Zecharia Sitchin

Sitchin was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, and was raised in Palestine. He acquired some knowledge of modern and ancient Hebrew, other Semitic and European languages, the Old Testament, and the history and archeology of the Near East. Sitchin graduated from the London School of Economics, University of London, majoring in economic history. A journalist and editor in Israel for many years, he now lives and writes in New York City. His books have been widely translated, converted to braille for the blind, and featured on radio and television.

According to Sitchin's interpretation of Sumerian cosmology, there is a undiscovered planet which follows a long, elliptical orbit, reaching the inner solar system roughly every 3,600 years. This planet is called Nibiru (the planet associated with Marduk in Babylonian cosmology). According to Sitchin, Nibiru collided catastrophically with Tiamat, another supposed planet located by Sitchin between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Tiamat, as outlined in the Enûma Elish, is a goddess. According to Sitchin, however, Tiamat was what is now known as Earth. When struck by one of planet Nibiru's moons, Tiamat split in two. On a second pass Nibiru itself struck the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half, struck again by one of Nibiru's moons, was pushed into a new orbit and became today's planet Earth.

This scenario is hard to reconcile with the Earth's current small orbital eccentricity of only 0.0167. Sitchin's supporters maintain that it would explain Earth's peculiar early geography due to cleaving from the celestial collision, i.e., solid continents on one side and a giant ocean on the other. While this is consistent with the giant impact hypothesis for the origin of the moon, that event is estimated to have occurred 4.5 billion years ago.

The scenario outlined by Sitchin, with Nibiru returning to the inner solar system regularly every 3,600 years, implies an orbit with a semi-major axis of 235 Astronomical Units, extending from the asteroid belt to twelve times farther beyond the sun than Pluto. "Elementary perturbation theory indicates that, under the most favorable circumstances of avoiding close encounters with other planets, no body with such an eccentric orbit would keep the same period for two consecutive passages. Within twelve orbits the object would be either ejected or converted to a short period object. Thus, the search for a trans-Plutonian planet by T.C. Van Flandern of the U.S. Naval Observatory, which Sitchin uses to bolster his thesis, is no support at all."^[3][4]

Sitchin's theory "posits that, from an equal start, the Nefilim evolved on Nibiru 45 million years ahead of comparable development on Earth with its decidedly more favorable environment. Such an outcome is unlikely, to say the least, since Nibiru would spend over 99% of its time beyond Pluto. Sitchin's explanation that heat from radioactive decay and a thick atmosphere keep Nibiru warm is absurd and does not address the problem of darkness in deep space. Also unexplained is how the Nefilim, who evolved long after Nibiru arrived, knew what happened when Nibiru first entered the solar system."^[5]

According to Sitchin, Nibiru was the home of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth, who Sitchin states are called the Nephilim in the Bible. He claims they first arrived on Earth probably 450,000 years ago, looking for minerals, especially gold, which they found and mined in Africa. These "gods" were the rank and file workers of the colonial expedition to Earth from planet Nibiru. Sitchin believes the Anunnaki genetically engineered Homo sapiens as slave creatures to work their gold mines by crossing extraterrestrial genes with those of Homo erectus. Sitchin claims ancient inscriptions report that human civilization in Sumer of Mesopotamia was set up under the guidance of these "gods", and human kingship was inaugurated to provide intermediaries between mankind and the Anunnaki. Sitchin believes that fallout from nuclear weapons used during a war between factions of the extraterrestrials is the "evil wind" that destroyed Ur around 2000 BC (Sitchin claims the exact year is 2024 BC), described in the Lament for Ur.^[6] Sitchin claims that his research coincides with many biblical texts, and that biblical texts come originally from Sumerian writings.

Taken deom Wikipedia

Nibiru

In recent years, the work of Zecharia Sitchin has garnered much attention among ufologists, ancient astronaut theorists and conspiracy theorists. He claims to have uncovered, through his own retranslations of Sumerian texts, evidence that the human race was visited by a group of extraterrestrials from a distant planet in our own Solar System. Part of his theory lies in an astronomical interpretation of the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, in which he replaces the names of gods with hypothetical planets. However, since the principal evidence for Sitchin's claims lies in his own personally derived etymologies and not on any scholarly agreed interpretations (including scholars among the Sumerians themselves), his theories remain at most pseudoscience to the vast majority, if not the totality, of academics.

^[1]

Sitchin's theory proposes the planets Tiamat and Nibiru. Tiamat supposedly existed between Mars and Jupiter. He postulated that it was a thriving world in a much differently shaped solar system, with jungles and oceans, whose orbit was disrupted by the arrival of a large planet or very small star (less than twenty times the size of Jupiter) which passed through the solar system between 65 million and four billion years ago. The new orbits caused Tiamat to collide with one of the moons of this object, which is known as Nibiru. The debris from this collision are thought by the theory's proponents to have variously formed the asteroid belt, the moon, and the current incarnation of the planet Earth.

Beginning in 1995, websites such as ZetaTalk have identified Nibiru or "Planet X" as a large brown dwarf currently within our planetary system, soon to pass relatively close to Earth. Sitchin disagrees with the timing of passage.^[2]

To the Babylonians, Nibiru was the celestial body or region sometimes associated with the god Marduk. The word is Akkadian and the meaning is uncertain. Because of this, the hypothetical planet Nibiru is sometimes also referred to as Marduk. Sitchin hypothesizes it as a planet in a highly elliptic orbit around the Sun, with a perihelion passage some 3,600 years ago and assumed orbital period of about 3,750 years; he also claims it was the home of a technologically advanced human-like alien race, the Anunnaki, who visited Earth in search of gold.

Taken from Wikipedia