Introduction
Quite conveniently, in the middle of writing this series of blog posts on Planet X and 2012, CNN today posted this article on the subject of 2012 and the lack of any approaching Doomsday. I will admit that I was pleasantly surprised that the article took a fairly incredulous view on the whole doomsday scenario, and it contained a lot of quotes from experts on the Mayans. I want to post them while this story’s still “hot.”
Other posts in this series:
- Planet X and 2012: The Real and Historical Story of Planet X
- Planet X and 2012: Primer on the Mayan Calendar
- Planet X and 2012: The PseudoAstronomy (or Just Plain Wrong Astronomy) About a Galactic Alignment
- Planet X and 2012: The Pole Shift (Magnetic) Explained and Debunked
- Planet X and 2012: Proof Earth Is Not Experiencing a Pole Shift
- Planet X and 2012: The Pole Shift (Geographic / Spin Axis) Explained and Debunked
- Planet X and 2012: Why Planet X Is NOT Coming in 2012
- Planet X and 2012: What The Sky Looks Like On December 21, 2012
- Planet X & 2012: Why a 3600-Year Planet X (Nibiru) Doesn’t Exist
- Planet X & 2012: Could Planet X Be a Planet Around a Binary Star to Our Own – a “Dark Star?”
Good Quotes
From David Stuart, director of the Mesoamerica Center at the University of Texas at Austin: “There’s going to be a whole generation of people who, when they think of the Maya, think of 2012, and to me that’s just criminal. … The whole year leading up to it is going to be just crazy, I’m sorry to say. I just think it’s sad, it really just frustrates me. People are really misunderstanding this really cool culture by focusing on this 2012 thing. It means more about us than it does about the Maya.”
From David Morrison of the “Ask an Astrobiologist” section of NASA’s Web site: “The purveyors of doom are promoting a hoax.”
From Anthony Aveni anthropology and Native American studies at Colgate University: “I think that the popular books… about what the Maya say is going to happen are really fabricated on the basis of very little evidence. … What you have here is a modern age influence [and] modern concepts trying to garb the ancient Maya in modern clothing, and it just doesn’t wash for me.”
From John Major Jenkins who describes himself as a self-taught independent Maya scholar: “The trendy doomsday people… should be treated for what they are: under-informed opportunists and alarmists who will move onto other things in 2013.”
Final Thoughts
Yes, this is a short post. If I come across other good quotes, I’ll add to it. But, I think this post is somewhat necessary because really, all you hear about 2012 and Mayans and doomsday and all that are from the people who are promoting it or from the occasional skeptic or astronomer who just says, “well that’s stupid” without going into too much detail. I wanted to provide independent views, ones from the archaeology community that I normally don’t really interface with.
Exposing PseudoAstronomy 