The Ancient Alien Question

by Philip Coppens

  If aliens are to blame for most of the strife on our blue planet, where are they? Are they indeed, as Icke claims, hidden behind human flesh masks? Or are they instead directing the stage from beyond our planet? That is precisely the best-known and most enveloping of all ancient alien theories, from Zecharia Sitchin. He claimed that the alien rulers of planet Earth originated from an as yet undiscovered planet in our solar system, and that they came to earth hundreds of thousands of years ago.

  Sitchin had an interest in ancient history that began as a young boy, when, in a lesson on Hebrew scripture, he asked about the Nephilim. The Nephilim were mentioned twice in the Bible, in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, and were described as the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.” Who were they? His teacher brushed the question off, and at that point Sitchin began to try to find the answer for himself.

  Raised in a Jewish environment, he realized that the Jews were relatively new kids on the blocks and that much of their mythology was borrowed from Babylon and Sumer. He began to study the Sumerian language and weighed the accuracy of their translations, at a time when there were very few scholars in that discipline. In his first book, The Twelfth Planet, published in 1976, he argued that several Sumerian words had been mistranslated and were actually references to spaceships and other alien-related devices. Most importantly, he concluded that these Sumerian texts spoke of the existence of a 12th planet in our solar system, whose inhabitants had colonized Earth more than 400,000 years ago. We, humankind, were a genetic modification, created for specific purposes, which was the availability of a workforce on Earth, which the aliens from the planet Nibiru (the Sumerian name for the 12th planet) had colonized for its mineral deposits, especially gold. The Nephilim were precisely these alien overlords, and Sitchin had finally found the answer he had been looking for since his childhood.

  Life on Nibiru faced a slow extinction 450,000 years ago as the planet’s atmosphere eroded. When one Nibirian fled to Earth, he discovered our planet rich in gold, which would allow for its homeworld’s atmosphere to be replenished. The aliens then began to mine our gold—first extracting it from the Persian Gulf—and sent it back to Nibiru. For this purpose a series of spaceports were created in the Middle East. Sitchin went on to conclude that the Great Pyramid was built by and for the aliens—the gods. He spoke of Pyramid Wars, the division of the Earth between the aliens, and the creation of humankind in a lab around 300,000 years ago as a race that could work in the gold mines for the aliens. Mostly, he sees alien rivalries, before the Anunnaki, a group of Sumerian and Babylonian deities, realize that the demise of Nibiru in 13000 BC will trigger an immense tidal wave—the biblical flood. The Anunnaki take an oath to keep the impending doom secret from humankind, but one of them breaks rank and informs Noah, beginning an age when humankind is allowed to begin to rule the Earth, whereas the aliens largely maintain a hands-off policy, though they promise that they will return.

  Most of the Ancient Alien conspiracy theories can be traced back to Zecharia Sitchin. He either created them, or they were created by others using Sitchin’s material. In conspiracy corners, his conclusions are often taken as fact. In Gods of the New Millennium, British author Alan Alford writes how he “happened to discover in 1989, Sitchin’s contribution to proving the intervention of flesh-and-blood gods in the creation of mankind” and how this “cannot be overstated.”

  As his research progressed, Alford became one of many who learned that Sitchin’s theses did not hold water. When Alford published his dissent from Sitchin’s conclusion, he reported that all kinds of allegations were slung his way, including that he had been “turned” by the CIA.

  The problem—or advantage—of Sitchin’s work is that you are either a total believer or a total skeptic. This is typical of Sitchin’s work and his proponents, in the sense that it is an all-or-nothing approach: Sitchin is either totally wrong, or totally right. There is hardly any middle ground.

  Sitchin’s interpretations were all derived from his understanding of the Sumerian language. Since 1976, no scholar of Ugaritic ever corroborated his claims, and as more experts in the Sumerian language were created, none came even close to endorsing Sitchin. In fact, most noted that Sitchin had greatly mistranslated Sumerian.

  One of his most vociferous critics is Michael Heiser, who has an entire Website, SitchinIsWrong.com, devoted to refuting Sitchin’s theory. From 2001 onward, Heiser invited Sitchin to an open debate, but the latter always refused. Heiser therefore wrote an open letter to Sitchin, inviting him to present evidence in support of his theory. In it, he writes: “The reader must realize that the substance of my disagreement is not due to ‘translation philosophy,’ as though Mr. Sitchin and I merely disagree over possible translations of certain words. When it comes to the Mesopotamian sources, what is at stake is the integrity of the cuneiform tablets themselves, along with the legacy of Sumer and Mesopotamian scribes. Very simply, the ancient Mesopotamians compiled their own dictionaries—we have them and they have been published since the mid-20th century. The words Mr. Sitchin tells us refer to rocket ships have no such meanings according to the ancient Mesopotamians themselves.”6

  One key term in Sitchin’s theories was the word MU, which he defined as “an oval-topped, conical object,” and “that which rises straight,” from which he concluded that it was a space probe, used by the alien astronauts to travel between their orbiting space stations and our planet. However, the Mesopotamian lexical lists define the word as “heaven” and sometimes “rain”—at odds with Sitchin’s interpretation.

  A century ago, G.M. Redslob pointed out that the translation of the Sumerian shem as “name” was incorrect. This was seized upon by Sitchin, who stated that a shem was actually a space capsule. But Sitchin was equally wrong. Quite clearly, the word shem is related to the word shamaim, meaning “heaven.” Both shem and shamaim stem from the word shamah, meaning “that which is highward.”

  Going into more detail on the theory itself, Heiser also queried whether Sitchin could “produce a single text that says the Anunnaki come from the planet Nibiru—or that Nibiru is a planet beyond Pluto? I assert that there are no such texts.... There are 182 occurrences of the divine name Anunnaki. Please show me any evidence from the Sumerian texts themselves that the Anunnaki have any connection to Nibiru or a 12th planet (or any planet).” For almost a decade, Sitchin never answered or addressed the problems raised by Heiser, likely because he was unable to.

  How did Sitchin arrive at his interpretations? Though he claimed he was one of the few people in the world able to read Sumerian, it is clear that his understanding was not at all perfect. Sitchin’s approach can best be described as multilayered: He would see a depiction, or picture, accompanied by writing, and would then speculate as to how the depiction was evidence of an alien device. He identified pictures that resembled the modules used by the Apollo moon missions as Nibirian space modules, and then claimed that the Sumerian word associated with it was simply mistranslated.

  Sitchin was therefore highly specific in his exploration of the Sumerian culture, an approach he later went on to apply to other civilizations, each time claiming to find evidence to support his theory. For even though he believed that the gods had initially settled in Sumer, he also argued that the Great Pyramid and the ancient civilizations of America were also created by the occupiers of the Twelfth Planet. Furthermore, he claimed that the Great Pyramid had once been used as a prison for a non-conforming alien!

  Though Heiser has clearly shown that Sitchin committed serious linguistic errors, Sitchin’s main problem has and will always be astronomy. His 12th planet was said to occupy a highly elliptical orbit in our solar system. It went far into deep space and then swept back to the inner planets of our solar system, in an orbit that lasted 3,600 years. Astronomers have consistently claimed that it would be extremely unlikely for a planet of that size in that orbit to be life-sustaining. More importantly, with today’s high-powered telescopes, which did
not exist in 1976 when Sitchin first published his theory, we should have been able to see this planet. As a consequence, in recent years, Sitchin and his dedicated group of followers began to claim there was a worldwide cover-up and conspiracy to keep the existence and approach of this planet a secret.

  The plain meaning of Nibiru is “ferry, ferryman, or ford,” whereby mikis nibiru is the toll one has to pay for crossing the river, from eberu, “to cross.” It was Alfred Jeremias who insisted that Nibiru, “in all star-texts of later times,” indicated Canopus, the second-brightest star in the sky, and for the Ancient Egyptians the Southern Pole Star, although de Santillana and von Dechend point out that others have linked Nibiru with other stellar phenomenon, and hence they state that Nibiru has to remain “an unknown factor for the time being.”7

  On occasion, Sitchin and his followers would claim that astronomers were open to the suggestion that our solar system might contain planets in elliptical orbits. But the fact of the matter is that for Sitchin to be correct, such a planet would have to be of a particular size, in an orbit of 3,600 years, and flying in a path that matches his very specific descriptions.

  So, because Sitchin had a very specific theory, he needed a very specific answer, and the short answer is that there is no such planet. Sitchin is wrong. And because of the manner in which Sitchin himself constructed his theory, in an all-or-nothing approach, Sitchin is totally wrong.

  The reptilian aliens David Icke wrote about were actually already proposed in 1990 by René A. Boulay in Flying Serpents and Dragons: The Story of Mankind’s Reptilian Past. Boulay made a special acknowledgment to Sitchin’s work, and focused on the physicality of the Anunnaki, as well as analyzing the appearance of gods in other cultures. He observed that “it is no accident that all the early settlements were founded at the mouth of large river systems, where moisture was abundant,” which was necessary to the reptile race.8 However, shall we say, interesting his theory is, the problem is that the very foundation of his argument was built on swampy ground. And Boulay is but one of hundreds of theories that have been built on Sitchin’s mistranslations.

  Erich von Däniken once wrote that “religious people, regardless what faith they belong to, hope for ‘salvation from above.’”9 In the Western world of the 21st century, god has become an unpopular word; in fact, one can argue that the Ancient Alien Question was only posed because the weight of the Godword began to wane. But the key issue is that God was once believed to be omnipotent and omnipresent; the problem with many Ancient Alien theories is that most try to make the theories similarly all-encompassing, trying to explain in detail every nanosecond and mystery of our past. Overindulgence is never a good thing.

  The Sirius Mystery

  The greatest of ancient alien theories does not hold: Sitchin was unable to prove that the Sumerian civilization—as well as all other civilizations—was the creation of aliens who came to planet Earth to exploit its minerals, and who were either still present or at some point in the past had gone back to their homeworld, leaving the Earth and humankind orphaned.

  But perhaps there is evidence that contact between humankind and an extraterrestrial being has occurred on a smaller scale? The story that the Dogon, a tribe in Mali, West Africa, had possessed in their antiquity extraordinary knowledge of the star system Sirius achieved worldwide publicity in—once again—1976, through Robert Temple’s extraordinary book The Sirius Mystery. It was compellingly argued and became one of the most influential books of the 1970s’ “ancient astronauts” genre.

  Apart from apparently possessing astronomical knowledge about the four moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn, which the modern world only discovered with the help of the telescope, Temple claimed that the Dogon specifically knew about two smaller stars that are closely related to Sirius: Sirius B and Sirius C. The mystery was how they had obtained this astronomical knowledge, as these companion stars cannot be seen by the unaided eye. He argued that the knowledge the Dogon possessed of Sirius could only have been given to them by extraterrestrial beings that possessed information on that star system.

  As the star Sirius was also the brightest star in the sky and hence the most important star for the Ancient Egyptians—who based their calendar on it—the obvious follow-up question was whether the Ancient Egyptians and the Dogon of Mali were somehow related and/or had somehow shared this very specific knowledge about Sirius. Temple concluded that the answer was positive.

  In 1998, Temple republished the book with the subtitle “New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago.” The book’s reputation was first dented in 1999, when Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince published The Stargate Conspiracy, in which they allege that Temple’s thinking had been heavily influenced by his mentor, Arthur M. Young, an American inventor, helicopter pioneer, cosmologist, philosopher, and much more. In 1965, Young had given Robert Temple an article written by two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, on the secret star lore of the Dogon. In 1967, Temple—then age 22—began work on the thesis that became The Sirius Mystery. As Picknett and Prince have been able to show, Temple was very keen to please his mentor, who himself believed in extraterrestrial beings from Sirius.

  At the core of this theory lies the original anthropological study of the Dogon by Griaule and Dieterlen, who describe the secret knowledge retained by the Dogon of Sirius B and Sirius C in their own book The Pale Fox. Griaule claimed to have been initiated into the secret mysteries of the male Dogon, during which they allegedly told him of Sirius (sigu tolo in their language) and its two invisible companions. In the 1930s, when their research was carried out, Sirius B was known to exist, even though it was not photographed until 1970.

  Griaule and Dieterlen first described their findings in an article published in French in 1950, but at the time they included no comment about how extraordinary the Dogon knowledge of the “invisible companions” was. This step was taken by others, particularly Temple. Peter James and Nick Thorpe, in Ancient Mysteries, write: “While Temple, following Griaule, assumes that to polo is the invisible star Sirius B, the Dogon themselves, as reported by Griaule, say something quite different.” According to the Dogon, when Digitaria (to polo) is close to Sirius, the latter becomes brighter. When it is at its most distant from Sirius, Digitaria gives off a twinkling effect, suggesting to the observer that it is actually more than one star. This description of a very visible effect causes James and Thorpe to wonder—as anyone reading this should—whether to polo is therefore an ordinary star near Sirius, not an invisible companion, as Griaule and Temple suggest, for, whereas Sirius B is invisible, to polo clearly is visible!

  The biggest challenge to Griaule, however, came from anthropologist Walter Van Beek. He pointed out that Griaule and Dieterlen stand alone in their claims about the Dogon secret knowledge—no other anthropologist supports their opinions. In 1991, Van Beek himself led a team of anthropologists to Mali and declared that they found absolutely no trace of the detailed Sirius lore reported by the French anthropologists. James and Thorpe understate the problem when they say “this is very worrying.”10 Griaule claimed that about 15 percent of the Dogon tribe possessed this secret knowledge, but Van Beek could find no trace of it in the decade he spent with the Dogon.

  Van Beek actually spoke to some of Griaule’s original informants; he noted that “though they do speak about sigu tolo [interpreted by Griaule as their name for Sirius itself], they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some, it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that, through a different position, appears as sigu tolo. All agree, however, that they learned about the star from Griaule.”11 Van Beek concluded that this created a major problem for Griaule’s claims.

  In all claims of conspiracy—in this case, that it is Griaule who gave knowledge about Sirius to the Dogon and then pretended they had given this knowledge to him—there needs to be motive. Although he was an anthropologist, Griaule was ke
enly interested in astronomy and had studied it in Paris. As James and Thorpe point out, he took star maps along with him on his field trips as a way of prompting his informants to divulge their knowledge of the stars. Griaule himself was aware of the discovery of Sirius B, and in the 1920s—before he visited the Dogon—there were also unconfirmed sightings of Sirius C.

  The Dogon were well aware of the brightest star in the sky, but, as Van Beek learned, they do not call it sigu tolo, as Griaule claimed, but dana tolo. To quote James and Thorpe once again: “As for Sirius B, only Griaule’s informants had ever heard of it.”12 Was Griaule told by his informants what he wanted to believe, or did he misinterpret the Dogon responses to his questions? Either way, the purity of the Dogon-Sirius story is clearly spoiled, and it is highly likely that Griaule contaminated the Dogon star knowledge with his own. Carl Sagan also believed that this star lore was not native to the Dogon, but instead had been injected by Griaule and/or Dieterlen. The same conclusion was reached by Peter James and Nick Thorpe.

  With this, the Dogon mystery and the possibility of alien contact with a tribe in Central Africa comes crashing down. For more than 20 years, The Sirius Mystery influenced speculation about the possibility that our forefathers came from the stars. In his 1998 revised edition, Temple was quick to point out the new discussions in scientific circles about the possible existence of Sirius C, which seemed to make Griaule’s claims even more spectacular and accurate. But it is apparent that Temple was either not aware of Van Beek’s devastating research, or he decided to ignore it.

  The Alien Puzzle

  The UFO phenomenon and the Ancient Alien Question have often been mixed and woven into a rich tapestry. The UFO phenomenon is generally agreed to have begun on June 24, 1947, with a sighting by pilot Kenneth Arnold of nine shiny, mostly disc-like objects flying past Mount Rainier (in Washington state) at speeds that Arnold clocked at a minimum of 1,200 miles an hour. Only extraterrestrials, it was concluded, had technology that could fly at such incredible speeds. Since then, most UFO researchers have accumulated evidence, which they see as further confirmation of the extraterrestrial nature of such phenomena. At the same time, leading ufologists like Jacques Vallee, especially in Passport to Magonia, and Robert Emmegger, in UFO’s, Past, Present & Future, have argued that the UFO phenomenon began far earlier than 1947. Apart from pointing at references in the Bible, such as Ezekiel’s sighting, Vallee found references from the time of Charlemagne of encounters with tyrants of the air, and their aerial ships. One record, located by Vallee, reads: