Book: Connecting the Dots: Making Sense of the UFO Phenomena
By Paola Harris
The Old Guard
Zecharia Sitchin
www.sitchin.com
Scholars have traveled the entire world looking at historical artifacts and documents as evidence that possibly humankind could have been seeded by alien races. One of the most powerful proponents of this theory is prolific writer, researcher and historian Zecharia Sitchin, and his evidence is pretty convincing.
“The same applied to planets, which they considered as living entities, and to the whole solar system, and to stars: There is a predetermined destiny, but within it a changeable fate. We are part of it. We are not alone in our own solar system, and we are not alone in the universe.
The following interview took place May 5, 2003, a time when many people had questions about the ransacking of the National Museum in Iraq and the possible return of the planet Nibiru. In The Earth Chronicles, Mr. Sitchin tells, based upon his interpretations of ancient Sumerian clay tablets, the story of humankind, our origins, how we were created, and details of the overall plan. Earth’s history originates with the stories of gods who interact with humans, and most divine stories are similar. We know them
as mythology. Sitchin researched these concepts for 30 years, traveling the world and examining thousands of artifacts, art works and archaeological locations, to reach the following conclusions. (a). The Sumerians wrote the story of humankind on clay tablets 6,000 years ago in what is now Iran, where, in the ages past, a sophisticated, advanced and well
organized civilization suddenly bloomed in the Mesopotamian area. (b). They knew the sun was the center of the planetary system and they knew of planets that we have just discovered in the last 150 years, including Pluto, “discovered” in 1930. (c). The key to the mystery lies in a planet that once orbited between Mars and Jupiter, but which does not exist today. In its place lies the asteroid belt. The Sumerians called this planet Nibiru, and it is represented in ancient writings and art. It has a retrograde orbit around the sun. This “invader planet” has a 3,600-year elliptical orbit around our sun, and it may soon be returning our way. Sitchin says that it took him 30 years of research to discover this, but he had to pause for five years until he found an answer to the creation of humankind itself. This he found in the Mesopotamian epic of creation called Enuma Elish, which was written on seven clay tablets. Six tablets tell about the creation of the solar system and planets, and the seventh glorifies the Creator, much like Genesis in the Bible (the creation of the seven-day week). According to these ancient texts, humanity was genetically created by the Anunnaki (meaning “Those who from Heaven to Earth came”). Fifty of them splashed down in the Persian Gulf (432,000 years ago) and genetically engineered a race to mine gold for them in southeast Africa. They needed gold for a protective shield over their planet. To create humans, they did some serious genetic manipulation on an already-existing hominid species. They left behind symbols found in ancient cultures, such as the winged disc, and evidence of nuclear destruction. Mission control for their flying crafts was in what is now Israel, an area that was as significant then as it is now.
(See Connecting The Dots“The State of the World” chapter, page 237, which reiterates the key role that Israel still plays in today’s world.)
Paola Harris (PH): What is significance of the destruction of the thousands of artifacts in the National Museum of Baghdad? Does it destroy the legacy left by the early people of the Fertile Crescent, including the Anunnaki?
Zecharia Sitchin (ZS): While the subject of the fate of the archaeological objects in the museum should be of concern to everyone interested in the preservation of art, culture and history, the matter is, of course, of special interest to me and my worldwide readers because my writings, beginning with The 12th Planet, are profoundly based on the archaeological evidence from ancient Mesopotamia—beginning with the Sumerian civilization, continuing with the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian, and encompassing the other adjoining civilizations that followed. The National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad was a major depository of such artifacts, but fortunately not the only one. In the early days of modern archaeology most of the discovered artifacts were carried off to the museums of the archaeologists’ countries (London, Paris, Berlin, Milan, etc.) and later divided between them and the local museums. So, first, the loss is not total. Secondly, it is now clear that of the reported 170,000 items in the Baghdad Museum, only 29 (yes, twenty nine) important artifacts were missing (some have been returned since), and these ones have of course been studied, photographed, etc., and are well known to scholars (or even to readers of my book). Although the loss is not as massive as initially reported, the looting that took place, the smashing of display cases, thus damaging their contents, and the breaking of larger monuments that could not be carried off–this was nothing short of pure barbarism, unforgivable behavior. So the legacy that these museum collections represent was not and cannot be destroyed; it lives on in the other museums and, of course, in the books on the subject (such as mine), in videos, etc.
PH: Could there be a secret connection between this war and antiquity?
ZS: By advancing from the subject of the artifacts to the issue of the geographiclocation of the conflict, you are in reality raising two other very significant subjects. The first is that of hallowed or sacred ground; the other is that of prophecy. If you travel in the lands of the Bible, you realize that a mosque is built exactly where a Byzantine church had stood, and that it was built where there had been a synagogue, and that one, too, was built exactly there because the place was revered even in earlier times. Over the thousands of years of Mesopotamian civilization (from the beginning of Sumer circa 4,000 B.C. to the conquest of Alexander and the Seleucid rulers in the last centuries B.C.), royal inscriptions repeatedly state that it was the custom and the duty of kings to rebuild temples exactly where the previous ones stood. Conqueror after conqueror in antiquity adhered to this tradition, but neither the British after World War I nor the Americans this time have such a compulsion to build houses of worship upon ancient sites. So the issue of interest in one of prophesy. Though Baghdad is a relatively new city and is not a continuation of Babylon, nor built where it was, there are biblical prophecies about the fall of Babylon as part of a Divine Plan. The question is whether such prophecies were one-time prophecies, i.e., just specific to Babylon (as an example) in the 6th century B.C. only—or whether these are eternal prophecies, applicable again and again when the circumstances and the Wheel of Time apply. I believe in the latter. I have repeatedly stated that “The Past is the Future,” because the Anunnaki, the people, and the civilizations they bequeathed to humankind are subject to a grand historical cycle.
PH: In your works you mention that a nuclear explosion destroyed the Sumerians.
What kind of arms do you think they employed?
ZS: The use of nuclear weapons in 2024 B.C. is, first of all, of significance because it relates to the more general and bothering question: Why are there wars on Earth? In my book on the subject, The Wars of Gods and Men, I raised the question: Is Man born a warrior, or did someone teach us to make war? The answer is the latter: Before the wars of man there were the wars of the gods. It was during the conflict between Horus and Seth, according to unambiguous Egyptian texts, that humans were given arms and enlisted to fight (on the side of Horus that time). And so it was that in the conflict between the two clans of Anunnaki, nuclear weapons were used to wipe out the spaceport in the Sinai (an event reflected in the biblical tale of Sodom and Gomorrah). Before that there was an international war related to the spaceport (the so-called “War of the Kings” in Genesis, chapter 14). The nuclear cloud from the explosion in the Sinai was carried by the winds eastward to Mesopotamia, and numerous Lamentation Texts describe how the Evil Wind—the nuclear cloud–killed all life in Sumer. Thus, there was no actual explosion in Sumer. The cities, the buildings remained intact; people, animals, plants died. It is interesting in this regard to recall that as it happened the winds carried the poisonous cloud in such a way that Sumer itself was affected, but not Babylon to the north. So already in antiquity it was pondered: Was this divine omen, the hand of Destiny? Even the Anunnaki opposed to Marduk, the instigator of the war, considered that to be manifestation of destiny and accepted Marduk’s supremacy. As to what kind of nuclear weapons were used–that the texts do not specify.
PH: What do you think happened to the survivors of the conflict?
ZS: The Sumerian Lamentation Texts indicate that the “gods” realized as soon as the explosion took place that a calamity would engulf Sumer hundreds of miles away. So the texts describe a hurried departure by the gods and their warnings to their followers to escape as well: Not to try to hide, because there was no hiding from the cloud, but to run away, to the north and farther east. The result was the first recorded Diaspora. Remnants– led by their gods–found their way, in time, to what we call Iran and India (thus the same tales of the gods in the Sanskrit texts), to the Far East (thus the Chinese, Korean, Japanese scripts that are based on the Sumerian cuneiform), to eastern Europe (the lands of the god whose symbol was the double-headed eagle), along the Danube (thus the Hungarian legends and language), etc.
PH: If the Anunnaki colonized this entire planet, what other traces are there?
ZS: Everywhere! Besides the lands and people I just mentioned, there were the more distant Americas. In my book The Lost Realms, dedicated to the Americas, I show connections—the evidence. You find the same gods, even if called by local tongues (e.g. the Sumerian Ningishzidda = the Egyptian Thoth = the Mesoamerican Quetzalcoatl); the same legends of Creation; the same astronomical recognition of equinoxes and solstices as a guide to temple orientations, etc.
PH: What is your opinion of the return of Nibiru? Many people are becoming fearful of this. What consequences will this return have on the planet?
ZS: Nibiru, which is the home planet of the Anunnaki according to the Sumerians, has a great elliptical orbit that lasts (by definition) one year for its inhabitants but 3,600 Earth years as counted by us Earthlings. I have been asked many times when it will next be in our vicinity (passing between Mars and Jupiter); and if I don’t give an answer, the question is changed to “When was it last time,” so people just add 3,600 years. I have done my best in lectures, on my website etc., to stress that 3,600 (a Shar in Sumerian) is a mathematical number, not a precise orbital number, because orbits change with each passage. We know it from Halley’s comet. We know it from the changing configuration of Earth’s orbit. In addition, how Nibiru affects Earth is also not the same each time. Whether other planets stand between it and Earth is also not the same each passage. Is Earth directly exposed to its gravitational, magnetic and other effects? One time, we know, it caused the Deluge, but not after that one (circa 13,000 years ago). To be specific, I first announced clearly in talks, interviews, and on
my website that the claim by others that Nibiru will pass near Earth in 2003 is wrong. Since April 2003, the predicted date, in the meantime came and went, everyone now knows it.
PH: When will Nibiru be visible in your estimation?
ZS: Nibiru is without doubt on its way back from its farthest point out (aphelion). The leading searcher for what astronomers call “Planet X,” Dr. Robert Harrington of the U.S. Naval Observatory, agreed with me where it probably was a few years ago (his sketch or sky-map is given in my book Genesis Revisited). In that book I also provide the evidence from the discovery by IRAS (Infra-Red Astronomical Station), a satellite launched by NASA, that twice traced the planet in 1983 by infra-red (i.e. by heat emission, not by light reflection). So those who need to know, know at least since 1983. NASA is about to launch a new, more sophisticated infra-red space telescope. When will Nibiru be visible from Earth with regular telescopes? I cannot say, as I am not in the telescope field of expertise. Let me make clear, however, what I have stated in my lectures again and again: The return of the Anunnaki and the return of the planet do not and cannot coincide, for reasons of space travel and trajectories. I thus believe that the prophesied return or second coming is now applicable to the Anunnaki, even if not to their planet.
PH: Do you see any additional evidence that Mars is an outpost for an alien race that might also be the Anunnaki?
ZS: As a matter of fact, the evidence from Mars is one reason why I am so confident of the statement I just made. There is not doubt, from NASA’s own photographs from the ’70s, that there are artificial structures on Mars (other than the “Face”)–I include such photos in Genesis Revisited. The experts now admit, contrary to previous claims that Mars is a dead, airless, waterless uninhabitable planet, that it did have, and still has, plenty of water, that it even had seas and lakes, that it had an atmosphere, etc. So the Sumerian assertion that Mars served as a way-station on the way from Nibiru to Earth, which, when I wrote The 12th Planet in 1976, was deemed by others as impossible, now is admitted as very possible. The crucial piece of evidence is what I called in Genesis Revisited “The Phobos Incident,” when in 1989 a Soviet spacecraft first photographed the shadow of an elliptical object on Mars and then was destroyed by a missile fired from Phobos, a moonlet (possibly an artificial satellite) of Mars. I wrote then that though it may not be the Anunnaki themselves who are back, it was their “emissaries”–robotic artificial being. This was enlarged upon in my TV documentary “Are We Alone?”
in which the Soviet space officials were quite outspoken.
PH: What are the most current discoveries you have made?
ZS: I have made it a point of stressing that the various artifacts, clay tablets, etc., which I use as evidence, were not discovered by me. They are the result of archaeological discoveries by others over a century and a half, the work of scholars, translators, epigraphers, biblical scholars, etc. The main “discovery” by me is the belief that while others refer to all that as “mythology,” I say: No, these are records and recollections of what actually happened. That is why the overall title for my series book is The Earth Chronicles. If “discovery” is understood that way, my recent discovery has been this: That every year, every month, sometimes everyday, as our science advances—in space, in astronomy, in geology, in biology, in genetics, etc.–I “discover” more and more corroboration for what (as I understand it) the ancient people knew. More than ever, the subtitle of Genesis Revisited: “Is modern science only catching up with ancient knowledge?” is becoming more and more true.
PH: What is the overall message of The Earth Chronicles?
ZS: The message is: We are not alone. The DNA on Earth, which is the basis of all life from microbes to humans, is the same as on Nibiru, the same as everywhere else in the universe. Genetically, we are akin to the Anunnaki from Nibiru, for, as the Bible summed it up, we were fashioned by them in their image and in their likeness. Our civilizations are similar to the one they had, because it is they who gave us civilization. Our wars, to consider latest events, are similar to their wars–both wars on Earth and preceding wars on Nibiru. So we, in many respects, are they. And since I believe the Biblical prophecies and think they are universally valid, I have no doubt that we shall one day do what the Anunnaki did: Come to another planet, supposedly for a selfish need or reason, and end up doing there what they did here—cause life to evolve in a manner similar to ours, create civilization there, repeat the cycle, because it is all part of a grand design. The Sumerians distinguished between Fate (nam, tar) and Destiny (nam). Destiny was predetermined, fixed, unchanged. That Man is mortal was Destiny; how Man conducted his life between birth and death, how he would die, was Fate—a “destiny” that could be changed or bent by Man’s behavior, free will, circumstances, etc. The same applied to planets, which they considered as living entities, and to the whole solar system, and to stars: There is a predetermined destiny, but within it a changeable fate. We are part of it. We are not alone in our own solar system, and we are not alone in the universe.