Dr. Byron Glenn of Cape Girardeau says he wants nothing to do with the people he sees as online crackpots trumpeting a "conspiracy wrapped in an enigma."
He's not alone. The folks at NASA have fruitlessly tried to debunk what they say are wild conspiracies involving Comet Elenin -- a "wimpy" projectile expected to remain more than 20 million miles from Earth.
Glenn said he's been harassed and threatened by doomsday believers of "Planet X," an idea spreading in the blogosphere and in online chat rooms about a brown dwarf star, a low-mass object rapidly approaching the solar system and bent on destroying much of the Earth. He said that believers, apparently followers of Terral L. Croft, or "Terral03" as he is known in anxiety-ridden chat rooms, have shown up at his North Mount Auburn Road family practice demanding answers.
"I'm not the leader of any group. I can't tell people what to do. I don't want to," Glenn told the Southeast Missourian last week when asked about his connection to Croft's "research group," reportedly made up of people who plan to head for caves in Missouri's Ozarks in the coming weeks. The plan, according to Croft and a series of online correspondence in recent months, is to ride out the earthquakes, floods, volcanoes and other calamities they believe to be coming, thanks to the magnetic and polarizing effects of Planet X...read more>>>...