Author, Andy Lloyd, demonstrates in his book, The Dark Star, that a planet beyond Pluto need not be cold and lifeless! He says that astronomers know this. This is not controversial for them. They understand what brown dwarfs are, and they realize that they provide enough heat and light to provide habitable environments on planets orbiting these failed stars. Lloyd says that one might well be circling the sun, in the comet clouds that make up the bulk of the solar system's volume. The book recognizes the difficulties that detecting such a body present however, Lloyd puts forth a convincing argument with 332 pages of research, 41 pictures and graphics, hundreds of scientific references, and a complete index of terms and names. The existence of Planet X!
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Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Author, Researcher, Artist, Andy Lloyd received his BSc (Hons) (First Class Honours) in Chemistry from the University of Lancaster (1989) and continued Post-Graduate Studies at University of California, San Diego. He is currently a Registered General Nurse in the UK where he lives with his wife and two sons. He has been published in UFO Magazine (UK): Aug 2001, Nov/Dec 2002, Jan 2004, Paranoia Magazine (USA): Spr 2001, Win 2002, Spr 2002, Spr 2003, Spr 2005, "Australasian Ufologist" Magazine, Australia, June 2005 (Vol 9, no2), "Winged Disc: The Dark Star Theory" 2001, "The New Conspiracy Reader" , and Kensington, New York 2004 (Ed. Al Hiddell/Joan d'Arc). Currently, The Dark Star is his best authorship yet and is available in the US, Canada, Great Britian, and most of Europe. He has appeared on many radio and television programs such as 'Cut to the Chase' with Marshall Masters, Hilly Rose Show, USA, 2004, "Feet 2 The Fire" Radio Interview 8th May 2005, Radio Gloucestershire on several occasions, and Video Appearances on 'Planet X Video Part 2', 2003, and 'Waiting for the Apocalypse', 2003.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
57 of 57 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I first encountered Andy Lloyd's writing on the Internet about four years ago, when I was doing one of my periodic bouts of online research into possible discoveries of a tenth planet, along with updates to related "Planet X" and "binary companion" theories.
The Internet is a treasure trove of information, but sifting the plausible from the far-fetched and the patently preposterous has proven to be a time consuming endeavor over the years. This time was no different: it seemed that a group of alarmists had predicted, based on ancient Sumerian/Babylonian legends as well as a fairly recent book called "The Twelfth Planet", by Zecharia Sitchin, that a large planet by the name of Nibiru was about to come hurtling out of the void, on one of its once-every-3600-year rampages, and in 2003 it would cause all sorts of death, dismemberment, disaster and chaos in the inner solar system. Of course, the Government knew all this, but wanted to cover it up to prevent panic.
Now, I enjoy good doomsday and conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but this one seemed a bit over the top. Given how it's now 2006 and the world hasn't ended yet, I suppose my healthy dose of skepticism was in good order.
One web site stood out as remarkably different: Andy Lloyd's "Dark Star". He took a much more sober analysis of available astronomical data, and asked this set of questions: What if the Sun actually has a hidden binary companion? How would we be able to deduce the fact? What would it look like? How could it have escaped detection by our increasingly sophisticated telescopes? Being so far away from the Sun, and thus in a very cold region of space, could it host a civilization of extraterrestrials known by the ancient Sumerians as the Anunnaki, who supposedly long ago visited Earth?
Eventually, Andy assembled the gist of his online articles and essays and published it in the book "Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence". It consists of fifteen chapters on topics like the following:
- What is the solar system's "habitation zone", and how far does it extend?
- What did the Ancients have to say about this mysterious planet/deity Nibiru?
- What is a "brown dwarf", and could Nibiru be one? Or is Nibiru perhaps a planet/moon in orbit around a "brown dwarf", the Dark Star, sometimes known as Marduk? Could the Anunnaki Homeworld be yet another planet in this system?
- Could the Dark Star have played an important role in the formation of Earth? Could it have caused the primordial Earth to migrate from another part of the solar system, such as the Asteroid Belt?
- What could cause some of the anomalies in the orbits of the outermost planets and/or Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects such as Pluto, Sedna and the newly discovered "tenth planet", 2003 UB313 (popularly nicknamed "Xena")?
- Where might the Dark Star be, if it existed?
- What could be behind the precession of the Earth's equinoxes, as well as long-term cyclical changes in Earth's climate, such as the Ice Epochs?
- Could it be that the Dark Star has already been discovered, but just not recognized for what it is?
- What about some of the conspiracy theories about government cover-ups? Is there a valid reason why scientists might decide to "sit on" such a major discovery for a few years, without announcing it?
Although in a few places Andy repeats himself more than I'd care for, all in all I'd judge his book to be quite well written and informative, in simple language that a layperson like me can understand. There is an abundance of helpful diagrams as well as reference lists, at the end of each chapter, for further research. In fact, I enjoyed the book enough to read it twice, the second time taking detailed notes covering eight pages of notepaper.
It's important to note that Andy, like me, is not a professional astronomer: he merely has a very deep interest in astronomy and, I think, quite a broad knowledge of it. Thanks to the wonders of modern instant communication (e-mail), Andy has an extensive list of professional contacts, some of whom he quotes or even interviews in his book. I know enough to be able to catch glaringly obvious errors in poorly researched articles on astronomy; I noticed nothing of that sort in Andy's book. For errors of a more subtle variety, professionals will have to point them out.
I've been told that for something to be deemed "scientific", it ought to be able to explain observed phenomena, and yield testable predictions. Here, then, are some of the predictions either made or implied by "Dark Star":
- If the Earth formed in the Asteroid Belt, isotopic analysis of ices and other materials found on asteroids might be expected to match those found on Earth, but not other planets or moons. Do they?
- If the Dark Star and/or Nibiru exist, where Andy's book predicts or elsewhere, sooner or later it's going to turn up in someone's telescope sights.
- Once the Dark Star's orbit has been calculated, and its mass firmly determined, it should be possible to predict how it might affect the orbits of Earth and the other planets over long periods of time.
- If these Anunnaki extraterrestrials exist, or did at one time, it should be possible to eventually send a space probe to their homeworld and look for them, or for ruins of their civilization. Or, of course, they might show up here and say "Take me to your leader".
In summary, if you want a good overview of Planet X theories plus some tantalizing evidence that the Sun may have a hidden binary companion, this book would be a good place to start. I would also recommend visiting Andy's web site as a useful clearinghouse for new discoveries bearing on his theories.
The Internet is a treasure trove of information, but sifting the plausible from the far-fetched and the patently preposterous has proven to be a time consuming endeavor over the years. This time was no different: it seemed that a group of alarmists had predicted, based on ancient Sumerian/Babylonian legends as well as a fairly recent book called "The Twelfth Planet", by Zecharia Sitchin, that a large planet by the name of Nibiru was about to come hurtling out of the void, on one of its once-every-3600-year rampages, and in 2003 it would cause all sorts of death, dismemberment, disaster and chaos in the inner solar system. Of course, the Government knew all this, but wanted to cover it up to prevent panic.
Now, I enjoy good doomsday and conspiracy theories as much as the next guy, but this one seemed a bit over the top. Given how it's now 2006 and the world hasn't ended yet, I suppose my healthy dose of skepticism was in good order.
One web site stood out as remarkably different: Andy Lloyd's "Dark Star". He took a much more sober analysis of available astronomical data, and asked this set of questions: What if the Sun actually has a hidden binary companion? How would we be able to deduce the fact? What would it look like? How could it have escaped detection by our increasingly sophisticated telescopes? Being so far away from the Sun, and thus in a very cold region of space, could it host a civilization of extraterrestrials known by the ancient Sumerians as the Anunnaki, who supposedly long ago visited Earth?
Eventually, Andy assembled the gist of his online articles and essays and published it in the book "Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence". It consists of fifteen chapters on topics like the following:
- What is the solar system's "habitation zone", and how far does it extend?
- What did the Ancients have to say about this mysterious planet/deity Nibiru?
- What is a "brown dwarf", and could Nibiru be one? Or is Nibiru perhaps a planet/moon in orbit around a "brown dwarf", the Dark Star, sometimes known as Marduk? Could the Anunnaki Homeworld be yet another planet in this system?
- Could the Dark Star have played an important role in the formation of Earth? Could it have caused the primordial Earth to migrate from another part of the solar system, such as the Asteroid Belt?
- What could cause some of the anomalies in the orbits of the outermost planets and/or Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects such as Pluto, Sedna and the newly discovered "tenth planet", 2003 UB313 (popularly nicknamed "Xena")?
- Where might the Dark Star be, if it existed?
- What could be behind the precession of the Earth's equinoxes, as well as long-term cyclical changes in Earth's climate, such as the Ice Epochs?
- Could it be that the Dark Star has already been discovered, but just not recognized for what it is?
- What about some of the conspiracy theories about government cover-ups? Is there a valid reason why scientists might decide to "sit on" such a major discovery for a few years, without announcing it?
Although in a few places Andy repeats himself more than I'd care for, all in all I'd judge his book to be quite well written and informative, in simple language that a layperson like me can understand. There is an abundance of helpful diagrams as well as reference lists, at the end of each chapter, for further research. In fact, I enjoyed the book enough to read it twice, the second time taking detailed notes covering eight pages of notepaper.
It's important to note that Andy, like me, is not a professional astronomer: he merely has a very deep interest in astronomy and, I think, quite a broad knowledge of it. Thanks to the wonders of modern instant communication (e-mail), Andy has an extensive list of professional contacts, some of whom he quotes or even interviews in his book. I know enough to be able to catch glaringly obvious errors in poorly researched articles on astronomy; I noticed nothing of that sort in Andy's book. For errors of a more subtle variety, professionals will have to point them out.
I've been told that for something to be deemed "scientific", it ought to be able to explain observed phenomena, and yield testable predictions. Here, then, are some of the predictions either made or implied by "Dark Star":
- If the Earth formed in the Asteroid Belt, isotopic analysis of ices and other materials found on asteroids might be expected to match those found on Earth, but not other planets or moons. Do they?
- If the Dark Star and/or Nibiru exist, where Andy's book predicts or elsewhere, sooner or later it's going to turn up in someone's telescope sights.
- Once the Dark Star's orbit has been calculated, and its mass firmly determined, it should be possible to predict how it might affect the orbits of Earth and the other planets over long periods of time.
- If these Anunnaki extraterrestrials exist, or did at one time, it should be possible to eventually send a space probe to their homeworld and look for them, or for ruins of their civilization. Or, of course, they might show up here and say "Take me to your leader".
In summary, if you want a good overview of Planet X theories plus some tantalizing evidence that the Sun may have a hidden binary companion, this book would be a good place to start. I would also recommend visiting Andy's web site as a useful clearinghouse for new discoveries bearing on his theories.
22 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Walter Cruttenden,
Lost Star of Myth and Time
(St. Lynn's Press, Pittsburgh) 2005
Paperback, xxii+340 pages
ISBN 0-9767631-1-7
Andy Lloyd
The Dark Star
(Timeless Voyager, Santa Barbara) 2005
Paperback, xiv+304 pages
ISBN 1-892264-18-8
Critiqued by Frederic Jueneman
Here is a pair of scenarios, very old ones in many respects, to be sure, but motifs that take the reader on multidisciplinary journeys through space and time, of history and cosmology, and of culture and tradition. Regular readers of such literature will find that all of these groups plow pretty much in the same celestial fields. Notwithstanding, in a somewhat eclectic exposition one author (Cruttenden) come uncomfortably close to what this reviewer regards as new age occultism. But then, don't we all take a lot of things on faith and hope.
Cruttenden himself is a nonprofessional archeo-astronomer who builds and relies on earlier authors, both contemporary and historical, as well as assembling his own cache of mythic material to fortify his case that our Sun is part of a double-star system which orbits one another in approximately the same period as the Precession of the Equinox--a polar retrograde wobble of Earth currently figured at 25,770 years. Moreover, as the most original concept in the book, the author argues that the binary motions and gravitational influence of the two-star system cause the precession itself.
In like manner, science writer Andy Lloyd takes inspiration from Zecharia Sitchin's ancient Babylonian interpretations although with marked reservations, while also delving into myth and alternative science. Yet he generally tends to follow es¬tablishment guidelines in giving credence to his argument for a solar binary system. His major theme is based on the cliff-like Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt of asteroidal objects and comets that drops off rather precipitously beyond some 45 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun--one AU being the Earth-Sun distance--a gap that ostensibly extends several hundred AU to the inner boundary of the the¬oretical comet-filled Oort Cloud beyond.
The Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt was initially proposed in 1943 by the British researcher Kenneth Edgeworth and later resurrected by American as¬tronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951. This gap is argumentatively considered by Lloyd to be swept out by what might eventually be found to be a so-called brown dwarf star and its retinue of planetesimals, which have yet to be observed.
Such brown dwarfs were first theoretically described by radioastronomer Jill Tartar in 1975 as small, very dense and dim planet-like stars, which are radiating mainly in the infrared. They were called "brown" to differentiate them from the already designated black, red, and white dwarfs, although brown dwarfs were ultimately found to glow magenta to reddish.
Cruttenden's book, on the one hand, despite being replete with physical phenomena and apocalyptic mythology, also attempts to reinforce his earlier mercantile DVD exposé with additional detail from mythic and mystic lore by enumerating and expanding on the four stages of the Yuga ages: The primeval Kali Yuga, typifying the dark age of iron from which we have just emerged in the endless Hindu cycles of time, and our now having recently entered into the Dwapara Yuga, or bronze age, with the increasingly enlightening Treta and Satya Yugas, of the respective silver and golden ages, still some thousands of years ahead in the distant future. Our increased enlighten¬ment is apparently predicated on this approaching Lost Star, which endows mankind with field-induced expanded mental capacity. There are ascending and descending phases of these ages, the divya or half-yugas that comprise something over 12,000 years each, delineating the half-cycles of the equinoctial precession: The rise and fall of mankind's intellectual proclivities.
The Lost Star spends an inordinate number of pages on the significance of these ages on human culture, where a high point in human capacity and competence was reached some 11,500 years ago, and has gone downhill ever since, or at least until the end of the medieval period just a few centuries ago. According to Cruttenden, the lowest point--the Kali Yuga--was from about 700 BCE to around 500 CE; however, no allowance was made for the global renaissance of the 6th century BCE, where religious, philosophical, and intelletual thought burgeoned throughout the civilized world; a flourishing which gave rise to the received wisdom of India. Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. This may have been an aberration according to his scenario, but the excep¬tion does test the rule.
This is where the two authors differ, in that Lloyd is less enthusiastic than Cruttenden about the mysticism surrounding recorded events in human history. However, both authors do pay tribute to Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, who themselves had furrowed their pioneering groundwork of mythic lore by highlighting the Precession of the Equinoxes, and who also complained, "It goes without saying that the still more modern habit of replacing `culture' with `society' has blocked the last narrow path to understanding history. Our ignorance not only remained vast, but became pretentious as well."
Both of our authors under review bemoan the fact that astronomical ardor doesn't include many who, either through ignorance or hubris, even bother to consider an otherwise "unknown" or "unseen" massive companion to our solar system in the light of mounting evidence, other than minuscule icy worlds such as the recently discovered Quaoar, Sedna and Varuna, inter alia. But, as we all know, tradition is a very viscous medium.
Late 19th and early 20th century cosmologists, who had studied the perturbations on Uranus and relatively newly discovered Neptune (1846), determined that beyond these planets there was another massive body disturbing their motions; but, the discovery of tiny Pluto in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh didn't account for the expected discrepancy, although Voyager 2 in 1969 supposedly settled the cosmological question by assigning Neptune a greater mass than was previously reported.
Only Lloyd referred to the earlier research of the late Hughes Aircraft mathematician John P. Bagby, assisted by his wife Loretta L. Bagby, who were intrigued by planetary perturbations that seemed to indicate what they termed a Massive Solar Companion (MSC), situated out of the plane of the ecliptic in the direction of Sagittarius. Bagby, who was well known to this reviewer, initially and tentatively proposed this MSC back in 1972 but only formally and obliquely published his results some years later in a study related to earthquake periodicity. However, his investigation seemed to indicate that such an MSC, or perhaps a distributed mass in Lagrangian orbits, might be also located in the direction of Sirius. Bagby postulated Lagrange distributions for several of the orbital parameters, which much like the Trojans in Jupiter's orbit may either lead or lag the gas giant by 60°.
Sagittarius, however, would turn out to be a "star-crossed" option since it is well within our most abundant view of the Milky Way galaxy, which leaves astronomers looking into the headlights of millions of stars that would make finding a dim body among such stellar traffic toilsome at best. The latest IRAS (InfraRed Astronomical Survey) satellite exploration of the heavens showed an excess of 200,000 dim suns within relatively short telescopic range that are available for study. So, where do those who want to look decide to seek such a candidate star? In the other direction, of course, where there isn't quite so much glare. The comparatively open celestial sectors of Orion or Canis Major will do nicely.
Interestingly, one of Bagby's major postulated orbits had a period of 1467.6 years, which is uncannily close to the so-called Egyptian Sothic period of some 1460 years, which makes an enticingly roundabout connection with Sirius. This reviewer had corresponded at length with Bagby over this observation, and subsequently copies of his summary were distributed to his colleagues.
Sirius, in Canis Major, visible in winter months just to the left (east) of Orion in the celestial sphere, turns out to be a candidate "lost" star for Cruttenden's argument, despite its 8.6 lightyear distance and -1.43 magnitude brilliance, making it the brightest nighttime star in the heavens. It is Cruttenden's nominee for a root cause of Earth's precession, because of some residual resonant effect, as well as Sirius' own unique proper motion. It is this singular proper motion, which remarkably is in the direction of our own locale in the galaxy that keeps it almost stationary over the centuries in its annual heliacal rising despite its gradual transit across the constellations.
Sirius has risen heliacally on almost the same Julian date for the past 4000 years, and is currently moving out of Canis Major. Here, however, Cruttenden makes an oblique reference to the calendar reform of Julius Caesar, whereas the Julian calendar used in the astronomical community was devised by Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), whose own calendar reform was published in 1583, one year after the Gregorian amendment devised by the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII. Scaliger's formula, however, using days instead of years, is called the Julian Day Count--a practice still in use by astronomers today and named after his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger.
Both authors had scrutinized ancient literature, which claimed that in ancient times this star was red in color, which Sirius currently is definitely not. Read more ›
Lost Star of Myth and Time
(St. Lynn's Press, Pittsburgh) 2005
Paperback, xxii+340 pages
ISBN 0-9767631-1-7
Andy Lloyd
The Dark Star
(Timeless Voyager, Santa Barbara) 2005
Paperback, xiv+304 pages
ISBN 1-892264-18-8
Critiqued by Frederic Jueneman
Here is a pair of scenarios, very old ones in many respects, to be sure, but motifs that take the reader on multidisciplinary journeys through space and time, of history and cosmology, and of culture and tradition. Regular readers of such literature will find that all of these groups plow pretty much in the same celestial fields. Notwithstanding, in a somewhat eclectic exposition one author (Cruttenden) come uncomfortably close to what this reviewer regards as new age occultism. But then, don't we all take a lot of things on faith and hope.
Cruttenden himself is a nonprofessional archeo-astronomer who builds and relies on earlier authors, both contemporary and historical, as well as assembling his own cache of mythic material to fortify his case that our Sun is part of a double-star system which orbits one another in approximately the same period as the Precession of the Equinox--a polar retrograde wobble of Earth currently figured at 25,770 years. Moreover, as the most original concept in the book, the author argues that the binary motions and gravitational influence of the two-star system cause the precession itself.
In like manner, science writer Andy Lloyd takes inspiration from Zecharia Sitchin's ancient Babylonian interpretations although with marked reservations, while also delving into myth and alternative science. Yet he generally tends to follow es¬tablishment guidelines in giving credence to his argument for a solar binary system. His major theme is based on the cliff-like Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt of asteroidal objects and comets that drops off rather precipitously beyond some 45 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun--one AU being the Earth-Sun distance--a gap that ostensibly extends several hundred AU to the inner boundary of the the¬oretical comet-filled Oort Cloud beyond.
The Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt was initially proposed in 1943 by the British researcher Kenneth Edgeworth and later resurrected by American as¬tronomer Gerard Kuiper in 1951. This gap is argumentatively considered by Lloyd to be swept out by what might eventually be found to be a so-called brown dwarf star and its retinue of planetesimals, which have yet to be observed.
Such brown dwarfs were first theoretically described by radioastronomer Jill Tartar in 1975 as small, very dense and dim planet-like stars, which are radiating mainly in the infrared. They were called "brown" to differentiate them from the already designated black, red, and white dwarfs, although brown dwarfs were ultimately found to glow magenta to reddish.
Cruttenden's book, on the one hand, despite being replete with physical phenomena and apocalyptic mythology, also attempts to reinforce his earlier mercantile DVD exposé with additional detail from mythic and mystic lore by enumerating and expanding on the four stages of the Yuga ages: The primeval Kali Yuga, typifying the dark age of iron from which we have just emerged in the endless Hindu cycles of time, and our now having recently entered into the Dwapara Yuga, or bronze age, with the increasingly enlightening Treta and Satya Yugas, of the respective silver and golden ages, still some thousands of years ahead in the distant future. Our increased enlighten¬ment is apparently predicated on this approaching Lost Star, which endows mankind with field-induced expanded mental capacity. There are ascending and descending phases of these ages, the divya or half-yugas that comprise something over 12,000 years each, delineating the half-cycles of the equinoctial precession: The rise and fall of mankind's intellectual proclivities.
The Lost Star spends an inordinate number of pages on the significance of these ages on human culture, where a high point in human capacity and competence was reached some 11,500 years ago, and has gone downhill ever since, or at least until the end of the medieval period just a few centuries ago. According to Cruttenden, the lowest point--the Kali Yuga--was from about 700 BCE to around 500 CE; however, no allowance was made for the global renaissance of the 6th century BCE, where religious, philosophical, and intelletual thought burgeoned throughout the civilized world; a flourishing which gave rise to the received wisdom of India. Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece. This may have been an aberration according to his scenario, but the excep¬tion does test the rule.
This is where the two authors differ, in that Lloyd is less enthusiastic than Cruttenden about the mysticism surrounding recorded events in human history. However, both authors do pay tribute to Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, who themselves had furrowed their pioneering groundwork of mythic lore by highlighting the Precession of the Equinoxes, and who also complained, "It goes without saying that the still more modern habit of replacing `culture' with `society' has blocked the last narrow path to understanding history. Our ignorance not only remained vast, but became pretentious as well."
Both of our authors under review bemoan the fact that astronomical ardor doesn't include many who, either through ignorance or hubris, even bother to consider an otherwise "unknown" or "unseen" massive companion to our solar system in the light of mounting evidence, other than minuscule icy worlds such as the recently discovered Quaoar, Sedna and Varuna, inter alia. But, as we all know, tradition is a very viscous medium.
Late 19th and early 20th century cosmologists, who had studied the perturbations on Uranus and relatively newly discovered Neptune (1846), determined that beyond these planets there was another massive body disturbing their motions; but, the discovery of tiny Pluto in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh didn't account for the expected discrepancy, although Voyager 2 in 1969 supposedly settled the cosmological question by assigning Neptune a greater mass than was previously reported.
Only Lloyd referred to the earlier research of the late Hughes Aircraft mathematician John P. Bagby, assisted by his wife Loretta L. Bagby, who were intrigued by planetary perturbations that seemed to indicate what they termed a Massive Solar Companion (MSC), situated out of the plane of the ecliptic in the direction of Sagittarius. Bagby, who was well known to this reviewer, initially and tentatively proposed this MSC back in 1972 but only formally and obliquely published his results some years later in a study related to earthquake periodicity. However, his investigation seemed to indicate that such an MSC, or perhaps a distributed mass in Lagrangian orbits, might be also located in the direction of Sirius. Bagby postulated Lagrange distributions for several of the orbital parameters, which much like the Trojans in Jupiter's orbit may either lead or lag the gas giant by 60°.
Sagittarius, however, would turn out to be a "star-crossed" option since it is well within our most abundant view of the Milky Way galaxy, which leaves astronomers looking into the headlights of millions of stars that would make finding a dim body among such stellar traffic toilsome at best. The latest IRAS (InfraRed Astronomical Survey) satellite exploration of the heavens showed an excess of 200,000 dim suns within relatively short telescopic range that are available for study. So, where do those who want to look decide to seek such a candidate star? In the other direction, of course, where there isn't quite so much glare. The comparatively open celestial sectors of Orion or Canis Major will do nicely.
Interestingly, one of Bagby's major postulated orbits had a period of 1467.6 years, which is uncannily close to the so-called Egyptian Sothic period of some 1460 years, which makes an enticingly roundabout connection with Sirius. This reviewer had corresponded at length with Bagby over this observation, and subsequently copies of his summary were distributed to his colleagues.
Sirius, in Canis Major, visible in winter months just to the left (east) of Orion in the celestial sphere, turns out to be a candidate "lost" star for Cruttenden's argument, despite its 8.6 lightyear distance and -1.43 magnitude brilliance, making it the brightest nighttime star in the heavens. It is Cruttenden's nominee for a root cause of Earth's precession, because of some residual resonant effect, as well as Sirius' own unique proper motion. It is this singular proper motion, which remarkably is in the direction of our own locale in the galaxy that keeps it almost stationary over the centuries in its annual heliacal rising despite its gradual transit across the constellations.
Sirius has risen heliacally on almost the same Julian date for the past 4000 years, and is currently moving out of Canis Major. Here, however, Cruttenden makes an oblique reference to the calendar reform of Julius Caesar, whereas the Julian calendar used in the astronomical community was devised by Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540-1609), whose own calendar reform was published in 1583, one year after the Gregorian amendment devised by the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Clavius was instituted by Pope Gregory XIII. Scaliger's formula, however, using days instead of years, is called the Julian Day Count--a practice still in use by astronomers today and named after his father, Julius Caesar Scaliger.
Both authors had scrutinized ancient literature, which claimed that in ancient times this star was red in color, which Sirius currently is definitely not. Read more ›
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
By Joe E. Perez
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This is a really good book that makes more scientific sense than others that I have read on the subject of a 12th planet,Nibiru,Nemesis and such. Highly recommended.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
lost planet or a binary star in our solar system?
Andy is not a scientist. He has no tenure to protect. He has written an excellent book on a subject that should interest all of us. It is controversial. Read more
Published 12 months ago by David J. Webb
1.0 out of 5 stars
More junk for 2012 hysteria
The writer calls his own book "critically acclaimed" but doesn't mention by whom. It purports the theory that there's another sun in our solar system with it's own planets, and... Read more
Published 23 months ago by doppelganger
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Book on the Planet X Discussion
I really enjoyed Andy Lloyd's book, "The Dark Star". It was very apparent that Andy put an incredible amount of passion and research into "The Dark Star", from which I learned a... Read more
Published on February 17, 2009 by Roy F. Peters
5.0 out of 5 stars
Outstanding Research
`Dark Star' presents Lloyd's outstanding research on the subject of Planet X. It is the definitive book on the subject: well researched and clearly written. Read more
Published on January 12, 2009 by Peter Scott
4.0 out of 5 stars
A very good book
As an amateur ancient historian, I enjoyed this book very much. It goes beyond Z. Sitchin (Earth Chronicles) interpreting Sumerian texts, and shows that our solar system is likely... Read more
Published on August 12, 2007 by Aonghais
5.0 out of 5 stars
WHERE DID WE COME FROM? A MUST READ . NASA is following andy lloyds...
Wish i could give it 10 STARS..A indept look at how are inner solar system developed into what it is today. Read more
Published on April 12, 2006 by STUDACE
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