Book Review: The Return of Planet X by Jaysen Q. Rand

The full title of this book won’t even fit in the space allotted for the blog post title, so here it is: The Return of Planet-X And Its Effects on Mother Earth ~ a Natural Disaster Survivor’s Manual ~ WORMWOOD: Mankind’s Ongoing Legacy With A Brown Dwarf Star by Jaysen Q. Rand, Ph.D. (FutureWorld Publishing, 2007).

Let’s start at the end, since starting at the beginning won’t make any more sense. The bibliography for Planet-X is the freaking weirdest I have ever seen in my life. It includes numerous sci-fi novels, the 1990 Guinness Book of World Records, a Jehovah’s Witness tract, and a book called Re-Discovering the Sacred by Phyllis A. Tickle. There are many non-academic works of Bible history, religious prophecy, and pseudohistory, written by people with extreme fondness for exclamation points, such as Gyeorgos Ceres Hatonn‘s Shrouds of the Seventh Seal (The Anti-Christ Whore of Babylon!) and Cataclysm! by D.S. Allan and J.B. Delair. Most interestingly, there are several works by one Harold Camping, a California radio preacher. His name comes up in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer magazine (May/June 2010). It seems Camping has used his own mathematical Bible Code to discover the date of the end of the world several times… and his latest date is May 21, 2011. That’s gotta hurt. You use the guy as the backbone of your 2012 theory, and he goes and pulls 2011 out of his hat.

There is no index. The text is errata-riddled, the punctuation bizarre (slashes are used in lieu of commas 99% of the time, and I lost count of the triple exclamations points!!!). Some pages are just blank. There’s neither rhyme nor reason to the layout, giving the impression of a scrapbook belonging to an insane person. Random photos jostle with sentimental free-verse poetry by Anonymous, Bible verses, and vaguely relevant clipart. Most of the photos are superfluous. One blurry photo of Earth is captioned, “Planet Earth – the continuing saga of a small watery world seemingly lost in space on its intrepid journey hurtling through the vastness of the Milky Way Galaxy here in the 21st Century.”

Moving forward (er, backward) from the bibliography, Planet-X concludes with a brief history of George Van Tassel’s Integratron. Rand lived on Van Tassel’s property in 1983-84 and wrote a book about his paranormal experiences there, The Reality Engineer. I still have no idea what this has to do with the end of the world.
There’s also a press release from the Binary Research Institute, and a critique of the Kyoto Accords, arguing that reforestation can offset some of the effects of the coming catastrophe – no curb on greenhouse gas emissions required.
The main text ends with a prophecy by “Mother Shipton” (a seeress who likely never existed).

So what is this imminent catastrophe, exactly? Let’s go to the beginning. The book starts out with the Wormwood passage from Revelation (8: 10, 11) and other Bible verses, along with excerpts from Planet-X itself, which is just weird. There are some additional subtitles, too, including “a working hypothesis based on science and fact”. We learn from these snippets that Dr. Rand has awkwardly melded Velikovsky‘s catastrophism to the Nibiru material of Zecharia Sitchin to create a “scientific” theory: Every 3600 years or so “Planet-X” (an undiscovered brown dwarf in our solar system) passes close to Earth on its wildly elliptical orbit, causing catastrophes aplenty. It last passed by us during the Biblical Exodus (dated here as 1447 BC), which Velikovsky explained in his 1950 masterpiece of pseudohistory and pseudoastronomy, Worlds in Collision. A “pole flip” may occur when X next passes Earth, either in September 2009 or December 2012. More on that concept later.

Planet-X is variously described as “a creative writing project”, a “timely natural disaster survivor’s manual”, a work “critically important for every American and citizen of planet Earth living today”, and a scientific treatise. At one point, Rand mentions he was given the “ET assignment of writing a number of books”.
Rand himself doesn’t quite seem to accept that the world as we know it will end in a few years. Early on, he suggests that a visit to your local planetarium would be fun and educational for the whole family. Screw the apocalypse, go to the Planet Arium!
In his “introductory overview”, he mentions that the book started out as a series of teleplays for a never-produced TV pilot, packed with “exciting Planet-X adventure themes”. Um, why propose a TV series if you think the world will end in five years? Who is this guy, anyway?

Jaysen Q. Rand, Ph.D.

The name sounds like one of those old-timey dramatic serials you can still find on the comics page, doesn’t it? I can just picture “Jaysen Q. Rand, Ph.D” next to Mary Worth and Prince Valiant.
But anyway, according to his bio and other info in the book, Rand is an alien abductee, a UFO researcher with close ties to Russian ufologists Lt. Col. Marina Popovich and her ex-husband, General Pavel Popovich, and a Grammy-nominated record producer with 35 gold/platinum records to his credit. The “dr.” comes from an honorary PhD bestowed by the Academy of Energyinformative Sciences sometime in the early ’90s. As the only accessible info about “energyinformative science” comes from the academy’s own website, I’m not exactly sure what it is. But it incorporates folk medicine, “cosmic biorythmology” [sic], astrology, “uphology” (the science of upholstery?), biolocation, psychology, psychotronics, and aerodynamics, and it seems to be another term for “eniology”, whatever that is.

Rand’s real name is Paul Bondora. Currently, he resides in a small town in Mississippi. The photo in Planet-X is incredibly outdated; Rand (b. 1939) is now in his golden years, as you can see in the promotional vid at the end of this post.
Last year, criminal charges of acting as a real estate agent without a license were filed against him, then dropped.
He apparently does have some background in the recording industry, but his Grammy nom and gold/platinum status are in question.
He first came to public attention with the publication of Planet-X and a 2008 appearance on Coast to Coast AM.

When did Rand first become interested in Planet-X? Well, it all began in Manitoba, in the year 1950. An ET named A-Lon saved 11-year-old Paul Bondora’s life, and Paul spent five hours aboard a landed spaceship with A-Lon’s family. They showed him an hour-long film about the history of Wormwood.

The Gist of Planet-X

We’re all going to die in two years. Well, most of us will die. There will be a few survivors – the lucky ones who purchased this book.
Rand believes that Earth’s geological, mythological, and even sociological history has been shaped by catastrophic upheavals more than anything else, and that most of these upheavals were caused by the repeated passage of “Planet-X”, the body referred to as “the star Wormwood” in the Book of Revelations. Our scientists and public officials know all about this “star” and its effects, but to avert widescale panic they have painstakingly hidden the truth of our planet’s history and future. The Bush administration doubled FEMA funding in 2002 because of Planet-X, for instance. Rand paradoxically insists that modern science is woefully ignorant of Earth’s cataclysmic history. This isn’t the only issue on which Rand contradicts the hell out of himself. On page 64 he asserts, “We believe Nibiru is ‘Wormwood’.” But go back to page 25 and you’ll read this: “Many Internet websites suggest that Planet-X be referred to as Planet Nibiru – one particular theory about ‘X’ that we don’t ascribe to [sic].”

X has been affecting Earth’s weather patterns since 2005, causing a record number of tropical storms. Rand predicted that it would make its first pass of Earth in 2009, causing massive natural disasters: a 180-degree “pole shift”, tsunamis, quakes, fires, volcanic eruptions. I’m sure you remember all this happening, so I won’t go into any detail.
In 2012, all this stuff (and probably more) will occur again when X makes its second pass. Oh, and “as our planet’s vibratory rate increases daily we’re also beginning to see phenomenal shifts in our personal time-based physical reality streams.”
This is all New Age-speak for “Shit’s gonna get real.” And that’s pretty much all Rand has to say. The rest of the book is filler. Rand speculates that the “Nefilim” aliens written of by Sitchin may already be on Earth, preparing a Rapture-like scenario in which they will ferry select humans to safety. Another possibility is that the hybridization programs so often mentioned by alien abductees are the aliens’ effort to repopulate Earth with a new species.

There’s also a lot of material about Atlantis and other “lost kingdoms” destroyed by brushes with X. Rand points to ruins discovered near the Azores, Cuba, India, the Thar Desert, Peru, and Malta as evidence of sudden catastrophes. We’ll look at some of this archaeological evidence in Part II, along with “pole shifts”.

Promotional video for The Return of Planet-X (Part I)