Oh-My-Gawd! We’re All Gonna Die!
WARNING! This article contains skeptical analysis of ridiculous fantasies perpetuated by listeners of late night AM radio and other assorted inbred whack jobs living in plywood shacks in the deep forest.
If you are a member of one of the above mentioned groups… SHEEESH! What the hell are you people smokin’? 
2012 and Counting is a great article by Dr. David Morrison that can be read in full at the Skeptic.com website. I’m going to quote a bit of it here, but I highly recommend reading the article. Interesting stuff!
PUBLIC CONCERN ABOUT DOOMSDAY IN December 2012 has blossomed into a major new presence on the Internet. This fear has begun to invade cable TV and Hollywood, and it is rapidly spreading internationally. The hoax originally concerned a return of the fictitious planet Nibiru in 2012, but it received a big boost when conspiracy theory websites began to link it to the end of the Mayan calendar long count at the winter solstice (December 21) of 2012.
This is funny. I just saw an interview on some PBS program the other day where present-day descendants of the Mayans get a laugh out of all this. They claim the calendar just ended… nothing mysterious about it. The Mayans just stopped it at that point. Whether they intended to pick it back up 
again is unknown. The point though, is that they just decided to stop chiseling notches in stone tablets at that point. Maybe they just ran out of sharp chisels. Who knows?
As this hoax spreads, many more doomsday scenarios are being suggested, mostly unrelated to Nibiru. These include a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field, severe solar storms associated with the 11-year solar cycle (which may peak in 2012), a reversal of Earth’s rotation axis, a 90- degree flip of the rotation axis, bombardment by large comets or asteroids, bombardment by gamma rays, or various unspecified lethal rays coming from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy or the “dark rift” seen in a nearby galactic spiral arm.
Why am I not surprised here? Isn’t life on this Earth complicated enough without creating fantasy ELEs? You know, it’s no wonder the psychiatry/psychology profession is so busy prescribing therapy and psychotropic drugs for so many folks these days. If the websites online and the radio programs on in the middle of the night are any hint, there’s a whole lot of mental instability out there. Scary, huh?
I answer questions from the public submitted online to a NASA website, and over the past two years the Nibiru-2012 doomsday has become the dominant topic people ask about. Many are curious about things they have seen on the Internet or TV, but many are also angry about supposed government cover-ups. As one wrote “Why are you lying about Nibiru? Everyone knows it is coming.” Others are genuinely frightened that the world will end just three years from now. My frustration in answering questions piecemeal motivates this “Twenty Questions” format…
Read the rest of the article to see how efficiently Dr. Morrison addresses concerns in the Q/A format he speaks of above.
In the 
meantime, watch out… these folks are your co-workers, your neighbors, even your own family members. Next time you’re visiting weird uncle Bill, keep an eye open for his tin foil headgear and accessories.
Well, I gotta’ run, folks. The ol’ bomb shelter out back needs some spring cleaning. Hmm… wonder how old those MREs are? Oooh! Chocolate cake from Desert Storm. YUM!
Later…
~Eric
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This article was originally published on my Nocturnal Slacker | Lockergnome blog. You can click HERE to see it there along with the accompanying comments.
Nocturnal Slacker v2.0 
It was listening to Art Bell one night — long ago — that finally pushed me over the edge. Over the edge of skepticism, that is. I was finally convinced I had been right to question all the bafflegab and bullshit I’d heard since I was a kid … about ETs and UFOs and Stonehenge and the pyramids and Bigfoot and yada yada yada. Art Bell convinced me it was all laughable, a huge steaming load of cow manure straight out of the barn.
When I was a child and a young teen, there was an area of the public library labeled “.001” by the Dewey Decimal System in use at that time. Its name was “Transient Events”. In it were books about everything from UFOs to six-legged frogs. for a period of ten years or so, I gobbled up every book in that section of Tampa’s main branch library. There truly are some unexplainable things in this world and in the universe. However, I do not believe they are unexplainable because they are “supernatural” in any way. I believe them to be unexplainable simple because we do not have the requisite knowledge to explain them. To this day, I still find those topics quite interesting. Oddly enough (or maybe not oddly at all), my study of that topic probably led me to my current skepticism, also.
Even though, this was an old rerun posting, Psi, thanks for reading/commenting. 🙂
~Eric
Re: “… I gobbled up every book in that section of Tampa’s main branch library.”
Hmm, sounds like you were stealing a page from the late Charles Fort. If you’ve never heard of him, don’t be alarmed … although he had a pretty large following at one time and established a Fortean Society of like-minded cranks and freaks, it rapidly fell by the wayside after his death. Now he’s best-known as a rather interesting chapter of Martin Gardner’s Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science.
Indeed. I’m definitely aware of who Fort was. Wasn’t there a magazine back then called The Fortean Time or something like that?