Armageddon forecasters persist — try, try, try again

In September, to much fame, a man who claimed to have studied astronomy in Kentucky and deciphered the Book of Revelations predicted an ominous sign would appear on Sept. 23 and foretell the world’s end.

“It’s a very biblically significant, numerologically significant number,” David Meade told The Washington Post then. A series of catastrophic events would follow the omen, he claimed, culminating in the appearance of a mysterious planet called Nibiru and the end of “the world as we know it.”

Meade’s claim sold a lot of tabloids and Youtube ads. When Sept. 23 passed with no omens or calamities, Meade revised his very numerologically significant date to Oct. 15.

You might think two consecutive misfires would quash the Nibiru theory. Instead, it’s simply transcended its erroneous author.

Meade isn’t even mentioned in the latest batch of tabloid stories, which quote yet another doomsday theorist to warn that the end of all things not on Sept. 23 or Oct. 15 — but now Nov. 19, when Nibiru is supposed to set off cataclysmic earthquakes.

“November 19th will see earthquake Armageddon across huge swaths of the planet,” the Daily Express wrote in representative tones. The paper cited as evidence unnamed “astronomers and seismologists.”

Try to pin down the “astronomers and seismologists” who supposedly support this theory, and you end up at Planetxnews.com, a conspiracy website that Meade sometimes writes for. The quakepocalypse theory comes to us courtesy of a different author, Terral Croft.

But like every other Nibiru doomsday theory (which go back to 2003, as Kristine Phillips wrote for The Post) it’s based on an analysis of pure fantasy.

Nibiru, as far as science can tell us, simply doesn’t exist.