The 2012 Phenomenon

Summary

Many people believed that the world would end, or be transformed, on 21 December 2012, when the Maya Long Count completed its 13th b'ak'tun. The day passed, and no Maya text had predicted anything of the kind for it.

By the middle of 2012 two ancient inscriptions were known to name the date. Both record events of the seventh century AD, and neither describes a catastrophe. The doom, the alignments and the planet Nibiru were modern additions. A single NASA question service received more than 5,000 questions about them, some from people in real distress.

What is documented

The count. The Long Count is a count of days, in units of the k'in (one day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days), k'atun (7,200 days) and b'ak'tun (144,000 days, about 394 years). It runs from a base date in August 3114 BC, which Maya texts describe as the end of a 13th b'ak'tun. In December 2012 the count reached 13 b'ak'tuns again, written 13.0.0.0.0 and named 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in: 1,872,000 days, about 5,125 years, after the base date.

Two dates, not one. The match between the count and the European calendar is a scholarly reconstruction. Simon Martin, writing for the Penn Museum in April 2012, explained that its two versions give 21 or 23 December 2012. Many specialists favoured the 23rd, he wrote, but believers in a cosmic significance "uniformly prefer" the 21st, the winter solstice.

Tortuguero Monument 6. Until 2012 the only inscription known to refer to the date was Monument 6 from Tortuguero, in Tabasco, Mexico. From the reign of Bahlam Ajaw, it records the dedication of a building in AD 669, and its badly eroded closing passage looks ahead to the 13th b'ak'tun. Sven Gronemeyer and Barbara MacLeod (2010) translate it as the completion of the thirteenth b'ak'tun on 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in and "the display of B'olon-Yokte' in a great 'investiture'", a god they associate with the ends of Long Count cycles. They read the passage as a prophecy, but of a ceremony. Stephen Houston (2008) tied it to the building's dedication: "It has nothing to do with prophecy." A brick from Comalcalco, once proposed as a further reference, is doubtful.

La Corona. In April and May 2012 an excavation directed by Marcello Canuto of Tulane University and Tomás Barrientos of the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala uncovered the remains of a hieroglyphic stairway at La Corona, in northwestern Guatemala. David Stuart of the University of Texas at Austin deciphered one block, Block V of Hieroglyphic Stairway 2, in May. It commemorates a visit in AD 696 by Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk', king of Calakmul, after Tikal had defeated him in 695. He had celebrated the end of the 13th k'atun in 692, and the scribe projected forward to the day when the next higher unit would also reach 13. Stuart called the block the second ancient source known to mention the date, and wrote: "There is no prediction involved." Canuto said the ancient Maya "make no apocalyptic prophecies about it whatsoever".

How the belief was built. The anthropologist John Hoopes, of the University of Kansas, calls the notion that the date would bring "physical catastrophes, a transformation of consciousness, or even a New Age" an "unanticipated and unintentional consequence of early speculation by credentialed academic experts". It grew, he writes, through counterculture reinterpretation. The works he cites include the first edition of Michael D. Coe's The Maya (1966), Frank Waters's Mexico Mystique (1975), José Argüelles's The Mayan Factor (1987) and John Major Jenkins's Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (1998).

What attached itself. Jenkins argued that the Long Count's creators had fixed its 2012 ending to an alignment of the December solstice Sun with the Milky Way, which he called the galactic alignment. Nibiru, a planet the ZetaTalk website had first expected in May 2003, attached itself to the 2012 date after that one passed (AR-0160). Other versions forecast a lineup of planets, or "lethal solar flares". The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian notes: "The majority of these predictions were made by non-experts and people who are not Maya."

The fear NASA reported. David Morrison, an astrobiologist at NASA's Ames Research Center, answered the public through NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist website. By late November 2012, NPR reported, it had received more than 5,000 questions about doomsday 2012, and Morrison had posted more than 400 answers. Some came from people contemplating suicide. One correspondent asked when to have a pet dog put down so that it would not suffer in the cataclysm. A NASA Ames listing for a lecture by Morrison that year said that millions believed a rogue planet called Nibiru was on its way.

NASA's answers. A NASA feature of 21 December 2011 noted that the Sun enters the part of the sky occupied by the Milky Way's dark rift every year at the same time, and that on 21 December 2012 it would pass about 6.6 degrees north of the galactic centre: its arrival there "portends precisely nothing". NASA's question-and-answer page stated: "There are no planetary alignments in the next few decades." It called Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets "an Internet hoax", and said that the solar maximum due between 2012 and 2014 was "predicted to be an average solar cycle". On 28 November 2012 NASA held a public online question session, "Beyond 2012", on the 2012 rumours, including what it called "the fictional planet Nibiru".

The day after, published early. On 11 December 2012, ten days before the date, NASA released a ScienceCasts video titled "Why the World Didn't End Yesterday". Its description told viewers they would "be here Dec. 22 to view it again". NASA's question-and-answer page now carries the date 22 December 2012, the title "Beyond 2012: Why the World Didn't End", and, below a 2017 editor's update, the line: "News flash: the world didn't end on Dec. 21, 2012."

Maya voices. In October 2012, AFP reported, a Maya alliance in Guatemala accused the government and tour operators of perpetuating the myth for money; its leader, Felipe Gomez, spoke against "deceit, lies and twisting of the truth". The Yucatec Maya archaeologist José Huchim Herrera, quoted by the Smithsonian: "Maya time is cyclical, and the end of the Long Count calendar in December 2012 is just that, the end of a cycle."

Leading explanations

A modern belief attached to a real calendar date. Established. The date is genuine: the Long Count completed 13 b'ak'tuns in December 2012. The doom, the transformation, the alignments and the planet were added later, a process Hoopes traces, and the inscriptions and NASA's answers record what each addition lacked.

A Maya prophecy of catastrophe or transformation. Rejected. In Simon Martin's words, the ancient Maya made "no prediction about what would take place on the next occurrence of 13.0.0.0.0", "calamitous or otherwise". Whether the Tortuguero passage forecasts anything is disputed: Gronemeyer and MacLeod read it as the prophecy of a ceremony, Houston and Stuart as a restatement of the building's dedication. No reading finds an end of the world.

An astronomical event on the date. Rejected. NASA answered the alignment, solar and planetary claims in public before the day, and no planet Nibiru has ever been observed (AR-0160).

Current status

Debunked. The date passed. The Maya inscriptions known to name it predict neither an end nor a transformation, and NASA answered the astronomical claims before the day. What the record keeps is the belief itself and the distress it caused.

Nothing can change what happened on 21 December 2012; a newly found inscription could only add to what the Maya wrote about the date. The predictions moved on to other dates: in September 2017, when another planetary collision was being predicted, NASA added an editor's update to the same page. The next b'ak'tun ends in 2407.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.