Nibiru

Summary

Nibiru is a planet said to be on course for the Earth in May 2003 and then in December 2012. No telescope has ever recorded it, and both dates passed.

The name comes from a 1976 book by Zecharia Sitchin, who read Babylonian texts as describing a planet on a 3,600-year orbit. The first date came from Nancy Lieder's website ZetaTalk, which presents itself as messages from beings she calls the Zetas. Neither the planet nor the dates survive a check against the texts or the sky.

What is documented

The book. In 1976 Zecharia Sitchin (1920 to 2010) published The 12th Planet (New York: Stein and Day). He argued that Sumerian and Babylonian texts describe an unknown planet, Nibiru, in the solar system, which, in the words of his official website, has "an elliptical orbit of about 3600 of our years". In Sitchin's account its inhabitants, the Anunnaki, came to Earth and mined its gold.

The word. In cuneiform texts nēbiru means a crossing. The Babylonian creation epic Enūma eliš says that Marduk "established the heavenly station of Nēbiru to fix the stars' intervals". Astronomical texts apply the name to Jupiter, the star of Marduk, when it stands at a particular point in the sky, and another text applies it to Mercury. Reviewing the evidence in 2015, Immanuel Freedman concluded that the name "may be assigned to any visible astronomical object that marks an equinox". On that reading the name belongs to whatever visible object marks the crossing, not to a hidden planet.

The prophecy. Nancy Lieder, from Wisconsin, is the author of ZetaTalk. Her own biography dates its beginning to 19 January 1995, in an online discussion group, and says she became aware of her "contactee status" in 1993. A ZetaTalk page written on 15 February 1996 states: "Planet X does exist, and it is the 12th Planet, one and the same." It tied Lieder's Planet X to the title of Sitchin's book.

May 2003. ZetaTalk said the planet's passage, with the Earth's rotation stopping and its poles shifting, would come shortly after 15 May 2003. On 16 May 2003, on a radio show, it gave a specific date: the rotation would stop for 5.9 days and the pole shift would come on 27 May 2003. Nothing happened on either date. A ZetaTalk page written on 23 May 2003 had already called the 15 May date "an acknowledged white lie on our part", told, it said, so that governments could not plan to block cities on a known date. A later page said that "the date, and the date alone, was a deliberately confused issue."

December 2012. The story then attached itself to predictions that the world would end in December 2012, a date drawn from the Maya calendar. The date was not Sitchin's. He died in 2010, and in July 2011 his official website, answering readers who asked what 21 December 2012 meant for his work, said that "neither cataclysmic events on December 21, 2012 nor Nibiru come into play as a concern in 2012". In November 2017 the site added that, according to Sitchin's 2007 book The End of Days, "Nibiru is not due to come near Earth for at least several hundred more years."

NASA. NASA answered the 2012 claims in public. In a NASA TV programme dated 5 January 2012, David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Lunar Science Institute, addressed "related myths like Nibiru". NASA's description of a public question-and-answer session held on 28 November 2012 began: "Stories about the fictional planet Nibiru and predictions of the end of the world in December 2012 have blossomed on the Internet." The description of a NASA ScienceCasts episode of 11 December 2012 said that the world was "safe from rogue planets".

After 2012. In November 2014 the ZetaTalk newsletter said that world leaders had planned to announce Nibiru in the week following 20 October 2014, and that the announcement had been blocked. No announcement was made. The newsletter gave no date for the planet itself.

The sky. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) scanned the whole sky twice between 2010 and early 2011. In March 2014 NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory reported Kevin Luhman's analysis of the survey: no object the size of Saturn or larger out to 10,000 astronomical units from the Sun, and no object larger than Jupiter out to 26,000. Luhman concluded that the outer solar system "probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star."

Leading explanations

A modern story, not a planet. Established. Nibiru exists in two places: Sitchin's interpretation of Babylonian texts, and Lieder's messages. It does not exist in the cuneiform record, where nēbiru is a crossing and a name for visible objects, and it does not exist in any observation. Its dates came from prophecy and from the 2012 predictions, and each passed without it.

A real planet approaching the Earth. Rejected. Nothing was seen before, during or after May 2003, December 2012 or October 2014. The whole-sky WISE survey found no object the size of Saturn or larger within 10,000 astronomical units of the Sun.

Nibiru is Planet Nine. Rejected. Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet proposed by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown in 2016 to explain the orbits of some distant icy bodies (AR-0080). NASA describes it as 20 to 30 times farther from the Sun than Neptune on average, with an orbit of 10,000 to 20,000 years, and states that it "has not yet been discovered".

Current status

Debunked. No telescope has ever recorded Nibiru. The dates set for its arrival, in 2003 and 2012, passed without it, and the promised announcement of 2014 never came. The ancient texts cited for it use the name for Jupiter, Mercury and the equinox crossing, not for an unknown planet.

The one thing that would change this record is an observation: a planet, found and tracked by astronomers, on the orbit claimed. None has been reported in the half century since The 12th Planet was published.

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