There are plenty of outlandish predictions about how the world is going to end on December 12, 2012 - by fire from an unprecedented solar storm, earthquakes, and a sudden shift of the earth on its axis. But one of the kookiest has to be the so-called Nibiru cataclysm, which will supposedly occur when a planet from the Zeta Reticuli galaxy (39 light years away) collides with the planet earth.

What most people don't know about this prediction is that it originated with a woman named Lancy Lieder who claims she is able to communicate with aliens from the Zeta star system via an implant that was put into her brain when she was a little girl. These aliens have been warning her about the coming disaster and she has taken it upon herself to warn the world.

According to Lieder's website, Zeta Talk, she first encountered the alien Zetas in the woods of Wisconsin as a young girl but only became aware of her "contactee status" in 1993.

This is how she describes them in one encounter (which she recalls under hypnosis, of course): "They're very grayish colored, and they're thin, like a thick broomstick. It seems like that to me. Even their bodies, almost like a thick broomstick. They don't seem to have a lot of substance. Or maybe they're like a post, but the arms and legs are like thick broomsticks. Very, very gray. No color."

Apparently, when she was in her teens and early twenties, she had sexual encounters with these beings and had their children - called "hybrids. She had the pleasure of meeting one of these offspring one night and they communicated telepathically.

This is how she described her "son": "He doesn't have any hair. His head looks like it's all rounded and white. It doesn't look real hard. It's got dimples here and there. Our skulls are smooth, so I wonder if there's bone under there. Maybe there's just brain. He has tiny little ears. They're very small. His eyes are hazel colored and they don't have any whites. His eyeballs are bigger than ours."

By 1999, Lieder decided it was best to quit her full-time job and devote herself entirely to spreading the message of the coming collision between earth and Nibiru. She now has a website and a Twitter account which she uses to warn mankind of the interplanetary danger that awaits us.

Lieder's so-called messages from the Zetas quickly wept through cyberspace and her prophecies became part of various doomsday websites, even those that never materialized. For instance, she and her Zeta friends predicted that an extra-terrestrial object would sweep through the inner Solar System in May 2003 that would cause the Earth to shift on its axis, thus wiping out most of mankind. As we all know, this never happened. Nevertheless, her prophecies have now become a part of the larger Mayan calendar doomsday debacle.

In spite of how ludicrous this story is, Lieder has many followers who are busily preparing for the end of the world which they insist will happen on Dec. 21, 2012 - by one means or another.

If you know anyone who is panicking over the thought that they might die on Friday, you might want to show them this blog and let them see how these predictions are the stuff of comic books, not real life.