The Prodigal Sun: A Novel

by S. E. Meyer

  “The missing link,” added Hosea.

  “Yes, the missing link between the two types of Humans. If evolution caused all of the changes then there would be an archaeological record. We would have found remains of ancient humans with a few changes and then found more remains from a period a hundred thousand years later with a few more subtle changes, but that’s not what happened. We went from almost animals to where we are today in only twenty or thirty thousand years. The last huge leap of progress for our race was only within the last ten thousand or so. Erich Von Daniken‘s work, ‘Chariots of the Gods‘, further supports this, and talks about all of the evidence supporting the fact that we may have been visited by an alien race thousands of years ago, which ended up being the basis for most of our religious beliefs today,” Frank paused and took a sip of whiskey that the flight attendant had left in his drink holder, while he waited for everyone to absorb what he was explaining.

  “I could not have explained it better,” said Hosea. Exactly right. Also, humans are the only species on the planet that have a language gene. It’s been identified as the Foxp2 gene and no other species has it. Even animals that have complicated and advanced speech or communication patterns like primates or dolphins do not have the language gene. It would only make sense that all life on Earth would have evolved in the same way regarding speech. Why are we the only ones that have a complicated gene just for communication? Where did that come from? Is it just a fluke? Everything points to the need of a better explanation than just evolution alone. There has to be more to the story,” Hosea finished.

  “And what would that be?” John asked

  “Um, how about God?” Jenny replied.

  “Indeed Jenny.” Hosea smiled. “The Sumerians tell a story on their creation tablets that no one wants to believe is true.”

  “And what’s that?” John asked as he leaned forward.

  “That we were given some help along the way,” Hosea replied.

  “What do you mean by help?” asked Jenny.

  “Well, the Sumerians wrote that there was another race on this planet and the Sumerians called this race the Annunaki. The very name Annunaki means Gods from Heaven that came to Earth. They go on to say that these Gods, the Annunaki, combined ancient human DNA with their own, creating the human race as we know it. This new race was far superior to any that had existed on Earth before. So it begs the question as Jenny pointed out. Is it possible, that in fact, we were created by God? According to the Sumerians we were. When we take the literal translation of any of the ancient texts or religious writings from around the world, including the Torah in the bible, the word God, in most cases was originally written as plural. Before Christianity almost any reference to God was made in plural and was written as ‘the Gods’. The Greeks, The Egyptians, the Romans, the Pagans, they all used the plural. For more than five thousand years we as a human race believed there were many gods. The Bible, as it’s known today, was translated three times and a lot was lost each time. It was originally written in Aramaic then translated to Hebrew then finally to Latin before it was translated in the rest of the world’s languages. It was only in translation from Aramaic, which was the precursor language to Arabic and Hebrew, that Judaism and then Christianity changed it to a singular God. So did God create us in his own image? Maybe he did. The literal translation of image is a likeness or picture. I know of only one way to get the best picture of someone that there is. Give me a strand of their DNA and I can tell you everything about that person. I can tell you hair color, eye color, approximate height, body structure and on and on. Maybe God didn’t create us in his own image but rather with his own image, with his own DNA,” Hosea finished.

  There was a long silence as everyone pondered this thought. Jenny began shaking her head. “Okay, so you’re saying that aliens from another planet came down to Earth and spliced their genes with ours to make the human race as we know it, and that God is an alien? Does that sound just a bit out there to anyone else?” asked Jenny. She laughed nervously. “That’s ridiculous, God is an alien.” She finished, but continued to shake her head in disbelief.

  “What is your definition of an alien Jenny?” Hosea asked, “An alien is someone that is not from Earth, correct? I think we all would agree that God’s not from around here is he?” Hosea moved his index finger in a circular motion as he spoke.

  “It does sound a bit out there,” added John. “But it‘s an intriguing idea.”

  “I know how it sounds,” explained Hosea. “But if you forget everything you have learned about religion, and if you look at all of the facts and all of the historical documentation we have, the information is quite startling. In almost every religion in the world there is a story of a God, or Gods, that came to Earth and created mankind, and the world in which we live. All of these stories are so similar, and they all coincide so specifically with the Sumerian Creation story, it can’t just be coincidence, can it? The Sumerians go on to explain that the Gods, the Annunaki, brought animals and plants to Earth as well. They were colonizing our planet, and with them they brought native plants and animals including birds, fish and a host of other living things. If we look at it in that way we can almost perfectly mesh all of the stories together, you see? Maybe there can be an evolution story and a Genesis creation story. Maybe they‘re two interpretations of the same story, or better yet, maybe one picks up where the other leaves off.” Hosea smiled.

  “You guys are all off your rockers, I mean, it makes an interesting story, but that’s about it. Jeez, God is an alien?” Jenny made another nervous laugh.

  “And that Jenny is exactly why these ideas have not made it into the mainstream, and why these ideas have been suppressed or written off as folklore. It’s because it challenges ninety percent of the world’s religious belief system,” Frank replied. “If everyone would just open their eyes and expand their minds a little, they would see that everyone’s beliefs are correct in their own way. Forget the small details. When looking at just the main, and most important points, all the stories fit together”

  Everyone sat back in the seats and stopped talking when the flight attendant returned with their meals. The group ate in silence. The drinks eased them into a more relaxed mood and they quietly passed the time deep in thought. The plane landed at Baghdad International Airport shortly after nine o’clock. It was already getting hot and stuffy in the plane before it even touched down on the tarmac. The captain’s voice came over the radio, but only Hosea knew what he said.

  “It’s going to be hot John, really hot. Captain said it’s currently a refreshing hundred degrees and its not even ten o’clock yet, local time,” he said as he smiled and then sighed, “whew!” The four of them exited the plane and the heat hit them immediately in the stuffy cramped jet way as they made their way to the terminal.

  “Let’s get out of this airport and into some air conditioning at the hotel as soon as possible” Hosea said. They shuffled along through the crowd and made it out to the street as Hosea hailed a cab. Within fifteen minutes they were being shown to their rooms in a comfortable eighty degrees.

  “I just spoke with Lucas, he has a presentation at the hotel tonight. He said he left us admission passes at the front desk and he’s going to meet us in the lounge immediately following” said Hosea

  Everyone went to their rooms to freshen up. The trip and the lack of sleep were wearing on John, as well as the rest of the crew. Getting through the multiple security checkpoints in the Green Zone was grueling at best, and the heat wore everyone out. The four travelers picked up their badges at the front desk for the lecture Mr. Goodman was giving at the hotel. They thanked the clerk at the front desk and made their way to the other side of the building where the conference rooms were located. Crowds of people moving through the hallway, making their way into the large conference room on their left. There was a large billboard sign on a tripod just to the right of the doorway that read.

  Ancient Writings and Historical Accounts of Mesopotam
ia, Sumer and Babylon.

  Myths and legends, or facts and reality? By Lucas Goodman, PHD 8:00pm

  “This is going to be interesting,” Frank said as they made their way into the large conference room and took seats about halfway back in the left hand section. It wasn’t long before the room was packed to standing room only. There was a large applause as Lucas walked out from behind a door at the front of the room and climbed the small steps to the raised platform facing the crowd. The applause slowly died down. Lucas raised his hand and the applauding finally stopped. There was a huge projection screen on the wall behind him and the first slide was displayed, welcoming the group to the conference. John looked around the room. There were a lot of local people attending. Most of the attendees were English-speaking foreigners on business, as well as government contractors, archaeologists, and some military personnel. Lucas began his presentation with an explanation of the Sumerian signs of the zodiac and how they are still used today.

  “The Zodiac is just one example of something we see and use every day that was created over six-thousand years ago. Now let’s move on to something else.” Lucas changed the slide to a picture of the solar system. “No, they didn't create the solar system itself of course, but a picture of it,” He explained, as he changed the slide again to show another picture of the solar system, this time carved into a clay tablet. “The Sumerians depicted our solar system on clay tablets like this one. These depictions included all of our planets in the correct order, and with correct size in relation to the sun.” Lucas chuckled as he clicked to the next slide. “We didn’t know Pluto even existed until Tombaugh discovered it in 1930, but there it is in black and white on the tablets. So the Sumerians knew there was a Pluto six thousand years before we did. They had no giant Earth telescopes or Hubble spacecrafts orbiting the globe that we use today. So tell me, how could they have known that? How could they draw a complete picture of our solar system showing orbital rotation around our sun unless they were told what it looked like, or they somehow saw it for themselves?” The next slide showed a picture of a Sumerian tablet showing a large circle in the middle and smaller circles, varying in size, around the larger one.

  “Each of these circles represents a planet, even our moon is shown here next to the Earth, all rotating around the sun. This clay tablet is over six thousand years old, yet up until about a few hundred years or so ago, we still believed the Earth was flat and that it was the center of our solar system.” Lucas paused as he took a drink of water from the podium before continuing.

  “Another interesting point is they didn’t call our planet the third planet, as in third from the sun. They counted our planet as the seventh. Which is exactly where one would find it if one could have had the vantage point from outside our solar system looking in. The seventh planet.” Lucas repeated. “Hmm, kind of an odd perspective for a race living on Earth, don’t you think? The Sumerians also wrote about a twelfth planet, shown here with the rest.” Lucas gestured towards the large image again, this time magnified to see it more clearly.

  “You see, they show twelve circles here, they also counted the sun and the moon which as far we know would make a total of eleven. The Sumerians and the Mesopotamians both mention this twelfth planet many times. According to the Ancients, its abnormally elliptical orbit takes it far away from our solar system, and only allows it to visit us every 3600 years. Another possibility is that it is a Jupiter-sized sun. A twin to our sun, only much dimmer, a more orange sun, that’s running low on fuel. Even today’s scientists theorize about the possibility of our sun having a twin that orbits elliptically from somewhere off in space.

  They call it a wide binary system. It’s a common phenomenon in space and it’s really the only way to explain some of the elliptical orbits of our outer planets. Scientists have recently discovered other solar systems similar to ours. However, the solar systems they discovered that only have one sun, have planets that orbit in an almost perfect circle.” Lucas changed the slide to show the orbital pattern of the solar system before continuing. “As you can see here many of the outer planets in our solar system have an irregular elliptical orbit.” Lucas paused again and took a deep breath. “So, according to the Ancients some kind of foreign planet visits our solar system on a long elliptical 3600-year orbit. A large planet like that does not take a cruise through our solar system without having some devastating effects, or someone noticing. Just the gravitational effects alone could be enough to pull a planet out of orbit or create massive earthquakes. It could create huge tides with ensuing floods, as well as incredible volcanic eruptions. According to the Ancients, things apparently get pretty nasty when the planet comes around, and when that many problems occur at the same time, there are usually some historical records of them right? Although they have not made their way to the mainstream media, historical records depicting events like I mentioned are available. I have spent many years researching these topics, and what I discovered is that the 3600-year orbit the Sumerians wrote about may be incorrect, or at least the translation of it anyway.” Lucas flipped another slide to show three more clay tablets.

  “This shows their writing of the twelfth planet. I found a mistake that was previously made. On every clay tablet, cylinder scroll, or rock the Sumerian’s used to write about that planet, they carved their calculation of the orbit in duplicate. It is always written down twice, which modern translators merely decided it meant it was important enough to do so. However this led me to the simple conclusion that maybe it’s not a 3600-year orbit after all. It could be a 3600-year trip away from Earth, and another 3600-year trip back. Maybe it’s 3600 times two. Yes, I came to the conclusion that this planet may visit us every 7200 years. Now, is their something in our history, something very significant that happened around seven thousand years ago?” Lucas asked the room as he slowly panned the audience with his gaze.

  “Anyone hear of a guy named Noah?“ Lucas asked the crowd with a chuckle. There was a small outburst of smiles from the audience as he continued. “Yes, there was a great flood. And this flood is not just mentioned in the Bible or Torah. A great flood is mentioned in almost every ancient text and religion around the world. It would be too much of a coincidence to assume every one of them were fiction. Has anyone heard of Utanapishtim? My guess is that you haven’t unless you studied ancient Mesopotamian history. Well Utanapishtim was a guy that was warned of a flood, and he was told to build a boat to save his family. The exact measurements are written out on clay tablets and what’s interesting is the measurements are exactly the same as the Biblical account. In fact, the entire story is almost identical. Another interesting fact is that the story of Utanapishtim, which is written on a tablet called the Epic of Gilgamesh, is thousands of years older than the Biblical account of Noah.

  The point here is that these stories have been told and re-told for thousands of years. Even our own geologists agree there was a massive flood at one time. Now the question is, and has always been, what might have caused it? No one seems to know, but when I take all of this information and put it together it makes perfect sense. A large planet passing by Earth would have huge gravitational effects. It could pull our oceans into unimaginable tides, hundreds, if not thousands, of feet into the air. Similar to how our moon creates the much smaller oceanic tides. These rising waters would immediately condense in the cooler air, hundreds of feet above, and bring about torrential rains that could last for months. A similar phenomenon occurs when moist air pushes up along the Himalayas and condenses, causing the monsoon rains that can last for weeks in India.” Lucas paused again for another drink of water.

  “So the next question is when will it come back? There’s really no way to tell for sure, but based on my own calculations and the historical events from 5000 BCE that I mentioned, the planet could arrive any day, or in a couple hundred years. Many things these ancient peoples wrote down have now been proven to be true, so until I can be proven wrong, I’m going to say it‘s quite possible that we could see a
n event like this within the next hundred years, or maybe even sooner. My question to you as we go over the rest of the material in my presentation tonight, is this. How can they be right about so many things and yet we believe they are wrong about others? Why do we incorporate so many of their writings into our current lives, but yet discard others as folklore and myth? Scientists are already talking about the possibility of a tenth planet, which would be Sumer’s twelfth when you add the sun and moon. NASA says that they are very confident that there is another planet out there, somewhere in the outskirts of the outermost part of our solar system. Something large, much bigger than the few pebbles they have discovered out there beyond Pluto over the last few years.”

  Lucas continued on with more examples of things and processes the Sumerians invented that are still used today, or were just recently proven to be true by our modern day scientists as he advanced through more slides. John started to trail off. Most of this info was over his head. He found it interesting, but he was feeling tired after all the traveling and closed his eyes for a minute to rest. He was suddenly walking along a beach at sunrise. It was warm and he could feel the sand between his toes as he strolled along. The sun was rising quickly and he could feel it’s warm rays on his skin. Going to be a hot one, he thought. John felt that he was not alone, and when he looked to his left, Jake was walking beside him.