There are a number of planetary objects proposed in religion, astrology, ufology and pseudoscience whose existence is not supported by scientific evidence.
Lilith
Lilith is a fictitious second moon of Earth, supposedly about the same mass as the Earth's
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite. It is the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System and the largest and most massive relative to its parent planet, with a diameter about one-quarter that of Earth (comparable to the width of ...
, proposed in 1918 by
astrologer
Astrology is a range of divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of celestial objects. Dif ...
Walter Gorn Old, who called himself
Sepharial
Walter Gorn Old (born 20 March 1864 in Handsworth, West Midlands, Handsworth, England; died 23 December 1929 in Hove, England) was a 19th-century astrologer, who used the nom-de-plume "Sepharial", after an angel in the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
...
. Sepharial applied the name
Lilith
Lilith ( ; he, Wiktionary:לילית, לִילִית, Līlīṯ) is a female figure in Mesopotamian Mythology, Mesopotamian and Jewish mythology, Judaic mythology, alternatively the first wife of Adam and supposedly the primordial she-demon. ...
from medieval Jewish legend, where she is described as the first wife of Adam.
Sepharial claimed that Lilith was the same second moon that scientist
Georg Waltemath
Dr. Georg Wilhelm Waltemath (August 24, 1840 – September 27, 1915) 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.
Second Moon
He is ...
claimed to have discovered twenty years earlier, but which had never been confirmed.
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.
Sepharial's comments ignored the fact that Waltemath's proposed moon had already been discredited by the
scientific community
The scientific community is a diverse network of interacting scientists. It includes many " sub-communities" working on particular scientific fields, and within particular institutions; interdisciplinary and cross-institutional activities are als ...
at the turn of the century.
There are many readily apparent holes in the arguments supporting Lilith's existence, and its existence is believed only by
fringe
Fringe may refer to:
Arts
* Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world's largest arts festival, known as "the Fringe"
* Adelaide Fringe, the world's second-largest annual arts festival
* Fringe theatre, a name for alternative theatre
* The Fringe, the ...
groups.
[
]
In modern astrology
In present-day astrology
Astrology is a range of Divination, divinatory practices, recognized as pseudoscientific since the 18th century, that claim to discern information about human affairs and terrestrial events by studying the apparent positions of Celestial o ...
, the name Black Moon Lilith is usually given to a point on the horoscope of the actual moon's apogee
An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion.
General description
There are two apsides in any ellip ...
. 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 direction. It takes 8 years and 10 months to complete its circuit around the zodiac.
Planets proposed by L. Ron Hubbard
L. Ron Hubbard
Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986) was an American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, who is best known for having founded the Church of Scientology. In 1950, Hubbard authored '' Dianetic ...
, the founder of Scientology
Scientology is a set of beliefs and practices invented by American author L. Ron Hubbard, and an associated movement. It has been variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religious movement. The most recent published census data indi ...
, proposed as part of his cosmology a Galactic Confederacy
Xenu (), also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology", a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the "Technology", Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a "Galactic Confederacy" who brought bil ...
which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as "Teegeeack
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard explicitly compared his teachings to the science-fiction subgenre space opera. In his writings, wherein thetans (the name given to human souls) were reincarnated periodically over quadrillions of years, retaini ...
".
One planet in the Scientology doctrine is known as Helatrobus
According to Church of Scientology doctrine, Helatrobus was an "interplanetary nation", now extinct, which existed trillions of years ago.
Government
In his ''State of OT'' lecture, Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard described them as:
''"a littl ...
.
Ummo
Ummo or Ummoism is a decades-long series of claims that aliens
Alien primarily refers to:
* Alien (law), a person in a country who is not a national of that country
** Enemy alien, the above in times of war
* Extraterrestrial life, life which does not originate from Earth
** Specifically, intelligent extrate ...
from the planet Ummo were communicating with people on the Earth. Most Ummo information was in the form of detailed documents and letters sent to various esoteric groups or UFO
An unidentified flying object (UFO), more recently renamed by US officials as a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon), is any perceived aerial phenomenon that cannot be immediately identified or explained. On investigation, most UFOs are id ...
enthusiasts. The Ummo affair was subject to much mainstream attention in France and Spain during the 1960s through the 1970s, and a degree of interest remains regarding the subject. Consensus is that Ummoism was an elaborate hoax
A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...
. The culprit (or culprits) is unknown, but a José Luis Jordán Peña has claimed responsibility for instigating Ummoism. However, there are still a few small groups of devotees, such as "a strange Bolivian cult called the Daughters of Ummo".
Jacques Vallée
Jacques Fabrice Vallée (; born September 24, 1939) is an Internet pioneer, computer scientist, venture capitalist, author, ufologist and astronomer currently residing in San Francisco, California and Paris, France.
His scientific career began ...
has said that the author(s) of the Ummo documents might be a real-world analogue of the fictional creators of Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo (; ; 24 August 1899 – 14 June 1986) was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, as well as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known bo ...
' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in the Argentinian journal '' Sur'', May 1940. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, se ...
". Historian Mike Dash
Mike Dash is a Welsh writer, historian, and researcher. He has written books and articles about dramatic episodes in history.
Biography
Dash was born in London. He attended Peterhouse, a college at the University of Cambridge particularly noted ...
writes that Ummoism began on February 6, 1966, in Madrid
Madrid ( , ) is the capital and most populous city of Spain. The city has almost 3.4 million inhabitants and a metropolitan area population of approximately 6.7 million. It is the second-largest city in the European Union (EU), and ...
. 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
A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and ...
resemble the alchemical sign for the planet Uranus
Uranus is the seventh planet from the Sun. Its name is a reference to the Greek god of the sky, Uranus (mythology), Uranus (Caelus), who, according to Greek mythology, was the great-grandfather of Ares (Mars (mythology), Mars), grandfather ...
." (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
Contactees are persons who claim to have experienced contact with extraterrestrials. Some claimed ongoing encounters, while others claimed to have had as few as a single encounter. Evidence is anecdotal in all cases.
As a cultural phenomenon, c ...
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)
In June 2002, a scientist with the pseudonym
A pseudonym (; ) or alias () is a fictitious name that a person or group assumes for a particular purpose, which differs from their original or true name (orthonym). This also differs from a new name that entirely or legally replaces an individua ...
Jean Pollion released, in French, his book , or, ''Ummo, real extraterrestrials'' in which he analyses the "Ummite" thoughts and language. He shows that the Ummo language is different from any other language we know in that it is a "functional" language. One of the astonishing properties of this language, according to the author, is that it works without a dictionary. One must only know 18 symbols, that Pollion has named "soncepts", which if combined make up a functional description of the thing or situation that the creator of the "word" is trying to convey. 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
Network theory is the study of graphs as a representation of either symmetric relations or asymmetric relations between discrete objects. In computer science and network science, network theory is a part of graph theory: a network can be defi ...
(or graph theory
In mathematics, graph theory is the study of ''graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of '' vertices'' (also called ''nodes'' or ''points'') which are conne ...
), astrophysics
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...
, cosmology
Cosmology () is a branch of physics and metaphysics dealing with the nature of the universe. The term ''cosmology'' was first used in English in 1656 in Thomas Blount (lexicographer), Thomas Blount's ''Glossographia'', and in 1731 taken up in ...
, the unified field theory
In physics, a unified field theory (UFT) is a type of field theory that allows all that is usually thought of as fundamental forces and elementary particles to be written in terms of a pair of physical and virtual fields. According to the modern ...
, biology
Biology is the scientific study of life. It is a natural science with a broad scope but has several unifying themes that tie it together as a single, coherent field. For instance, all organisms are made up of cells that process hereditary i ...
, and evolution
Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...
. Some of this information is thought to be dubious pseudoscience
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or falsifiability, unfa ...
, but much of it is scientifically accurate. However, Jerome Clark
Jerome Clark (born November 27, 1946)"Jerome Clark". ''Contemporary Authors Online''. June 12, 2002. Retrieved on April 11, 2012. is an American writer, specializing in unidentified flying objects and other paranormal subjects. He has appeared ...
(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
Science fiction (sometimes shortened to Sci-Fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction which typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel unive ...
novel—plausible in the 1960s, but dated by the standards of the 1990s. Controversy arose about one particular assertion of the Ummites. In 1965, they wrote they were coming from a planet orbiting Wolf 424, adding this star is 3.68502 light-year
A light-year, alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (), or 5.88 trillion miles ().One trillion here is taken to be 1012 ...
s of the Sun. This was consistent with the distance estimated in 1938, but after some additional measurements, the estimate was revised to 14.3 light-years. Fernando Sesma asked then the Ummites about this apparent mistake. The Ummites replied in another letter the same year that the first measurement is the real distance measured in the "three-dimensional framework" while the second is "the apparent distance traveled by light".
Planets proposed by Zecharia Sitchin
The work of Zecharia Sitchin has garnered much attention among ufologists
This is a list of notable people who are ufologists (UFO researchers).
Argentina
* Juan Posadas, (1912–1981), Trotskyist theorist who blended together Trotskyism and Ufology. Posadas' version of Trotskyism is regarded as its own strai ...
, ancient astronaut theorists and conspiracy theorist
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources:
*
*
*
* The term has a nega ...
s. He claimed to have uncovered, through his retranslations of Sumerian
Sumerian or Sumerians may refer to:
*Sumer, an ancient civilization
**Sumerian language
**Sumerian art
**Sumerian architecture
**Sumerian literature
**Cuneiform script, used in Sumerian writing
*Sumerian Records, an American record label based in ...
texts, evidence that the human race was visited/created by a group of extraterrestrials from a distant planet in the Solar System
The Solar SystemCapitalization of the name varies. The International Astronomical Union, the authoritative body regarding astronomical nomenclature, specifies capitalizing the names of all individual astronomical objects but uses mixed "Solar S ...
. Part of his theory lay in an astronomical interpretation of the Babylonian creation myth
A creation myth (or cosmogonic myth) is a symbolic narrative of how the world began and how people first came to inhabit it., "Creation myths are symbolic stories describing how the universe and its inhabitants came to be. Creation myths develop ...
, 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
Pseudohistory is a form of pseudoscholarship that attempts to distort or misrepresent the historical record, often by employing methods resembling those used in scholarly historical research. The related term cryptohistory is applied to pseudohist ...
, if they know it at all.
Sitchin's theory proposes the planets Tiamat
In Mesopotamian religion, Tiamat ( akk, or , grc, Θαλάττη, Thaláttē) is a primordial goddess of the sea, mating with Abzû, the god of the groundwater, to produce younger gods. She is the symbol of the chaos of primordial creati ...
and Nibiru. Tiamat supposedly existed between Mars
Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun and the second-smallest planet in the Solar System, only being larger than Mercury (planet), Mercury. In the English language, Mars is named for the Mars (mythology), Roman god of war. Mars is a terr ...
and Jupiter
Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and the List of Solar System objects by size, largest in the Solar System. It is a gas giant with a mass more than two and a half times that of all the other planets in the Solar System combined, but ...
. 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
The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...
and the current form of planet Earth.
Sitchin claims that the Babylonia
Babylonia (; Akkadian: , ''māt Akkadī'') was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq and parts of Syria). It emerged as an Amorite-ruled state c. ...
ns associated Nibiru with the god Marduk
Marduk (Cuneiform: dAMAR.UTU; Sumerian: ''amar utu.k'' "calf of the sun; solar calf"; ) was a god from ancient Mesopotamia and patron deity of the city of Babylon. When Babylon became the political center of the Euphrates valley in the time of ...
; the word is Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to:
* Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire
* Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language
* Akkadian literature, literature in this language
* Akkadian cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo- syllabi ...
and the meaning is uncertain. Sitchin hypothesized it as a planet in a highly elliptic orbit
In astrodynamics or celestial mechanics, an elliptic orbit or elliptical orbit is a Kepler orbit with an eccentricity of less than 1; this includes the special case of a circular orbit, with eccentricity equal to 0. In a stricter sense, it ...
around the Sun, with a perihelion
An apsis (; ) is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body. For example, the apsides of the Earth are called the aphelion and perihelion.
General description
There are two apsides in any ellip ...
passage some 3,600 years ago and assumed orbital period
The orbital period (also revolution period) is the amount of time a given astronomical object takes to complete one orbit around another object. In astronomy, it usually applies to planets or asteroids orbiting the Sun, moons orbiting planets ...
of about 3,450 years; he also claimed it was the home of a technologically advanced human-like alien race, the Anunnaki
The Anunnaki (Sumerian: , also transcribed as Anunaki, Annunaki, Anunna, Ananaki and other variations) are a group of deities of the ancient Sumerians, Akkadians, Assyrians and Babylonians. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which c ...
, 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
Following the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846, there was considerable speculation that another planet might exist beyond its orbit. The search began in the mid-19th century and continued at the start of the 20th with Percival Lowell's ...
" is a brown dwarf
Brown dwarfs (also called failed stars) are substellar objects that are not massive enough to sustain nuclear fusion of ordinary hydrogen ( 1H) into helium in their cores, unlike a main-sequence star. Instead, they have a mass between the most ...
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.
Sitchin also postulated that Pluto
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of trans-Neptunian object, bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the S ...
began life as Gaga
Gaga ( he, גע גע literally 'touch touch') (also: ga-ga, gaga ball, or ga-ga ball) is a variant of dodgeball that is played in a gaga "pit". The game combines dodging, striking, running, and jumping, with the objective of being the last perso ...
, a satellite of Saturn which, due to perturbation caused by Nibiru's passing, was flung into orbit beyond Neptune.
Serpo
Project Serpo is an alleged top-secret
Classified information is material that a government body deems to be sensitive information that must be protected. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of people with the necessary security clearance and need to know, ...
exchange program between the United States government and an alien planet called ''Serpo'' in the Zeta Reticuli
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 ...
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
The United States Air Force (USAF) is the air service branch of the United States Armed Forces, and is one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. Originally created on 1 August 1907, as a part of the United States Army Signal ...
Sergeant Richard C. Doty contacted investigative journalist Linda Moulton Howe
Linda Moulton Howe (born January 20, 1942) is an American investigative journalist and Regional Emmy award-winning documentary film maker best known for her work as a ufologist and advocate of a variety of conspiracy theories, including her in ...
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 ran by Victor Martinez claiming that the project was real. Some variations on the conspiracy story state that the name Serpo is the nickname of the extrasolar planet
An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917 but was not recognized as such. The first confirmation of detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, init ...
. 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
A conspiracy theory is an explanation for an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful groups, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable.Additional sources:
*
*
*
* The term has a nega ...
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
The Roswell incident was an event that occurred in 1947, pertaining to the recovery of mundane metallic and rubber debris from a military balloon that crashed near Corona, New Mexico by United States Army Air Forces officers from Roswell Army ...
). 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
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 ...
.[Project Serpo: Fact or Fiction?](_blank)
''Mysteries Magazine'', Issue #15, Tim Swartz, November 2006, Archived at Wayback Machine
Zeta Reticuli has a history in ufology (including the Betty and Barney Hill abduction
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. It was the first widely publicized report of an alien abduction in ...
and the Bob Lazar
Robert Scott Lazar (; born January 26, 1959) is an American conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed physicist who claims he was hired in the late 1980s to reverse-engineer extraterrestrial technology. This work supposedly occurred at a secret ...
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
''Two Suns'' is the second studio album by English singer Natasha Khan, known professionally as Bat for Lashes. It was released on 3 April 2009 by The Echo Label and Parlophone. The album was produced by Khan herself and David Kosten (who also ...
". 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." (http://www.serpo.org/release36.php)
One criticism of Project Serpo stems from the lack of veracity of one of its alleged witnesses, Sergeant
Sergeant (abbreviated to Sgt. and capitalized when used as a named person's title) is a rank in many uniformed organizations, principally military and policing forces. The alternative spelling, ''serjeant'', is used in The Rifles and other uni ...
Richard Doty. Doty has been involved in other alleged UFO-related activities (see Majestic 12
Majestic 12, also known as 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 officia ...
and Paul Bennewitz
Paul Frederic Bennewitz, Jr. (September 29, 1927 – June 23, 2003) was an American businessman and UFO investigator. According to multiple sources, Bennewitz was the target of a government disinformation campaign that ultimately led to his psyc ...
), and thus is a discredited source (or a purposeful provider of disinformation). Additionally, there is no physical evidence
In evidence law, physical evidence (also called real evidence or material evidence) is any material object that plays some role in the matter that gave rise to the litigation, introduced as evidence in a judicial proceeding (such as a trial) to ...
supporting the project's existence. 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. Swartz also expressed that the details of Project Serpo have varied considerably with different accounts. It has been alleged that the entire series of posts were designed to be viral marketing
Viral marketing is a business strategy that uses existing social networks to promote a product mainly on various social media platforms. Its name refers to how consumers spread information about a product with other people, much in the same way tha ...
for a new book by Doty.
Bill Ryan, a chief proponent of publicizing the Project Serpo claims, announced on March 5, 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.[Serpo.org: A Final Update from Bill Ryan: 5 March 2007](_blank)
/ref>
See also
* Fictional planets of the Solar System
The fictional portrayal of the Solar System has often included planets, moons, and other celestial objects which do not actually exist in reality. Some of these objects were, at one time, seriously considered as List of hypothetical Solar System o ...
* Kolob
Kolob is a star
or planet described in the Book of Abraham, a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement. Several Latter Day Saint denominations hold the Book of Abraham to have been translated from an Ancient Egypt, Egyptian Joseph Smith Pap ...
* Lost asteroids
A minor planet is "lost" when today's observers cannot find it, because its location is too uncertain to target observations. This happens if the orbital elements of a minor planet are not known accurately enough, typically because the observat ...
* Nibiru cataclysm
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. Believers in this doomsday event ...
* Planets in astrology
In astrology, planets have a meaning different from the astronomical understanding of what a planet is. Before the age of telescopes, the night sky was thought to consist of two very similar components: fixed stars, which remained motionless in ...
* Religious cosmology
Religious cosmology is an explanation of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe from a religious perspective. This may include beliefs on origin in the form of a creation myth, subsequent evolution, current organizational form ...
* Stars proposed in religion Stars proposed in religion may include:
* Kolob, a star proposed in Mormon cosmology
* The Star of Bethlehem, the star that supposedly marked the birth of Christ
* Wormwood (star), a star said to fall to Earth in the Book of Revelation
* Seven Sun ...
* UFO conspiracy theory
UFO conspiracy theories are a subset of conspiracy theories which argue that various governments and politicians globally, in particular the Government of the United States, are suppressing evidence that unidentified flying objects are controlle ...
Notes
References
* Clark, Jerome, ''Unexplained! 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena''; Detroit, Visible Ink Press; 1993,
* Mike Dash
Mike Dash is a Welsh writer, historian, and researcher. He has written books and articles about dramatic episodes in history.
Biography
Dash was born in London. He attended Peterhouse, a college at the University of Cambridge particularly noted ...
, ''Borderlands: The Ultimate Exploration of the Unknown'',
{{Portal bar, Astronomy, Stars, Spaceflight, Outer space, Solar System
Hypothetical bodies of the Solar System
Astrology-related lists