The Planet X Saga: Mark Hazlewood

Page Contents
Introduction to Mr. Hazlewood	Sitchin
Brown Dwarf	It's not Planet X, by Jove!
Mr. Hazlewood accuses me of sending him disinformation!
Another misidentification of a conspiracy
Stable orbits	His attacks on me
Coverup	Conclusion
Back to the main Planet X page

He makes claims about Planet X based on his interpretations of the writings of Zacharia Sitchin, who in turn interprets ancient text, like those of the Sumerians. However, doing this is fraught with problems. Immanuel Velikovsky tried it (and Sitchin based his own work on Velikovsky), but failed miserably. Ironically, even Sitchin doesn't seem to claim Planet X will be around in 2003, but Mr. Hazlewood ignores that small fact.

Mr. Hazlewood claims that Planet X is a brown dwarf. As strongly as I can make this claim, this is impossible. I cover this on another page. He makes this claim several times in his book, and it's wrong every time.

(late July 22, 2002): Up until July 23, 2002, Mr. Hazlewood had a picture on his website, claiming it was sent to him anonymously. The caption read:

This anonymous inferred picture, which was said to be that of Planet X, was sent to my email address... It looks like it was photographed head-on because only a small portion of the tail is showing toward the bottom left.

In his defense, once it was pointed out to him, he took the picture down (and said he was mistaken on his listsev). For this I applaud him. However, the very fact that he had it up at all says a lot. Mr. Hazlewood didn't ask around to see what the picture was; he simply took an anonymously posted picture and stuck it on his site. He didn't say it was Planet X, but he did make inferrals about it being "face-on", and having a tail. This is misleading at best. It says a lot to me about the quality of his arguments.

Added July 31, 2002:
On July 30, Mr. Hazlewood responded to this very page on his read-only listserv group. A reader wrote to him, saying,

Someone is trying very hard to discredit you,while we are trying hard to get to the truth. "Bad Astronomy" has controversial info that the new sighting you received dated July 22 is in fact Jupiters moon,"Io". Evidently they want us to think it was your work.

Now, if you read what I wrote, you'll see that I say quite clearly that he posted to his website a picture someone else sent him; the problem was that he didn't bother to research it at all before posting it. So the person who wrote that was wrong. Also, there is no controversy in that image. It's clearly Io, and can be found on the Hubble website, to which I carefully linked. The reader is wrong again.

But then Mr. Hazlewood replies:

The powers that be, which includes Phil aka Bad astronomer, sent me what they said was an anonymous pic of Planet X. One day later I realized this and got rid of it. Immediately they started using this story to try to discredit all the other information I present, which was their original intention.

It sounds like he is accusing me of sending him that picture. I can assure you I didn't; I don't need to go to such lengths to show Mr. Hazlewood is wrong. The fact is that it doesn't really matter who sent it to him. He took a picture sent to him without reference, put it up on his site, and implied quite strongly that this was an image of Planet X. Incidentally, he is inferring motive behind someone sending him that picture, when he has no evidence for that motive at all. Maybe someone saw the image somewhere, and, like Mr. Hazlewood, was fooled by it. It's okay to make mistakes, of course. Everyone does. But it's best to check things out a bit first before jumping to conclusions. Anyway, his ideas of motivation are pure speculation, but he presents them as fact. They are nothing of the sort.

Then he goes on:

They are trying so hard to discredit and bait me they are actually developing interest where it wasn't before. In essence they are creating evidence in their attacks and I welcome the entire process which they only seem to understand a part.

It is a risk to debunk things like this, for that very reason. But in this case the genie is already out of the bottle. There are several websites, bulletin boards and chat rooms talking about Planet X. Maybe I waited too long to get into this topic! But people are hearing about it now, and some people are getting scared needlessly by this stuff. I'd rather people read his site and mine both, because then they'll get all the information they need to make an informed decision.

And I'll note again I am not trying to bait him. I don't see the need to! I was never on the attack with Mr. HazlewoodAs I show below, I was persistent with him, but never rude, despite the tone he took with me.

August 6, 2002: Hard on the heels of the misidentification of Io, Mr. Hazlewood finds yet more dubious-- and easily refuted-- evidence of a NASA coverup. Some pictures have been circulating the 'net supposedly showing Planet X as seen from a Russian space probe called NORLOK. I will post these images soon, but I will say here they look to me to be obviously faked for a number of reasons (not the least of which is that the captions on the image, which are supposed to be from the spacecraft itself, are in English). These images have caused a minor buzz among the Planet X folks.

Mr. Hazlewood, of course, has jumped right on the bandwagon for this. In his listserv, he says,

Hmmmmm, NASA's got info about NORLOCK but they don't seem to be making it clear for people to decipher it. [from an email he received]: However, I did a Google search on it and the term I entered was: "N+O+R+L+O+K" exactly like that, inside the quote marks. The returns were interesting in that there were about 8 and they all looked something like this: sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/sdb/soho/eit/daily_full_queue/200111/efr_195_2 0011128.191348 ... n o p k m j k l e k i l m k n h j p m o o o i p k k n u o o m l l k p l f h m j l p p q s p t p p p l h l o k n p l o v m p x o o q q n s m r p q u n o r l o k ... 101k - Cached (with the last 6 letters showing up in bold type, i.e. n o r l o k). When I clicked on any of them I was taken to an obvious NASA page, but the content was all in what I call gobbledegook! In other words lots of "computer type" signs, which I simply don't understand.

I was curious, so I typed the same thing into Google. The website they find is from SOHO, a joint European/NASA satellite designed to observe the Sun. When the page itself came up in my browser, I couldn't help myself: I laughed out loud. The page is not really a webpage, it's a binary file. SOHO takes images which are saved to disk as computer language files. Astronomers don't save images as GIFs or JPGs because they are not the best way to store data; astronomers use a special type of file called a FITS file. A FITS file has a text header with image information in it (like what telescope was used, what the target is, when the image was taken, etc.) and the image itself in binary format.

So, if you try to read a FITS file using a browser or text editor, you can read the header, because it's text, but the data is interpreted by your browser as just long strings of gibberish in ASCII format. That's precisely what is going on with this NORLOK stuff. By coincidence, that string of 6 letters in that order happens to be found deep in the binary part of the SOHO image. It is a coincidence. How do I know? Well, try going to Google and choosing some other strings. I tried "N+O+R+L+K" and got a SOHO page. I also found one for "G+O+O+G+L+E". Maybe they're in on the conspiracy! I also found one for "M+A+R+K+H", so I guess NASA is on to him. ;-) Ironically, "P+L+A+I+T" is not in the SOHO files, so I guess that proves I am not a disinformation agent.

The point here is that in a sufficiently long enough string of "random" letters, you are bound to find almost anything. In this case, a coincidence, when seen through prejudicial eyes, has led Mr. Hazlewood (and others, who have picked up on the story) to find meaning when there is none.

I'll also note that Mr. Hazlewood's informant mentions they could not understand what they were seeing. When I don't understand something, you know what I do? I pick up the phone and call someone who might. In this case, there are lots of SOHO scientists who would have been happy to explain what a FITS file is. They could have even (gasp!) emailed me and I would have explained it. Instead, they decided to make a mountain out of a particularly small molehill.

New! (April 24, 2003):
However, I did find the word "NORLOK" in the digits of pi (unfortunately, "Nibiru" is not in there). Perhaps the Universe itself is in on the conspiracy.

If it's stable, then we can calculate how far away it must be. I do this on the science page, and conclude that it cannot be more than 900 million kilometers away, which would make it very obvious in the night sky. We don't see it, so it must not exist.

If it's unstable, then you cannot make predictions about where it is, especially from ancient Sumerian writings! By definition, it is unstable and therefore unpredictable. if it's unpredictable, he cannot state it's on a 3600 year orbit. Therefore, Planet X does not exist, or else it has magical properties that make it both stable and unstable at the same time. You can guess how I feel about that.

You can read this discussion between Mr. Hazlewood and me starting with my own first post to the listerv. You may be surprised at the tone of the conversation. When I first posted a general comment to the listserv, he immediately attacked me, calling me a liar. Mind you, my first post was completely polite and did not attack him personally. I replied again, politely, and every time for quite a while he insulted and attacked me. I mention this simply to point out that I was never rude, nor did I ever say anything against him, yet he constantly attacked me, calling me a spook, among other things. He attempted to discredit me and others who questioned him but eventually only wound up making himself look bad.

I'm not the only one who feels this way, either. Ironically, his worst enemy may be Nancy Lieder herself! He "borrowed" a lot of her concepts for his own writing. She claims he posted several "get-rich-quick" scams to her own listserv. You can find more about that on The Skeptical Mind website. You can also read it on Ms. Lieder's site too.

But then something happens which changes all that. Mr. Hazlewood has thrown down a particularly vile and loathsome gauntlet. On his listserv, he says this (Note (January 13, 2007): that link no longer works. It goes to his old listserv, but it looks like he has erased all incriminating evidence. What a guy.):

Understanding that it's the same people that committed the 911 atrocities that are behind hiding Planet X, is a significant piece of information for all to comprehend.

Read that again, if you have to, and can stomach it. When I first did, I had a hard time believing anyone would say something this horrific and repugnant, but he did: he is indeed saying that the people covering up this imaginary Planet X are also behind the terrorist attacks that killed thousands of people on September 11, 2001.

Perhaps he is only including the government officials who, in his mind, are nefariously scheming to keep us common folks under their thumb. Perhaps he is including astronomers and scientists, people like me, in this statement.

Either way, this is the most astonishing, ridiculous, fetid thing I have heard come out of any piece of pseudoscience.

Mr. Hazlewood and others have accused me, over and over again, of attacking him and not his ideas. I have made my case in these discussions that I am only attacking his beliefs, but since he is the one holding them, in a sense these are indirect attacks on him. If you debate someone who truly believes in something, and you attempt to disprove it, is this not an indirect attack on them? Such is the nature of debate.

But this time I will make a personal statement:

By putting your revolting statement here on my page, I hope that the public you claim to want to protect sees you for what you really are. You talk of love, but spout hate. You talk of Oneness and togetherness, but incite divisiveness, an Us versus Them mentality.

When next May comes and goes with no celestial event even remotely resembling what you and your ilk claim, I hope the people who once followed you see you the way I do now. Enjoy your fame, such as it is, while it lasts. Come next May, you'll join the ranks of the thousands of other snake-oil salesmen who have come and gone, forgotten except in the moldy pages of future books documenting the folly of human belief.

I could go on and on, and when I get time I'll add to this list. Stay Tuned. For now, though, you can read more about Mr. Hazlewood's history on the Planet X and the Pole Shift website.

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