Hercólubus

Hercólubus, in the Latin American woo scene, is a giant planet that supposedly will approach the Earth with catastrophic results, similar to the Nibiru/Planet X claims. This sounds like the plot to a bad science fiction story.

Hercólubus, or red planet
The fault in our stars
Pseudoastronomy
Adding epicycles
Epicyclists
v - t - e

Its most recent promoter is the Colombian New Age author V.M. Rabolu (real name: Joaquin Enrique Amortegui Valbuena, 1926-2000). According to (a promotional video of) his book, Hercólubus o Planeta Rojo:[1]

  • The planet is described as being 5-6 times larger than Jupiter in the book (the size of a small star. Someone failed astronomy forever). However it was at first described 3,200 times larger than Earth, which is a lot of difference.[2]
  • On a previous approach, 13,000 years ago, it wiped out Atlantis and a civilization that inhabited it, which inspired all global flood myths.
  • Its proximity will cause volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, and ultimately — a pole shift.
  • It will also cause a deadly epidemic that "official science" will be powerless to stop.
  • It's mentioned that their inhabitants are basically very well armed and prepared to war, so it would be better for scientists not attempt to fight back that planet.[note 1] Oddly enough, he at first described those inhabitants as living in the Stone Age.[3]
  • The only escape is… "the elimination of psychological defects" and… astral projection? What, humanity is supposed to project itself away from the Earth while the bad things happen on it?
  • Apparently not, because those "who work on their spiritual regeneration" will be "taken to a safe place". The same place the Heaven's Gate people went?
  • Everything described in that book comes complete with a lot of contempt against scientists. Everything.

More weird stuff

More nonsense in the book include:

  • Being concerned about nuclear weapon testing in the sea 'cause they have provoked deep cracks in the oceans where "Earth's inner fire" has entered into contact with water forming first massive cyclones identified by the author with El NiñoFile:Wikipedia's W.svg meteorological phenomenon and causing the Earth's rotational axis to begin to go nuts, that followed later among other things by Godzilla monsters born by those atomic tests emerging from the sea and attacking coastal cities and ships, babies born with nasty mutations, and finally emissions of steam so powerful that not even aircraft will be able to fly and will engulf Earth in darkness killing all life. That mess is described as seen from other dimensions, and of course comes complete with contempt against scientists for doing said nuclear explosions as well as against those who consider this as basically AAA-grade bullshit.
  • He claims to have traveled using astral projection to Venus and Mars and to have contacted the aliens there, describing them as follows:[note 2]
  • Venusians are described by him as large, silicon-based lifeforms that look like a heavily armored, multi-legged tardigrade,File:Wikipedia's W.svg able to withstand the tremendous conditions on Venus' surface basically a telepathic elf-like aliens[note 3] with advanced technology that looks like from a low budget 1950s sci-fi movie living in basically a perfect, communist-like, world with no homosexuals (disliked by him) — for some unknown reasons he talks about how they eat at restaurants and the way they construct their buildings.
  • Conversely, Martians are described as mobile plants able to resist the hard conditions of the Martian soil and with adaptations to collect the little available water on Mars' surface basically a stronger version of a Venusian who dress to combat "evil" — whatever it is — with helmet, armor, and shield made of a bronze-like material, being of course warriors. What is common in both worlds, and seemingly in other planets of the Solar System, is that there's complete freedom with no borders of any kind, and when someone wants to die they're cremated and reincarnated into a new body (assisted suicide in other words). Of course this comes complete with contempt against (US) scientists who negate the existence of life in Mars 'cause he has guessed all that jazz without using telescopes or space probes.
  • But wait, there's more! Spacecraft are cigar-shaped vessels made of one single piece and controlled by buttons (à la cheapo 1950s sci-fi movie again) that use solar energy to move, as if it was the air that a jet engine uses,[note 4] and whose crew communicates with telepathy. As one could have guessed, they'll come with huge transports to rescue the ones who have practiced what is written in the book when Herco… whatever arrives, and his hate of scientists is again present here.
  • Still here? The book ends talking about how to eliminate "psychological defects" and how to use "astral projection" (basically go to his cult to discover how, but for what's said there it looks as if it included to extend each syllable of certain words) (Sadly, it does not tell what things were ingested when writing this).

If you want to enjoy the BS by yourself, the book is sent for free. However you can *cough* find a copy *cough* in French *cough* if you *cough* look deep enough and at the bottom in *cough* Google.

The origin of the woo

Hercólubus or Red Planet was written in 1998/1999, but Rabolu apparently got the idea from his "teacher" Samael Aun WeorFile:Wikipedia's W.svg, who in the 1970s preached about Hercólubus being the end of the world in religious terms, as a punishment for the "shameful humanity that deserves the karma that approaches" and that "did not want to listen to the voice of the prophets".[4] Being the founder of a theosophy/anthroposophy-influenced New Age "gnostic" church (read: cult, with many splits later), he also threw Atlantis and the Kali Yuga into the mix.[5] In his version, Hercólubus is a part of the "distant solar system of Tylo", which he identifies[5] as Barnard's Star.[note 5] Needless to say, despite his claims to the contrary, Hercólubus is not an accepted scientific fact.[note 6]

ZetaTalk quotes a Hercólubus prophecy to bolster its claims about "Planet X", though they cite another origin — the channeled prophecies of other South Americans.[6] In the Brazilian version, the planet is orbiting an invisible star called Tia and enters the Solar System every 6666 years.[6] Skeptical readers will note that an invisible star would be a black hole, making this claim all the more laughable.

In recent times, some of the 2012 nuts have outright conflated it with the already conflated pair PlanetX/Nibiru. It's not that they have a great choice of actions — it's either that, or claiming that there are multiple incoming planets. The latter may be too much to swallow even for the most gullible among their followers.

gollark: You are GEORGE; in a way, we all are GEORGE.
gollark: GEORGE is currently standing outside the US National Library of Medicine.
gollark: GEORGE is the largest sporadic simple group.
gollark: GEORGE is a good notion of “fibrant-cofibrant functor” between which weak transformations can be replaced by strict ones.
gollark: GEORGE is commutative, associative, alternative, and invariant under tetration.

See also

Notes
  1. Obviously someone also failed at having sense of scale forever. The less one talks about the life that could develop in a planet so big, the better.
  2. Seriously. He uses just a couple of pages to talk about Hercowhatever, its effects, and to insult scientists, and changes subject to this. WTF?
  3. In the sense of Dungeons & Dragons elves minus the pointed ears and the tree-hugging
  4. Someone failed at physics forever too
  5. Barnard's StarFile:Wikipedia's W.svg is a small red dwarf star close to the Solar System with some unusual properties. In the 1960s and 1970s, some astronomers believed that they have detected planets in orbit around it, but this was later refuted until in late 2018 one was announced. See the Wikipedia article for details.
  6. The planet was also supposedly going to be visible at dawn in 1999 (no words in which month). Of course, it did not appear that year, much less affected us[citation NOT needed]. One guesses either the Death Stars/Starkiller Base/Sun Crusher used it for target practice or Galactus ate it as a snack

References
  1. HERCOLUBUS: THE PLANET OF THE END OF THE WORLD, video at DailyMotion, uploaded on 7 February 2009. It's embedded on the front page of http://www.hercolubus.tv/
  2. Link in Spanish. Said volume would mean it's as large as Jupiter. Still, WTF wth the size?
  3. Link in Spanish
  4. Samael Aun Weor, Closing Speech at the 1975 Gnostic Congress. When even pseudoscience magazines bashed his ideas, you can smell the bullshit from far away
  5. Samael Aun Weor, The End of the Kali Yuga, a lecture delivered in 1976.
  6. http://www.zetatalk.com/index/zeta335.htm
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