Planet X Cover-Up: the Find

And then they FOUND it ...

Washington Post
Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered, a front page story
31-Dec-1983

    A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter
    and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this
    solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation
    Orion by an orbiting telescope aboard the U.S. infrared
    astronomical satellite. So mysterious is the object that
    astronomers do not know if it is a planet, a giant comet, a
    nearby "protostar" that never got hot enough to become a star,
    a distant galaxy so young that it is still in the process of forming

    its first stars or a galaxy so shrouded in dust that none of the
    light cast by its stars ever gets through. "All I can tell you is
    that we don't know what it is," Dr. Gerry Neugebauer, IRAS
    chief scientist for California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and
    director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Institute
    of Technology said in an interview.

    The most fascinating explanation of this mystery body, which
    is so cold it casts no light and has never been seen by optical
    telescopes on Earth or in space, is that it is a giant gaseous
    planet, as large as Jupiter and as close to Earth as 50 billion
    miles. While that may seem like a great distance in earthbound
    terms, it is a stone's throw in cosmological terms, so close in
    fact that it would be the nearest heavenly body to Earth beyond
    the outermost planet Pluto. "If it is really that close, it would
    be a part of our solar system," said Dr. James Houck of Cornell
    University's Center for Radio Physics and Space Research and
    a member of the IRAS science team. "If it is that close, I don't
    know how the world's planetary scientists would even begin to
    classify it."

    The mystery body was seen twice by the infrared satellite as it
    scanned the northern sky from last January to November, when
    the satellite ran out of the supercold helium that allowed its
    telescope to see the coldest bodies in the heavens. The second
    observation took place six months after the first and suggested
    the mystery body had not moved from its spot in the sky near
    the western edge of the constellation Orion in that time. "This
    suggests it's not a comet because a comet would not be as large
    as the one we've observed and a comet would probably have
    moved," Houck said. "A planet may have moved if it were as
    close as 50 billion miles but it could still be a more distant
    planet and not have moved in six months time.

US News World Report
Planet X - Is It Really Out There?
Sept 10, 1984

     Shrouded from the sun's light, mysteriously tugging at the
     orbits of Uranus and Neptune, is an unseen force that
     astronomers suspect may be Planet X - a 10th resident of
     the Earth's celestial neighborhood. Last year, the infrared
     astronomical satellite (IRAS), circling in a polar orbit 560
     miles from the Earth, detected heat from an object about
     50 billion miles away that is now the subject of intense
     speculation. "All I can say is that we don't know what it is
     yet," says Gerry Neugesbeuer, director of the Palomar
     Observatory for the California Institute of Technology.
     Scientists are hopeful that the one-way journeys of the
     Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes may help to locate the
     nameless body.