If you're a perennial, SoCal, top-down kind of driver, you might want to plan to go hard-top for this one: NASA confirmed last fall that a good-sized asteroid, called Apophis, is on a collision course with our kind planet, with an impact date of sometime in 2036. It's enough of a concern that the Russians recently suggested inviting the Chinese and the Americans to collude on a way to blast the thing.

Now a Los Angeles public-relations representative is claiming his Swiss client, Billy Meier, predicted the asteroid's existence as far back as 1981, and that the man has published his predictions in books in 1991 and 2001. Not only that, but, according to Playa Del Rey publicist Michael Horn, Meier got the information from a conversation he had with an extraterrestrial being in 1976.

Meier wrote that an asteroid would “split the crust of the Earth from the North Sea to the Black Sea and create a new continent.” Horn himself then paraphrases his client's projections, including that the “devastating effects of the impact” would include “the huge blast wave and fireball, sky-blackening fallout, enormous fires and catastrophic landmass changes. Millions of lives would be lost at once with millions more to follow from climate disruptions, flowing masses of red-hot lava, toxic gases and a deadly westward drifting sulfurous wall.”

Apophis is described by NASA as being the size of two and one-half football fields, so it's arguable whether the thing would split such a mean crust or cause such a gnarly blast wave. Horn doesn't always get his story straight, either. In a release provided to the Weekly, he writes that the alien gave Meier the information about the asteroid in 1976. In a release found online, he states the year his client learned about the asteroid was 1981.

Also, there's no mention in Horn's P.R. materials about Meier's prediction involving a 2036 collision. So, Meier said a large asteroid would collide with the planet someday. It happens. Pure Carnac.

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