Refuting Zecharia Sitchin's Ancient Astronauts and Planet X Theses
I really don’t want to belabour the point re Sitchin and Planet X etc. but for the fact that these kinds of theories have taken such a dramatic hold of so many people’s views on the ancients and impact upon their views of the present and future (doomsday prophecies etc). Currently, the most popular doomsday prophecy doing the rounds is the Planet X theory, which basically states that a rogue planet with a massive orbit will be returning in 2003 to cause catastrophe on Earth. This theory has developed over the years and is first to be found in the works of Zecharia Sitchin.
While there are so many people quoting the ‘Sumerian texts’ straight from Sitchin, or indirectly from the other sources who have also directly or indirectly replicated his bizarre interpretations, I feel we cannot simply ignore the impact this one man has had on the entire New Age movement. More importantly, we must consider the very real implications for our future if this revisionist movement continues at the pace it is going.
Amongst the popular authors who have used erroneous material from Sitchin are Graham Hancock and Robert Beauval, who relied on Sitchin’s assertion that the Great Pyramid at Giza had no evidence within it to show it was built in the 3rd millennium BC. They took him at his word that essential data – an inscription inside the pyramid relating to Khufu – was actually a later piece of fraudulent graffiti. Fortunately, Hancock has now assessed this himself and agrees that the inscription is of Khufu and it does prove that the pyramid was constructed no earlier than Khufu’s reign.
Another author – whose current theories regarding an extraterrestrial race seeding manipulating bloodlines in the ancient world are built upon Sitchin’s ideas – is David Icke. Icke has recently written two very popular books based on this theory and has in the process contaminated the superb work of Prof. L A Waddell with the disinformation of Sitchin. Again, the average reader is unlikely to have the knowledge-base with which to deconstruct the kind of mess which Icke has created of history by combining good source material with disinformation.
I too am guilty of accepting Sitchin’s translations at face value and used some of them in my earlier work. Like many others, I had read the superlative commendations about Sitchin’s scholarship and had not yet looked outside of Sitchin and Alford’s Gods of the New Millennium at the wide range of sources concerning the Sumerians that are available. So I do sympathise with other readers and researchers who have also fallen naively into the same trap. I am also grateful for Sitchin’s work, which initially stimulated my interest in the Sumerians, and gave me so many insights into how history and texts can be manipulated and mislead millions of people.
Today, there are many other such authors. Some are innocently taken in by the hoax, others are knowing hoaxers employed by the Illuminati’s Intelligence community to deliberately spread masses of fraudulent information to hide the truth about the secret aircraft development programme. This knowledge of advanced physics could revolutionise human life if it were widely acknowledged, by not only providing advanced craft, but free energy for the world. Another reason for the maintenance of this hoax is to distort our understanding of history, religion and mythology. If we were to truly understand the meanings behind the writings of our elder cultures, which are basis for most of the world’s religious beliefs, we would see and understand that our diversity of beliefs and faiths stem from common truths that have been perverted, distorted and used for dividing mankind, both from each other and from our own inner connection with our innate spiritual core. If the Truth were known, rather than beliefs bought and sold in packages of religion, then we could remove religion altogether - the greatest mind manipulation and social control tool in the Illuminati’s arsenal - and live in harmony and freedom, together.
One has to be aware of the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Many such authors are active in informing you that they are ‘freeing’ you from the mind control of religion, through deconstructing them and providing you with evidence to support their claims. However, what so many of them are actually doing is tearing down the foundations of religions (not necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion), to replace them with the ‘alien gods’ or ‘ascended master gods’ scenarios, which the reader may never even consider to be a new religion. And far from being ‘freed’ or ‘enlightened’, such people are actually being re-herded into new pens full of manageable sheep who believe they are free.
I have already said a good deal in previous magazines about what I see as a plan to create a new religion, which will bring us up to date in technological terms, whilst at the same time coalescing the previous religions, gods and mythologies into a united ‘they were all aliens’ scenario, and minor variations upon it. Christianity amalgamated the world religions into one manageable religion for the Romans 2000 years ago, and it would appear that we are heading for the next Universal (Catholic) Church, through which they can mind control future generations.
Sitchin is certainly not the only author to distort and mislead us, but is certainly the most influential, and most of what is being said in these articles about Sitchin can be applied to countless other New Age, historical revisionist and UFO-related authors.
Most people do not have the time to investigate the complex background to information presented in books on ancient texts. In the main, people develop an interest in a particular angle on a subject – for instance the ancient astronaut hypothesis. They will then read many books of the same type, usually coming from the same angle, often by a bunch of authors who cross-reference each other incestuously. They may then consider themselves quite well-read on the subject. However, unless they have taken the time to study the same texts and histories from many other perspectives, they will not have a good perspective from which to judge whether the material they favour is reasonable.
It has struck me how much information is available, and has been for many years, which your conventional ancient astronaut author will never reference, criticise or ever try to incorporate into their work. This applies equally to any number of revisionist Egyptology, Sumerian, ancient civilisation, Atlantis etc. etc. authors too. It would appear that these authors are either extremely ignorant of the available data – which I have difficulty believing, as they usually appear very well-read in their field – or they have so narrowed their field of vision to exclude the available answers in order to create an illusion that there are far more ‘holes’ in our knowledge than there actually are.
They usually start from the proffered premise that ‘we believe’ today a certain scenario which ‘experts’ have developed, such authors usually take pains to disassemble the ‘conventional view’ of academia and reveal the glaring inconsistencies; showing us how the academic viewpoint as taught in universities simply can’t be true or is at least highly dubious. And I agree in the main that conventional history needs to be revised, but we simply cannot ignore the mass of data which has been gathered by academia over the years, even if we do not necessarily agree with the overall picture such academics paint with this data. In the books of many of today’s popular alternative authors, once the subject is rendered ambiguous and open to interpretation, the authors then go on to ‘fill the gaps’ with highly speculative or tentative information as evidence of their own particular theory. Again, this is not necessarily improper; all authors and theorists do this. What is improper is when the conventional view is artificially distorted to make it appear to the reader to be inadequate or ridiculous; something which the average reader is unlikely to recognise.
Moreover, surely, when there is a huge body of information available which does provide adequate explanation, we need to question both the ability and the motivation of the author who never references known evidence and proof that would negate their own theories.
Sitchin is a good example of one who ignores known data, misquotes and mistranslates, and who leaves out elements of well-known data – even parts of well-known texts – which remove the proper context, so that he can reconstruct carefully selected fragments of hand-picked data into an internally consistent book. Although the individual books may seem to be internally consistent – which is all the average reader will know and therefore accept – when viewed next to the available data, such theories are blatantly ridiculous and clearly manufactured to con a reader who unfortunately knows no better; a reader who trusts the author to have done his homework and to be reasonable with the data – especially when, as in the case of Sitchin – the author is widely acclaimed to be an ‘expert’ and one of a handful of people in the world who can read the ancient Sumerian texts. It is clear that Sitchin is not an expert at all. In fact, most of his 12th Planet is merely a collation of standard works such as Kramer's, which is then used as the basis of a deconstruction and ‘retranslation’ into the ET-gods scenario.
I fail to see where Sitchin has done any proper translation work of his own, or has revealed anything which was not already available in the standard works. The only ‘new’ material in the 12th Planet comes in the form of mistranslation, and distortion of known data.
Unfortunately, it is this mistranslated data that any number of books, New Age gurus and websites are quoting to support their belief in the ancient astronaut theory. Amazingly, these clearly erroneous translations and histories are also being ‘channelled’ by numerous New Age gurus who claim to be receiving the information directly from spirits, ascended masters or aliens! There is a mass market for such things today; naïve ‘truthseekers’ all over the world have been captured in the glamour and excitement of the ETs and many have invested their entire view of reality on such paradigms as ‘the aliens will save us’, or ‘the aliens are coming’, which has replaced conventional religion as a means of explaining creation and providing answers from ‘above’ or ‘out there’.
So let’s look at the evidence and decide for ourselves if Sitchin’s particular version of history has any merit, and whether there is any reason to fear Planet X. Then we will take a brief look at one key area in mythology – astronomy and astrology – which is usually misunderstood, thereby creating a host of motifs that people such as Sitchin have speculated about and refashioned into new theories and myths over the years. I’ll run past you a few theories of my own into the bargain and you can see if they make any more sense in the light of the following information.
Ivan Fraser
Go to Part 2
