main events at Chichén Itzá in Mexico, and Tikal in Guatemala. Various astronomical alignments and numerological formulae were proposed as pertaining to this date. A New Age interpretation held that the date marked the start of a period during which Earth and its inhabitants would undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation, and that 21 December 2012 would mark the beginning of a new era. Others suggested that the date marked the end of the world or a similar catastrophe. Scenarios suggested for the end of the world included the arrival of the next solar maximum, an interaction between Earth and the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, or Earth's collision with a mythical planet called Nibiru. Scholars from various disciplines quickly dismissed predictions of concomitant cataclysmic events as they arose. Professional Mayanist scholars stated that no extant classic Maya accounts forecast impending doom, and that the idea that the Long Count calendar ends in 2012 misrepresented Maya history and culture, while astronomers rejected the various proposed doomsday scenarios as pseudoscience, easily refuted by elementary astronomical observations. UFO religions UFO religions sometimes feature an anticipated end-time scenario in which extraterrestrial beings will bring about a radical change on Earth and/or "lift" the religious believers to a higher plane of existence. One such religious group's failed expectations of such an event, the Seekers, served as the basis for the classic social psychology research on cognitive dissonance conducted by the American psychologists Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter and published in their book When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World (1956). Some adherents of UFO religions believe that the arrival or rediscovery of alien civilizations, technologies, and spirituality will enable human beings to overcome current ecological, spiritual, political, and social problems. Issues such as hatred, war, bigotry, poverty, and so on are said to be resolvable through the use of superior alien technology and spiritual abilities. Such belief systems are also described as millenarian in their outlook. Zoroastrianism The Zoroastrian eschatological ideas are only alluded to in the surviving texts of the Avesta, and are known of in detail only from the texts of Zoroastrian tradition, in particular in the ca. 9th century Bundahishn. The accompanying story, as it appears in the Bundahishn (GBd 30.1ff), runs as follows: At the end of the "third time" (the