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No, the world isn’t going to end on April 23rd

Published Apr 12th, 2018 2:15PM EDT
planet x
Image: Cubosh

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Hey, so, remember back in November of last year when self-proclaimed doomsday prophet and noted con artist David Meade predicted the end of the world was just days away? Yeah, it never happened. None of Meade’s many prior predictions of the end of the world — and he’s made many — have ever come true. But never one to let things like common sense keep him down, Meade is back with yet another hand-wringing prediction that a mythical world known as “Planet X” will either collide with Earth or come close enough to prompt an apocalypse. This time, the date of his embarrassment is scheduled for April 23rd. I can’t wait!

Planet X, which is also called Nibiru depending on who you ask, is common fodder for doomsday conspiracy theorists, mainly because it’s easy to get people to fear something they’ve never seen. The “planet” of course doesn’t actually exist, and NASA has debunked so many of these claims that it’s probably getting a little bit fed up at this point, but hey, Meade’s gotta make a living somehow, right?

Normally these kinds of ridiculous theories don’t even warrant the time it takes to debunk them, but Meade, who preys upon those who have misguidedly trusted him, managed to get his most recent prediction some front-page attention from the likes of Fox News, causing it to spread. Why anyone lends an ear to this scam artist I’m sure I’ll never know, but they’ve done it yet again, so here we are.

Meade hedges his prediction in some obscure bible passage that says something about a woman crying or something, but it doesn’t really matter because he can point to literally any section of a religious text and claim that he’s deciphered it into something else. In this case, he says the passage actually means that a planet nobody has ever seen is going to show up out of nowhere and ruin our day. Want to know more? Well, I hope you have your credit card handy!

As you might imagine, Meade isn’t sounding this alarm out of the goodness of his heart. No, he’s actually peddling a book describing his various predictions, and sewing fear helps him move copies of it out the door. Demanding money for his writings seems a bit silly since, if the world is indeed about to end, he’d have little use for the profits, but let’s not let that get in the way of utterly absurd doomsday predictions.