Doomsdays of Yesteryear: Toutatis Threatens Totally, 2004

From my column Psychic Vibrations   in the Skeptical Inquirer, 

Volume 28.4, July / August 2004

Toutatis Threatens Totally

Heads up—the End of the World is coming again! This time it’s the asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which, according to no less an authority than the celebrated Swiss UFO contactee Billy Meier, is in danger of slamming into Earth on September 29, 2004 (see Billy Meier’s Warning of a Catastrophic Impact Event Threat). According to NASA, Toutatis will make a close approach to Earth on that date, passing within approximately one million miles, which is nothing on a cosmic scale (see http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroids/ 4179_Toutatis/toutatis.html).

 But Meier is in contact with the space people from the Pleiades (he calls them “Plejarans”; I suppose that “Pleiadeans” sounds too unwieldy). And according to Michael Horn, who says he is the officially authorized media representative of Meier in the United States (which so far as I know Meier has never disputed), the Plejarans have warned that when Toutatis is closest to Earth, it will suddenly veer off course and head straight toward us. Horn says that it will require a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” to keep this multi-kilometer-sized asteroid from slamming straight into Earth. Before you dismiss this prophecy as the ravings of a demented man, be forewarned that Meier claims a long list of successful predictions (no doubt selectively culled from a much longer list of unsuccessful ones—Meier reportedly has written thousands of pages of predictions). Horn says that Meier predicted back in 1987 that Islamic fanatics would destroy the World Trade Center in New York. If true, this information will be of great interest to the current Congressional investigation into the September 11 attacks: What did Meier know, and when did he know it?
Others are also starting to sound alarm bells. The Web site of the conspiracy-oriented radio host Jeff Rense carries similar warnings (see www.rense.com/general50/sep29th2004.htm). There is even a claim of a secret government missile program to save us from disaster on September 29. And the biblical prophecy expert Arnie Stanton suggests that the encounter with Toutatis indicates that the Second Coming will be just a few months away. Stanton also warns that a larger, as-yet undiscovered asteroid will definitely smack into Earth sometime in 2006.
This is the first time to my knowledge that the world is ending in 2004. The world most recently ended in May of 2003, when a mysterious Planet X, inhabited by Zetans, was reported to be on its way to a disastrous close encounter with Earth, moving the poles and flooding entire countries. The Web site www.zetatalk.com is still there. It talks a lot about the disasters expected in 2003 but says nothing about there being a year 2004; as near as I can tell, their claim is that a disastrous planetary encounter did occur in 2003, but was covered up by NASA. Before that, the “planetary alignment” of May 5, 2000, was threatened as a trigger for all manner of earthly havoc. And of course, society as we know it ended on January 1, 2000, when every major computer system in the world not only failed, but became contagious, infecting even computers that did not suffer from the Y2K bug. The next scheduled major world-ending is in 2012, when, according to a number of reliable experts, the Mayan Calendar simply “runs out,” apparently making it impossible for time to continue.