Zecharia
Sitchin is a remarkable scholar. A Russian emigrant to Israel, where he was
educated, he now lives in the USA and has devoted his life to the ancient
languages and archaeology of the Near East. By refusing to take for granted
the traditional readings of ancient documents, interpretations developed in
pre-technical times when references to such artefacts as flying machines were
assumed to be either fanciful or metaphors, and by working backwards in time
to the sources beyond the Hebrew versions of the book of Genesis, Sitchin
has painstakingly assembled from these earliest accounts a novel and convincing
version of the solar system, of our own earth and of humankind.
The quest, which ended only with the publication of his magnum opus, the four
books collectively known as The Earth Chronicles, began when Zecharia, as
a schoolboy studying the sixth chapter of Genesis, refused to accept his teacher's
instruction that the word "nefilim" should be translated as "giants".
Sitchin objected that the root meaning of the word was "those who from
Heaven to Earth came down", and spent the rest of his life justifying
that assertion. How far he succeeded in his self-imposed task can readily
be assessed by anyone who shares his knowledge of the culture and writings
of the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians, but those of us whose scholarship
is deficient in those areas must adopt more indirect and subjective methods
of evaluation. Studying the mass of evidence he assembles and sets out with
such clarity and logic, we have to decide for ourselves whether the narrative
he develops provides a credible interpretation of the great issues with which
it deals and whether, if we reject his version of events, we can provide an
alternative that carries equal conviction.
To attempt even a complete list of the matter contained in The Earth Chronicles
would exceed both my scope and my intention here, which is simply to set out
without even the minimum of justification those aspects of Sitchin's narrative
relating to my theme of man's encounters with the UFO occupants whose aims
and activities we have been tentatively seeking to understand. So let us begin
with Sitchin's final answer to the question with which his long search began.
Those Nefilim who came down to Earth 445,000 years ago were 600 natives of
the planet Nibiru, the tenth planet in our own solar system, which has an
atypical comet-like orbit which requires 3,600 earth years to complete. Anu,
the king or ruler of the advanced Nibiruan culture, had despatched a party
of 900 individuals 600 of whom, under the command of their leader Enki, established
an initial base in what is now southern Mesopotamia. The remaining 300 did
not come down, but operated the space links with their home planet from a
space station in Earth orbit and a planetary base on Mars. The purpose of
the expedition was to obtain gold, which was urgently needed on the home planet
to maintain the ecology of Nibiru, whose inhabitants enjoyed a life span so
long that we should consider them virtually immortal. During the next 45,000
years, as the ice age gave way to an interglacial period, the Nefilim extracted
gold from the seawater, built cities and a spaceport and established gold
mining operations in Southern Africa. Enki's half-brother Enlil was then sent
to take over the administrative side of the operation, allowing Enki, the
master scientist and engineer, to concentrate on his specialisms.
There was rivalry and bad feeling between Enki, the firstborn of Anu, and
Enlil, for it was the latter who would be Anu's heir, having been born to
his father's half-sister.
300,000 years ago there was a mutiny at the gold mines, so serious that Anu
himself came down from Nibiru to settle the matter. The Nefilim working the
mines had decided that 100,000 years of manual labour was enough. Enlil was
furious and wished to take a hard line with the rebels, but Anu was wiser
and listened sympathetically to their complaint. Enki, however, found the
answer. He undertook to create primitive slaves to do the work, by taking
the eggs of female hominids, fertilising them in vitro with sperm from the
Nefilim and bringing the embryos to term in the wombs of Nefilim females.
The creatures thus produced were known generically as The Adam, sterile mules
whose function was to work for the Nefilim and accept them as gods. This method
by which the Adam were produced in quantity was of necessity slow and probably
unpopular with the female Nefilim, so Enki the great geneticist gave a further
twist to the DNA chain which finally led to the production of fertile men
and women, creating mankind as the self-perpetuating species it has been ever
since.
In a mere 50,000 years, homo sapiens had populated several continents and
many of the male Nefilim, finding the human girls attractive, had helped in
the process, to the disgust of Enlil, who was beginning to think the creation
of Man in the image of the "gods" had been a bad mistake, especially
as Enki had got all the credit for it. 13,000 years ago, when it became clear
to the Nefilim that a great deluge was imminent on earth, calculated to destroy
all life there, Enlil was content to see this happen and persuaded the council
of the "gods" and his father Anu to agree. The biblical story of
Noah is well known, but it is perhaps not generally realised that this is
a corrupt version deriving from Akkadian and Sumerian accounts and altered
to conform with the monotheistic preoccupations of the editors of Genesis,
who treated the god-word as singular while leaving the plural verb forms unchanged.
The Hebrew word Elohim is plural and corresponds to the Nefilim, the "gods"
who gave the Sumerian scribes the original story. In the Assyrian version,
Noah is called Utnapishtim, whose story is simply a re-telling of the Sumerian
account of their king Ziusudra, known personally to Enki and forewarned by
him of the coming flood. The Nefilim did not create the flood nor could they
have prevented it; it arose as a consequence of the increasingly unstable
Antarctic ice cap slipping into the sea under the gravitic influence of the
approaching Nibiru at its perigee in the asteroid belt.
The Nefilim planned to save themselves by taking off into Earth orbit until
the waters subsided, but they were not going to tell mankind of the approaching
doom. Enki was supposed to keep this secret, but instead he decided to save
his faithful servant King Ziusudra and gave him instructions to build a giant
submersible craft, which he and the trusted members of his court, his workmen
and their families too, were all to board when they saw the rocket ships of
the Nefilim taking off from the spaceport. Enki also provided him with a navigator,
who was to direct the ark to Mount Ararat when the flood began to subside.
From their orbiting craft the Nefilim watched the overwhelming of the world
they had built and many of them were sad and wept, regretting the loss.
Eventually, when Enki had landed on Mount Ararat to meet his servant Ziusudra,
they learned that mankind was not altogether destroyed and even Enlil was
finally persuaded that the world must be rebuilt. The "gods" used
all their knowledge and technology to re-establish humanity as the floods
gradually receded, promoting agriculture and animal husbandry. Human civilisation
spread out from the Middle East to cover the globe, actively assisted by the
"gods" in their airships. Enki, known in ancient Egypt as Ptah,
personally ordered the development of the Nile valley culture, where some
of the great engineering works of the "gods" still remain to impress
us, just as does the base of their post-diluvian spaceport at Baalbec in the
Lebanon.
Sitchin continues his story, filling in the biblical background in depth and
detail, until in a further book, Genesis Revisited (1990), he tells the story
which suggests that the final chapter in the dealings of the Nefilim with
humanity yet remains to be written, that the bug-eyed Strieber type ufonauts
with whom some believe the US government has done a deal are in fact the android
creations of the Nefilim, still operating from the old Martian base they set
up so long ago. The story he tells, with photographic evidence in support,
is that of the USSR unmanned space probe Phobos 2, launched in July 1988 to
explore the planet Mars and more especially its unusual moonlet.
Phobos 1, launched at the same time, was lost two months later, allegedly
by an error in the commands sent to it by radio, but its twin arrived safely
into Martian orbit in January 1989. Although officially a Soviet craft, Phobos
2 represented a collaborative international effort with more than thirteen
European countries involved, and the participation with government approval
of leading British and American space scientists. Briefings from mission control
in Moscow indicated that it carried equipment to locate more precisely the
heat-emitting areas on Mars, scanning both the planet and the satellite with
infra-red and gamma ray equipment. Phobos was to receive special attention,
perhaps in view of Soviet suggestions that it could be a captured asteroid
deliberately placed long ago in its almost perfect circular orbit as a hollow
space station. The moonlet was to be probed by radar as well as the other
scanners, and photographed by three television cameras. Two landers were to
be dropped on its surface, one stationary and one mobile, and it was planned
that eventually the probe would hover a mere 150 feet above the surface, recording
features as small as six inches in length.
It certainly seems that the expedition's planners expected significant results
from the operation, "but", asks Sitchin, "was there someone
there, at Mars, who did not welcome this intrusion?" For on March 28
1989 Soviet mission control announced that contact with Phobos 2 had been
lost. Gradually the details of what had occurred were released. The final
television transmissions from the spacecraft, recorded by both colour and
infra-red cameras, showed an object, either a craft or a missile, heading
from the Martian surface towards Phobos. These pictures were released only
three months later by the Soviet authorities, but the very last frames, taken
just before the transmission was ended by the destruction of the orbiter,
have never been released to the public media.
In the penultimate chapter of Genesis Revisited, after a detailed discussion
of all the evidence, Sitchin concludes as follows: "What the secret frames
hide is evidence that the loss of Phobos 2 was not an accident but an incident,
perhaps the first incident in a Star Wars - the shooting down by Aliens from
another planet of a spacecraft from Earth intruding on their Martian base.
" It seems, however, most improbable that any of the ancient astronauts
from Nibiru would have condemned themselves to millennia of pointless exile
in bases beneath the sands of Mars. If, as Sitchin suggests, such bases exist
and are manned, then a maintenance crew of androids and robots seems much
more likely. If Phobos is indeed part of their installations, then they would
certainly have been programmed to defend it from intrusion. Whether their
instructions have also included keeping a watch on our own planet, particularly
since the time of our first atomic explosions when the UFO Phenomenon went
public, we do not know, nor can we be sure that their findings are not relayed
back to planet Nibiru, now being searched for by astronomers in Earth's southern
hemisphere as it flies through space on its return journey towards our sun.
(NB.: The present writer submitted this article before its first publication
to Z.S. for his approval. In reply Zecharia Sitchin wrote: "The piece
is well written. I couldn't have done it better myself.")