".

[54] Prior to the 2012 date, Morrison stated that he hoped that the non-arrival of Nibiru could serve as a teaching moment for the public, instructing them on "rational thought and baloney detection", but doubted that would happen.

[130] Morrison noted in a lecture recorded on FORA.tv that there was a huge disconnect between the large number of people on the Internet who believed in Nibiru's arrival and the majority of scientists who have never heard of it.

[127] A viral marketing campaign for Sony Pictures' 2009 film 2012, directed by Roland Emmerich, which depicts the end of the world in the year 2012, featured a supposed warning from the "Institute for Human Continuity" that listed the arrival of Planet X as one of its doomsday scenarios.