(Planet-Today) Humans have had a long history of predicting the end of the world. It has been a hobby of quite a few self-proclaimed prophets and psychics going back millennia, and it seems to have long been a popular pastime among these fugures to prophesize on all the ways we are going to be wiped out. Thankfully, over the centuries such predictions have come and gone to leave us still here hurtling through space on this rock of ours, but this has not stopped people from continuing to try. Such doomsayers exist right up into the present and some are more prominent and high-profile than most. Here we will look at one very prolific spinner of end-of-days predictions, as well as various other bonkers things. 

Right off the bat, the man known as David Meade is a mystery in that this name is a pseudonym, and no one knows what his real name is. A writer, researcher and investigator who has written and self-published at least 13 books, mostly on how we are all going to die, Meade is a bit of an enigma and has made many claims about his past that are hard to confirm. He claims that he was raised as a Catholic and attended the University of Louisville, studying astronomy and other sciences, that he has worked for both the federal government and private industry, and that he has written investigative reports on abnormal state administration and executives for Fortune 1000 organizations. He has never provided any evidence or really any details on any of this that can be confirmed, and his whole past is murky. We may not know his name or his real history, but a lot of people certainly know who he is, because he has made a name for himself by making a series of very bizarre future predictions over the years on how we are all doomed.

Meade’s main area of interest is foretelling the end of the world, and his favorite method by which this will happen is an elusive and ominous theoretical planetary object called Nibiru, also often called Planet X. Long talked about by various conspiracy theorists, Nibiru is said to be a planet four times the size of the Earth on a long, 3,600-year-long elliptical orbit around the Sun, and that when it passes through our neighborhood it is supposed to bring with it catastrophic destruction. The theory was first mentioned in 1976 by author Zecharia Sitchin, who believed the planet is home to ancient aliens called the Annunaki who he claimed created the human race, and supposedly will end it. At the time it was still an obscure concept, but in 1995 it was given a push by a woman named Nancy Lieder, who claimed that she was an alien contactee receiving messages from extraterrestrials from the Zeta Reticuli star system through an implant in her brain, and that these entities were warning her about the imminent arrival of Nibiru, which would destroy the earth and all life on it. This was supposed to happen in 2003, but even when it didn’t, the idea of this menacing mysterious planet lurking around ready to swoop in and wipe us out stuck, and all manner of conspiracy theorists came out of the woodwork with their own dire predictions about the Nibiru cataclysm happening sometime in the 21st century within our lifetime. One of the most prominent of these is Meade. 

Meade’s first prediction that Nibiru would destroy us was that it would happen on September 23, 2017. He based this assertion on a combination of alleged numerical codes in the Bible and what he says are coded messages in the Giza Pyramids of Egypt, and that several catastrophes such as the solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and the Mexico earthquakes were all proof that he was right, serving as opening acts to the main event. According to him, on September 23, Nibiru would barrel through our solar system to collide with Earth, and not only that, but “a woman clothed with the sun will appear in the sky, crowned by nine stars, and then give birth to a boy that will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.” On September 21 he even claimed to have seen the rogue planet in the sky from his house. This might have just remained the ramblings of a disturbed individual that didn’t get far past the fanbase of people who read his conspiracy theory books, but when a glitch from a test by the Emergency Alert System caused an Orange County, California television station to accidentally display his prediction in a public emergency alert it got people’s attention. Suddenly Meade was the center of attention, and he would add that not only was Nibiru on its way, but that September would also see North Korea launching a nuclear attack on America from a used Russian submarine lurking off the coast of California, and that this would trigger the eruption of a supervolcano, so yeah, it seems that if Nibiru didn’t wipe us out we were screwed anyway. Depending on whether a person was rational or not, at the time there was panic among some, and scoffing among others. When September 23 came and went without us being destroyed, Meade had some explaining to do, and explain he did. 

He would claim that people had misunderstood his Planet X prophecy, and he pushed the date back into October, which was to be a pretty busy month for calamity, catastrophe, and all sorts of weird stuff. First was that there would be an eclipse of the sun by Nibiru on October 5, which would herald a surprise nuclear attack by North Korea, China and Russia on the US on October 15, when, as he put it “that’s when the action starts.” As soon as the missiles started flying, a billion people, all Christians, would be levitated into the sky to disappear in the Rapture, or the biblical end of the world where only the worthy are saved by God and the rest left to suffer and die. The ones that would levitate away would supoposedly include President Donald Trump and his vice president Pence, after which president Barrack Obama, who presumably would not fly off to Heaven with the others, would serve a third term as president of the United States. I am not making any of this up. There would also be seven years of nuclear war, and the electro-magnetic pulses from Nibiru would shut down electrical systems all over the world, destroying infrastructure and sending the remainder of humanity careening into chaos. Just for good measure, there would also be “seven years of tribulation,” during which there would be a series of solar flares and catastrophic magnitude 9.8 earthquakes, tsunamis would run amok, the Earth’s pole would shift by 30 degrees, and the United States would be split in half, all sorts of fun stuff, and this would all be followed by a millennium of peace. You might recognize all of this as things that did not happen, and so Meade was back to square one again.

He quickly backpedaled on his ominous prediction, saying that an error in his readings of the numbers and signs had caused his prediction to be off, and that in fact the apocalypse was meant to do down the following month on November 20, but nothing happened on that day either. Meade then went back to his notes, tweaked his data and formulae, and came to the conclusion that the apocalypse would totally, definitely, for real this time guys, happen in March of 2018, and that the January 2018 super blue blood moon eclipse, the 2018 Winter Olympics, and Israel’s 70-year celebration of independence were all signs of this certainty, but when Nibiru was a no show he changed it to April 23. That didn’t happen either, but undeterred he asserted that it would definitely happen sometime between May and December of 2018. Are you still here reading this? Yeah. 

Meade has faced a lot of hurdles with his preaching and predictions. First and foremost is that none of his predictions have ever come true, which means that either the bible is reading it wrong or he is reading it wrong, or, you know, he’s making it all up. There is also the fact that there is absolutely no scientific evidence whatsoever that Nibiru exists in any sense, and in fact NASA has repeatedly wasted its time trying to explain to Nibiru believers of this. In addition, although Meade is a hardcore Christian and often intertwines his Nibiru doomsday predictions with biblical end-of-world scenarios and Christian apocalyptic rhetoric, he does not even have much support among other Christians, who largely consider him to be an ambarrassment. Ed Stetzer, who is the Billy Graham Distinguished Chair of Church, Mission, and Evangelism at Wheaton College and Executive Director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, as well as a pastor and just about as Christian as you can get has said of Meade and his ramblings:

There is no such thing as a ‘Christian numerologist.’ Meade is a made-up expert in a made-up field talking about a made-up event. Whenever someone tells you they have found a secret number code in the Bible, end the conversation. Everything else he or she says can be discounted. He is making Christians look silly.

Nevertheless, Meade has continued to rack up views on his various pages and videos, gather followers, and he continues to sell a lot of books on the subject, so it seems doom and gloom sells. One of the main unsettling problems is that he has become so incredibly well-known. Despite his failed predictions and being constantly debunked and shunned by the larger Christian community he has made a stamp in the public consciousness by appearing on interviews on Coast to Coast AM, The Washington Post, the popular American national television and radio program Glenn Beck Program, YouTube with pastor Paul Begley, and the Daily Express, which all gives him a podium from which he can spread these ideas. He will no doubt continue to make his predictions and Nibiru will likely continue not arriving, and even so some will likely keep eating it up. That is not to say that the end of the world will not happen. There are lots of scenarios that could end the world as we know it, but it seems that with the way the world is going now many might agree that we won’t need a mysterious rogue phantom planet or the biblical Rapture to do it.

Brent Swancer