Ninth Planet of the Solar System Will Destroy Life on Earth
In April 2016, the New York Post tweeted: “A newly discovered planet could destroy Earth as soon as this month.”
The newspaper referred to the hypothetical ninth planet on the edge of the Solar System. Scientists suggest the possibility of its existence because it could explain the tilted orbits of certain trans-Neptunian objects, such as Sedna, and other unexplained phenomena in the Kuiper Belt. However, Planet 9, or Planet X, as it is also called, has not yet been discovered.
In a video prepared by the New York Post, it was stated that Planet 9 would influence asteroids in the Kuiper Belt, directing them toward Earth with its gravity, ultimately destroying life on our planet.
A similar pseudoscientific theory was popular before. Planet X, called Nibiru by conspiracy theorists, allegedly was supposed to approach Earth in 2012 and destroy it with its gravitational pull.
However, this is nonsense. According to astronomer Mike Brown from the California Institute of Technology, even if Planet 9 exists, it poses no threat to Earth. The distance separating us is unimaginably vast, and this object will not come close to us.
Chinese Unable to Find Traces of Americans Landing on the Moon
In 2019, the Chinese Chang’e-4 probe landed on the Moon, bringing with it a second “Jade Rabbit,” a small six-wheeled lunar rover.
It studied the soil in the Von Kármán crater, finding olivine, a green mineral, measured radiation levels, took photographs, showcased the grandeur of the People’s Republic of China, and successfully entered sleep mode on December 22, 2020. However, there is one problem…
Chang’e-4 did not find traces of American astronauts’ presence on the Moon.
There were supposed to be six landings, no less! The conclusion is obvious: Americans never went to the Moon.
This news appeared on the internet in early 2019 and spread across various Russian-language news portals. It was first spotted on WorldNewsDailyReport.com. But this source is hardly reliable: it is a satirical news site, filled with headlines such as “Cannibal killer slaughtered and ate 23 pizza delivery men, 6 Jehovah witnesses, 2 postmen in past 7 years” and “Texas man admits to abducting 79 people to perform rectal exams on them.”
Chang’e-4 landed in the Von Kármán crater, which is located on the far side of the Moon, where the Apollo missions, incidentally, never landed. It is no surprise that the rover did not find any traces of landings there. It would be like trying to find Red Square by searching in Brazil.
And yes, for that matter, Chang’e-4 also didn’t find traces of the Soviet lunar rovers, but that is not a reason to claim they never existed.
Gagarin Was Not the First Cosmonaut
As everyone knows, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person to reach Earth’s orbit. He launched aboard the Vostok-1 spacecraft, completed an orbit around Earth, and returned safely.
The way the Soviets managed to send a human into space on the first attempt led to a wave of conspiracy theories in the West. Some claim Gagarin was not the first person sent into orbit but the first to survive. Allegedly, Alexey Ledovskikh, Sergey Shiborin, Andrey Mitkov, Maria Gromova, Gennady Zavodovsky, Ivan Kachur, Alexey Belokonov, Alexey Grachev, Gennady Mikhailov, and a dozen or so other cosmonauts flew there before him.
All of them supposedly died during the flights, but Soviet propaganda hid this to avoid losing face on the world stage. Such a brutal regime.
In reality, however, Zavodovsky, Kachur, Belokonov, Grachev, and Mikhailov were merely ground testers of space equipment and never actually went to space. The names Ledovskikh, Shiborin, Mitkov, and Gromova do not even appear in the cosmonaut corps or in the archives of the Ministry of Defense. Moreover, the spacecraft on which they allegedly perished were, in fact, carrying dogs.
Speculations that the Soviets secretly launched people into space with unsuccessful results had already appeared in the press before Gagarin’s flight. On February 12, 1961, the head of the cosmonaut corps, Nikolai Kamanin, wrote in his diary:
“After launching a rocket to Venus on February 4, many in the West believe that we unsuccessfully sent a human into space; Italians even claim to have heard groans and broken Russian speech. All this is completely unfounded. In reality, we are working persistently to ensure a guaranteed cosmonaut landing. In my view, we are even overly cautious in this. A full guarantee of a successful first space flight will never exist, but a certain level of risk is justified by the greatness of the mission. I agreed with Korolev and Keldysh that before a human flight, at least two consecutive successful mannequin flights should be conducted.”
The ISS is Fake
We’ve previously talked about “flat-earthers”—people who believe that our planet is actually a flat disc. On YouTube videos about space exploration, you’ll often find comments along the lines of “The International Space Station doesn’t exist; all astronauts are actors, and ISS videos simulating zero gravity are filmed either in a pool or on a diving plane.” Presumably, these comments come from those who believe in a flat Earth.
They don’t seem to have any explanation for why anyone would go to such trouble.
But such claims don’t stand up to scrutiny.
First, you can simply observe the ISS, as it’s the third-brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. The station is very close—about 400 kilometers from Earth. A pair of binoculars is usually enough to see it, and many people even manage to spot it with the naked eye.
NASA has even released a guide for amateur photographers who want to capture images of the station. You can track its current location using an interactive map or the ISS Detector mobile app.
Second, the ISS program involves 15 countries, and 242 astronauts have visited the station throughout its history, with tens of thousands of people involved in its operation. It’s hard to believe NASA could bribe, intimidate, or deceive so many people. Furthermore, hundreds of independent scientific organizations and institutions have conducted research on the ISS; you can see a list of these organizations here.
Third, ISS radio communications have often been picked up by amateur radio operators, including enthusiasts in our own country. There are even instructions on how to do this.
Fourth, the idea that ISS footage is shot in a pool or a diving plane doesn’t make sense either. Take a look, for example, at a couple of videos made by astronauts. One was by Andrew Morgan and Luca Parmitano, and another by Sunita Williams. It’s clear they’re not floating in a pool—there’s too much talking for people underwater.
And artificial weightlessness in diving planes only lasts a few dozen seconds, which isn’t enough to produce these videos. Plus, planes are much smaller than the ISS.
Incidentally, here’s a fun fact. American astronauts jokingly call planes used to simulate weightlessness the “Vomit Comet.” Guess why.
SpaceX Rockets are Fake Too
If you’re not convinced by the ISS conspiracy theory, here’s another one. As everyone supposedly knows, Elon Musk is a fraud who could never invent anything real—or flyable. Therefore, his company SpaceX’s rockets are an elaborate fake.
In videos of rocket landings, the boosters are allegedly lowered on cables in front of the camera. Sometimes, they don’t even bother and simply cut the broadcast—then show a rocket standing on a barge, as they did during the first crewed launch in May 2020. They’re getting lazy.
In fact, proving that SpaceX rockets actually fly and aren’t lowered on cables is quite simple: just look at an amateur video of a booster landing. There are also many onlookers witnessing these landings.
Moreover, you can see a photo of a spent booster on a barge, with a couple of workers nearby. Obviously, lowering such a massive object on cables would be quite challenging.
As for the frequent interruptions of live broadcasts of barge landings, it’s simple: the barge shakes at that moment, disrupting the signal from the directional antenna. They have to wait until the ship returns to port to retrieve footage from the cameras. More details are available in this video.
Once, internet users even noticed a “mouse” crawling across the nozzle of Falcon’s second stage while it was flying in space. Upon closer inspection, however, it turned out to be a piece of frozen oxygen venting from the engine valves.
And the Tesla Sent into Space is Fake
Here’s more about SpaceX. On February 6, 2018, the company tested its first heavy rocket, the Falcon Heavy. As a dummy payload, it launched a Tesla Roadster, owned by Musk himself, somewhere toward the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
After this, rumors began circulating that the footage of the Roadster in space was fake, because the car looked too unrealistic, as if someone had added it in Photoshop.
Rick Sachleben, a specialist from the American Chemical Society, explains that colors appear different in space because there is no atmosphere. Light reflected from objects doesn’t interact with air particles, so colors appear sharper.
This is why the car looked too “crisp”—even Musk joked, “It looks kind of fake.”
Earth Has a Twin Hidden Behind the Sun
Counter-Earth is a hypothetical planet supposedly located behind the Sun, on the same orbit as Earth. It’s also been called Antichthon, Gloria, Gor, or Vulcan. Its existence was first speculated by ancient philosophers—the Pythagoreans—and it still pops up in various conspiracy and UFO theories.
Allegedly, it’s inhabited by some alien civilization—possibly a copy of ours or a much more advanced species of green beings. In 1952, a strange man named Truman Bethurum even claimed to have been taken there on a flying saucer. He reportedly had a romantic affair with the ship’s captain, a humanoid woman named Aura Raines, whose portrait you can see here.
Naturally, iPhones weren’t around back then, so Truman didn’t take any selfies with her. Nonetheless, his wife left him.
Modern research, however, clearly shows that no Counter-Earth exists. First, it would exert a gravitational influence on other planets, which would be detectable. After all, the existence of Neptune was predicted by mathematical calculations before it was seen through a telescope.
Second, NASA’s STEREO satellites, launched in 2007 to observe what’s behind the Sun, didn’t find any planets at the third Lagrange point.
Mars Occasionally Appears as Large as the Moon
In 2003, an email circulated claiming that on August 27 of that year, Mars would appear as large as the full Moon. This would supposedly be visible to the naked eye.
Since then, this message has occasionally resurfaced in the media, leading many to believe that Mars, at certain times, appears as large as our Moon when at a record-close approach to Earth. Despite the email mentioning that such an event happens once every 60,000 years, social media often promises the chance to see it almost every year, usually with an accompanying photo like this one.
This is nonsense. Mars’s apparent size will never match the Moon’s because it’s too far away. On August 27, 2003, Mars did indeed come within 55.7 million kilometers of Earth.
This was the closest approach in 60,000 years, though Mars-Earth opposition—when the planets are closest and align—occurs roughly every 15–17 years. The most recent was in 2018.
However, even then, Mars appeared only as a small red dot in the sky.
Mars Has a Sculpture of a Face Visible From Orbit
By the way, here’s something else about Elon Musk’s desired destination. You’ve probably heard of the “Martian Sphinx” — a huge stone face protruding in the Cydonia region (an area in Mars’ northern hemisphere). You can easily find photos of it online. This is a genuine image taken by NASA’s Viking-1 research station in 1976.
Many pseudoscientific publications took this as proof of a civilization on Mars. After all, the idea of aliens building a statue visible from space and then disappearing in the sands sounds great. It’s very much in the spirit of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction.
Unfortunately, the mystery was spoiled by the Mars Global Surveyor and HRSC automatic stations. They photographed the “face” in higher quality, revealing that it was just a dull hill. The Viking-1 images only seemed to show a face because of the angle of the light.
Alien Technology Is Stored in “Area 51”
“Area 51” is a U.S. Air Force base located in Nevada. In 2019, nearly three million people coordinated on Facebook* and Reddit to storm the base.
Why? Because it supposedly contains UFOs recovered by the U.S. military, and extraterrestrial technology found on them is being studied there. It’s also rumored that real aliens are held captive there. Many people would love to get a glimpse of all this.
“We will all meet at the Alien Center tourist spot near Area 51 and coordinate our entrance. If we run like Naruto, we can move faster than their bullets. Let’s go see the aliens.”
— Matty Roberts, a Facebook* user who first suggested the Area 51 storming
Of course, the storming didn’t succeed because only a few thousand people showed up, and they ended up having a picnic outside the gates. But even if they had gotten into the restricted area, they wouldn’t have found anything interesting.
The base is used as a testing ground for experimental military aircraft, which would seem dull to those unfamiliar with aviation. The glowing objects occasionally spotted over the base since 1955 were spy planes, the Lockheed U-2 and A-12 OXCART, as the military later admitted. The reflections from these titanium-skinned aircraft are easy to mistake for flying saucers.
The CIA declassified some documents on the base back in 2013. So now, only the most die-hard fans of the movie Independence Day still believe in aliens at Area 51.
The Stars We See Have Long Since Died
As we know, light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. That’s not nearly fast enough to cover vast cosmic distances instantly, so we see objects in the sky with a delay. For instance, we observe the Sun with a delay of 8 minutes and 17 seconds because that’s how long it takes for its light to reach us.
As for other stars around us, we see them as they were in the distant past, separated from us by tens, hundreds, thousands, or even millions of light-years.
This is why it’s often said, “Most of the stars we see are already dead! We’re just seeing the light from already-dead stars.”
These phrases sound impressive and poetic, making one ponder the fleeting nature of things. However, this isn’t true.
The vast majority of stars you see are still alive and continue to shine. Yellow and red dwarfs, which are the most common stars in the sky, have lifespans in the billions of years.
In ideal conditions, you could count around 9,000 stars visible to the naked eye in the sky. The chance that any of them has died is less than 1%. So the overwhelming majority of stars above us are alive and well — at least as well as a ball of plasma can be.
Crop Circles Are Messages From Aliens
Amazing figures formed by flattened plants in fields are often thought of in popular culture as a way for aliens to leave messages for less developed civilizations. It’s like a giant “I love you, Katya!” written on the pavement, but on a scale visible from the sky. These circles and other geometric shapes in fields are known as “agriglyphs.”
So why would aliens from other planets ruin farmers’ crops instead of using more understandable ways of communication? Most likely, because there are no aliens.
In 1991, two pranksters named Douglas Bower and David Chorley admitted to creating over 200 figures in British fields since 1978. The “alien technology” they used included only a wooden plank, rope, and a coil of wire. Bower and Chorley inspired a whole following of imitators who created over a thousand more circles.
Researcher Jeremy Northcott analyzed many such phenomena and found that all these signs appear in easily accessible places, near roads, towns, and cultural heritage sites. Moreover, human symbols like hearts, arrows, smiley faces, and other such things often appear among the figures.
In short, all evidence points to agriglyphs being the handiwork of human pranksters rather than extraterrestrial minds.
