Here Comes Planet X
A January 20, 2016, Washington Post story began this way: Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology announced Wednesday that they have found new evidence of a giant icy planet lurking in the darkness of our solar system far beyond the orbit of Pluto. They are calling it “Planet Nine.”
Besides reminding everybody that little Pluto is no longer the ninth planet—and aggravating those who insist that it is—the announcement generated excitement in the lay community, and cautious optimism among scientists. After detecting anomalous, possibly gravity-influenced motion of dwarf planets and other bodies in the faraway Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto, Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin surmised the existence of “Planet Nine.” Brown and Batygin described the planet as two to four times the diameter of Earth, with five to ten times the mass; by way of contrast, planet number eight, Neptune, is seventeen times the mass of Earth. Neptune lies 2.7 billion miles from Earth; on average, Planet Nine’s orbit takes it twenty times farther from the sun than Neptune’s path. A “year” on Planet Nine passes in ten thousand to twenty thousand Earth years.
The writers of the Post article, Joel Achenbach and Rachel Feltman, displayed an instinctive grasp of the romance inherent in Caltech’s scientific announcement by weighting their lede with the words “giant,” ‘lurking,” “darkness,” and “far beyond.” A less discretionary word choice, “our,” is nevertheless the lede’s most significant: “our solar system,” the reporters wrote.
Planet Nine is in our solar system. Something amazing is apparently out there, and it is part of us.
X = Trouble
Just a day or two after the Caltech announcement, professional journalism’s pulpy faction (Britain’s Daily Express is one culprit) referred to Planet Nine with an alternate, more ominous name, “Planet X.” (Remember The Man from Planet X? He brought out the worst in the Earthlings that discovered him). In a goofy turn, sensationalist newspapers and Web sites conflated Planet Nine with the wholly imagined Planet Nibiru, alleged by the late, self-taught archaeologist Zecharia Sitchin to be the longtime home of the Annunaki, “space-faring overlords” that traveled to Earth ages ago, to dominate human affairs. (Author Jim Marrs perpetuates the story today.) Elements of the UFOlogical fringe jumped on board, reminding everybody about Nibiru’s collision with Earth, predicted in the mid-1990s by a Wisconsin woman named Nancy Lieder to happen by April 2016. (An earlier date given by Lieder, May 2003, came and went without Nibiru showing itself, and nothing happened in April 2016, either —but you probably already knew that.) Conspiracy theorists who had no truck with Nibiru pasted their own ideas onto Planet Nine, struggling to gain traction with the claim that a thirty-year span of deaths of astronomers—by accident, disease, and simple old age—is really a string of assassinations engineered to hide the apocalyptic truth about Planet Nine.
If your special concern is extraterrestrials from Planet X, Nibiru, or elsewhere, Altamonte Springs, Florida’s UFO Abduction Insurance Company sells specialized policies for $19.95, with a $10 million payout, and double indemnity if “the aliens insist on conjugal visits,” and if “the aliens refer to the abductee as . . . THE OTHER WHITE MEAT” [capitalization in original]. To collect, abductees need only provide “proof of abduction and return.” Approved claimants are paid a dollar a year for ten million years, or until they die. The gentleman behind this civic-minded idea, tax attorney Mike St. Lawrence, explained, “After carefully reviewing my homeowner’s policy I discovered that I, like many other Americans, was not covered.”
Blue Book Returns
The seminal days of UFO study returned to the fore in January 2015, when the 130,000 pages of declassified Project Blue Book documents mentioned in this book’s introduction came to the Web. While conducting research, I looked at thousands of those declassified Blue Book pages—admittedly not tens of thousands, but thousands, nevertheless. Between 1947 and 1969, Blue Book took 12,618 UFO reports. Of that number, Blue Book determined that 701 must remain “Unidentified.” (Vintage CIA documents released to coincide, rather too cutely, with the 2016 reboot of The X-Files reveal that agency’s conviction that some UFO cases must “remain unexplained.”) Blue Book document pages (preserved as paper-to-microfilm transfers executed in 1975) are now digitized. Researchers can locate particular documents by dates, location of the original incident, and by microfilm-roll number. To call up specific cases is time consuming but rewarding, not only when the payoff is an account of a well-known case, but when a heretofore anonymous case gets another moment in the sun. Researchers will be best rewarded by visiting bluebookarchive.com and theblackvault.com.
Individual pages are “rough,” with smeared or thickened typescript; speckles and other “dirt” (probably from damage to the microfilm); and evidence that many original document pages had been wrinkled or otherwise poorly handled.
Some documents had been “reversed” when preserved as photostats at some time during their life as paper; those digitized pages are white typescript on a black background, and virtually all are unreadable. Some other documents are too faded to be legible, suggesting that in such instances only carbon copies remained in the Blue Book paper files. In the main, though, the archived documents are readable—and thus remarkable conduits into UFO history.
A relative few pages show the handwritten notes of whichever Blue Book staffer happened to take a phone call, or spoke with someone who stopped by in person. Other pages are comprised of official Blue Book witness questionnaires and original correspondence (with the mailing envelopes), from witnesses.
Many Blue Book document pages consist of newspaper clippings, witness sketches, scientific computation, phone-call memos, and photographs. Pages from the Congressional Record are scattered throughout. Blue Book investigators could be catholic in their tastes, and even tossed in the occasional cartoon. As the little saucer pilots in a 1965 drawing (document page MISC- PBB2-238) hover above Earth, Pilot 1 says, “I’m sure I saw some ‘people’ down there!!” Pilot 2: “You aren’t going to start those silly rumors again, are you?” Longtime UFOlogists oriented to primary-source research were already well familiar with Blue Book’s overall record of denial, and expected little in the way of latter-day revelations following the documents’ move to the Web. Further, because many of the documents had been declassified before 2015, UFO researchers had carefully examined a good portion years ago, when the pages were far less easy to get to, but were nevertheless available to the persistent. No “shocking and new” revelations came to light after January 2015. The news value of the 2015 Web dump arose from the papers’ new, and relatively easy, accessibility.
