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At first glance, the claim by author Zecharia Sitchin that the earth has been visited by extraterrestrials for almost half a million years seems like something that belongs on the science fiction shelf. But this soon proves not to be the case. By the fourth paragraph on page one of The 12th Planet, the reader becomes fully aware that Sitchin does not indulge himself in fiction.

Instead, he reveals himself as a learned scholar intent upon making a serious case based upon historical knowledge and modern science that directly confronts one of the most hotly contested issues of our age, human evolution. Before long, one is humbled by sensing that the unprecedented and radical nature of Sitchin's inquiry arises as a product of our intellectual limits and not from a case of overstimulated imagination on the author's part.

Along the way, Sitchin manages to illuminate a path by which the Christian reading of the Bible and the materialistic scientism of modern Darwinians can be largely reconciled. The author's accomplishment here is profound. His is a stupendous achievement to those of us who suspect that neither of the existing paradigms which seek to explain human development by dragooning the other can withstand serious scrutiny. While I am no fan of Hegelian philosophy, Sitchin's fascinating synthesis of ancient historical texts and scientific investigation produces a magnificent resolution of the thesis-antithesis conflict represented by Christians and Darwinians.

This is not to suggest that either Christians or Darwinians are likely to be comfortable with Sitchin's Earth Chronicles (as his books are referred to collectively). Quite the opposite. The former, believing that Man is the unique product of a single God, are little disposed to consider life outside fallen humanity, nor are they willing to think of Man's creator as a scientifically oriented, mortal being. Darwinians are willing to admit to statistical probabilities about life elsewhere that are inescapable, but being materialists who often believe in the inevitable progress of Man they await something physical that can be measured before seriously entertaining the possibility of life elsewhere. Apparently, repetitive sighting of UFOs by highly trained astronauts is considered inadequate as proof.

Despite established science discounting the idea of extraterrestrial involvement on Earth, as scientific discoveries increasingly hint at the possibility of life beyond Earth and religiously inclined individuals begin to recognize that even someone like Sitchin is not specifically excluding a creative God, the possibilities of his research as a unifying intellectual force expand dramatically.

 

Long Unanswered Questions

In this, Sitchin's is no small feat. Like any war seriously pursued, the century-long struggle between Darwinian naturalists and Christian theologians in regard to the origins of life, especially human existence, has often been distinguished by confusion, error, and intellectual territorialism; the latter of which has caused both sides to unwisely deny particulars of unquestioned validity that have been put forth by the other. Of course, if the conflict is framed in terms of science versus religion generally, the debate began several centuries ago.

Certainly, the neo-Darwinian paradigm has merits which God-fearing individuals of even unexceptional intelligence and marginal open-mindedness must acknowledge. Not since the time of William Jennings Bryan has anyone seriously questioned that human beings belong to the mammal class of vertebrate animals, nor is it likely that in the face of ever-changing viruses (including HIV) and antibiotic-resistant bacteria strains that are constantly emerging will responsible people reject the theory of biological mutation and natural selection.

But on the other hand, some of the more astute, long-standing Christian criticisms of the Theory of Evolution are now being echoed by respected scientists for whom theological considerations are no more relevant than the Voodoo rituals practiced in certain sections of the Caribbean. Darwin himself noted that the fossil record failed to offer convincing evidence of how and when the major classes of animals evolved into a higher state. The process by which amphibians became reptiles and reptiles evolved into birds and mammals was almost (some would say completely) absent among discovered fossils. There is ample evidence of change within a class, but little to speak of regarding the evolvement of more advanced classes from earlier forms.

Darwin's own rationale, that the record was badly incomplete, was generally accepted at the time and is still popular today. Over a century after Darwin, however, this explanation has become badly shopworn. Not only is the fossil record now quite large, it stretches back over a period that includes eras where transitions from one class to another should have occurred. But our evidence remains "incomplete." This remains so even when statistics — that critical component of modern naturalism — suggests ever more insistently that obvious evidence of class transitions should have appeared by now. The missing state of these transition fossils is growing more significant all the time and the resulting questions correspondingly more pressing.

Furthermore, there is a dearth of evidence that points to recently evolved species. This is a problem in an evolutional theory which suggests new species should be developing all the time. As if this were not enough, the complexity of the world's biological systems (the eyeball and immune systems being just two examples) has caused additional apostasy among those who believe that insufficient time has elapsed for steady evolution and natural selection to explain the existence of such complexity. To be blunt, why would something like the eyeball even evolve over a period of millions of years when it would be useless until development was almost complete? Why would it get by the second generation? A recently published work of substantial merit entitled Darwin's Black Box highlights just this point, amongst others.

 

Modern Man's Sudden Arrival

When these points are considered in light of anthropologists' openly admitted puzzlement over the rate of recent (300,000 years) human evolvement (during a time when few if any new species have appeared), the objective mind begins to discern the need for a new paradigm to replace, or at least supersede, the current one in the same way that Albert Einstein overturned the Newtonian world view without destroying its essential usefulness. Increasing numbers of scientists are recognizing this need.

Sitchin notes that Man's ancestor apes existed 25 million years ago; it took 11 million years for a manlike ape to appear and then it was another 11 million years until the first ape-man worthy of the classification Homo appeared. The first being considered truly manlike was Advanced Australopithecus some 2 million years ago.

It took another million years for Homo erectus to appear and yet another million for Neanderthal man to arrive — and he looked much like Australopithecus and used almost identical tools. Then about 35 thousand years ago Homo sapiens suddenly appeared in the form of Cro-Magnon man with specialized tools, the ability to build shelters and art forms that reflected organized society and a rudimentary culture. A few thousand years later the high civilizations of Mesopotamia appeared. And in the blink of an eye, humans were traveling in space, involved in genetic engineering and threatening their own planet.

Furthermore, more recent discoveries revealed that Homo sapiens other than Cro-Magnon predated Neanderthal man by some 200 thousand years and appeared during an ice age, a period assumed to be unsuited for rapid evolution. Thus, a more advanced species inexplicably appeared prior to a less evolved one. This drew into question the idea of slow, steady, progressive evolution, without which the explanatory power of Darwinian theory is under heavy stressed. Clearly, there were (and are) large things unexplained by evolution alone.

One attempt to confront holes in Darwinian theory that threaten to become contradictions is the idea of "punctuated equilibria" (whenever scientists or doctors are unsure of what their data mean, they tend to describe the symptoms in Latin to add a sophisticated gloss to their confusion). In this construction, a rapid development of a species takes place which is then followed by an extended period where almost no development takes place. This variant has been developed because such a process describes the fossil record. And in truth, scientific theories often have to be modified to fit the existing data.

A little thought into this particular variant, however, soon brings us to the point where the updated theory finds itself at odds with the basic premise that underlies the predecessor from which it was derived. Is not the theory of "punctuated equilibria" eroding the basic Darwinian assumption that a natural, steady-state process accounts for the development of life? There seems to be nothing in either natural selection or the genetic influences on the process that indicates a reason for the unexpected acceleration and deceleration of evolution that is reflected in the fossil record.

The Christian Bible itself presents modern science with no small number of difficulties. While a literal reading of Genesis remains a big pill to swallow generally and the specific claim that the earth is but a few thousand years old is insupportable, much of the geographical, social and even military information in the Bible has been confirmed again and again by archaeologists and anthropologists. This naturally brings rise to the question of how the authors of the Bible could be so accurate when discussing certain elements of their existence and in other places write things that the modern world holds up to ridicule as hallucinogenic mysticism.

 

History as a Teacher

For a long time now, it has been common practice to dismiss, rather than to try to understand, those elements of ancient legends that are incomprehensible to the modern mind. But as worsening conditions in our civilization call some of our most cherished assumptions into question, maybe it is time to stop looking down upon the ancients while recognizing that their words, like all histories, must be incomplete and probably distorted — or at least reflecting a limited perspective.

There are precedents for the kinds of scientific crisis that both Christianity and Darwinism appear to be in. Some 35 years ago, Thomas Kuhn in a seminal work called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions noted that scientific paradigms are marred by anomalies, data that do not fall within theoretical limits. These data are often ignored under the assumption that later discoveries will explain them. Often, this is exactly what happens. Sometimes, however, these anomalies continue to build in number and importance until the failure of the ruling intellectual paradigm to interpret them satisfactorily comes to dominate the debate. When this occurs, the existing system is on its way out the door.

Kuhn's study highlighted the difficulties of Christian theology and materialistic science. In both cases irregularities in the data were ignored in the hope of future resolution. But in both cases, the aberrations grew in number and importance until they began to press on the theory itself. Christians have struggled against this with little success for centuries while neo-Darwinians are meeting resistance they consider serious (i.e., scientific) for the first time. This author suspects that punctuated equilibria is but the first of many attempts to save a theory that is rapidly reaching the limits of its usefulness.

Here, it seems very likely that Sitchin can help us. As an incredibly learned and dedicated scholar, he has devoted decades to the study of ancient civilizations with an eye firmly fixed on those anomalies that are beginning to impose limits on what the Darwinian paradigm can tell us. Sitchin, like Immanuel Velikovsky before him, seeks to offer a theory that incorporates all the data.

While Sitchin generally confines himself to geographical areas around Mesopotamia (except book four, The Lost Realms, which considers the Americas), Velikovsky's less intensive study (Worlds In Collision) ranged all over the Earth in search of corroboration for Middle Eastern myths. Although he makes no mention of extraterrestrials, like Sitchin, he found parallels to such a degree that he concluded only events of a cosmic magnitude could explain these profound similarities among peoples isolated and presumably lacking Earth-spanning communications systems.

Also like Sitchin and Velikovsky, ex-NASA scientist Maurice Chatelain (Our Cosmic Ancestors) finds the similarities between distant cultures more than coincidence. Chatelain, whose treatment of the subject generally revolves around mathematical relationships, sees the systems of measurement used by the Sumerians and the Mayans as an indication of communication between the two or, more likely, a common origin. That such an origin was very possibly extraterrestrial in nature is suggested to Chatelain by the system's complexity and the 1952 discovery of a Mayan pyramid that contained a stone slab that weighed over two tons and which contained a very well-preserved bas-relief that depicted an astronaut sitting at the controls of a space vehicle. The cry of "Fraud!" was the only explanation establishment scientists could offer.

While Chatelain's use of numbers for such research personally interests me less than Sitchin's methodology, it does have the advantage in that mathematical relationships are stable over time and less susceptible to interpretive errors, although hypothetical reasoning in isolation can lead one far astray, as Greek deductive logical errors showed. Nonetheless, Chatelain notes that the number 3,600 "certainly seems to be the root of all the astronomical calculations our ancestors made." He demonstrates this by commenting that we have exactly 3,600 tenths of one degree in the circumference of the globe and that each of these is equal to 36,000 Babylonian feet. As we will soon note, Sitchin also finds the number 3,600 significant.

That Chatelain's conclusion of extraterrestrial visits parallels Sitchin's is clear, but the methodological differences between the two men are almost opposites. Sitchin uses historical "myths" to formulate his theory and turns to science for collaboration. Chatelain, on the other hand, uses science and mathematical relationships to arrive at his hypothesis, and then uses myths to support what he suggests. Yet both men conclude that visitors from outer space are far more likely than not.

 

Myth Considered as Fact

Sitchin, who is one of the few individuals who can read cuneiform Sumerian texts, has authored a fascinating series of books collectively known as Earth Chronicles based on the premise that what today is considered inventive mythology is, in fact, a repository of ancient memories. Sitchin believes that writings from Mesopotamian civilizations like Sumer, Babylon, Assyria and the events described in the Old Testament should be read as historic/scientific documents.

Sitchin's analysis draws heavily from the Mesopotamian scholarship that has been undertaken over the last century. However, Sitchin, who was born in Russia and raised in Palestine, draws upon his own deep knowledge of ancient and modern Middle Eastern languages to challenge the current linguistic interpretation of Mesopotamian terminology, which in many cases Sitchin considers a result of pre-formed conclusions about the alleged impossibility of what these texts seemingly assert. In doing so, he arrives at conclusions which common wisdom (please excuse the oxymoron) has dismissed as preposterous. But in light of our recent discoveries regarding space travel and nuclear science, the Mesopotamian descriptions of rockets, space travel and what reads compellingly like a nuclear holocaust strike too close to home to be written off as fanciful imaginations.

Considering the apparent radicalness of the author's thesis objectively, Sitchin merely recognizes that these accepted linguistic translations — being undertaken largely before modern man could realistically consider space travel a possibility — imposed an unnecessary and erroneous cant to our understanding of what the Sumerians and their descendants were actually saying.

Sitchin uses Sumerian texts to describe a people the Bible calls the Nefilim. Rejecting the standard translation of "giants" in trying to understand the Nefilim, Sitchin goes to the Hebrew root of the word and arrives at "those who were cast down." Reading the Sumerian texts literally, Sitchin asserts that the Nefilim were beings from the planet Nibiru, which Sitchin, again differing from the generally accepted, believes is not Mars or Jupiter but a planet that Sumerian imagery depicts as lying between the two. It was the actions of these "Gods" from Nibiru that gave rise to the stories of ancient authors, of which the Old Testament is but a concise, powerfully stated summary.

Sitchin brings God's creation of Man into the picture by using ancient texts that indicate the use of genetic engineering to accelerate the development of ape-like creatures on Earth, to work in the mines that the Nefilim had established in southern Africa. In the process, he finds in the texts evidence of failed attempts to genetically create modern humans that produced mutants which may well have served as the models of the animal-human forms that abound in Greek mythology.

The potential for Sitchin's thesis to explain the ancient human infatuation with gold is intriguing here, as is his postulated presence of higher knowledge in ancient times in regards to the insights contained in the book of Revelation.

Sitchin's documentation, both interpretive and scientific, is so extensive that only a body of work similar in size to his own could do it justice, but one example may prove interesting. His claim that the Nefilim were mining minerals in Africa thousands of years ago may be substantiated by the 20th-century experience of the Anglo-American Corporation, a large mining company. Aware that many promising mining sites in southern Africa showed evidence of prior mining operations, the company called in teams of archaeologists for an analysis. These experts found that mining operations had been going on as far back as 50,000 B.C. and "more likely 70,000 to 80,000 B.C.!" One wonders at the interest in precious metals over 70,000 years ago. Certainly neither Christian nor Darwinian theories of human development offer anything that explains either a human interest in such metals nor the technology to dig such mines.

 

Knowledge of the Ancients

The anthropological mystery of how ancient civilizations — the Sumerian, Egyptian and Indus — seemingly sprang into existence absent any antecedent developments which could explain the cultural level that they attained implies a degree of knowledge of which modern students are only now becoming aware. Nowhere is this learning more obvious than in Sumerian astronomy. Sitchin, after noting that the Greeks in the third century B. C. (Aristarchus for example) suggested a heliocentric solar system, that Hipparchus in the next century possessed knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, and that in Greek mythology Atlas supports a globe on his shoulders, concludes that Greek knowledge had been handed down from Mesopotamian civilizations that preceded their own.

By way of tracing the devolution of knowledge prior to the Renaissance, Sitchin further observes that in Babylon the future position of celestial bodies was predicted by two methods, the older of which was surprisingly the more accurate and which continued the heritage of Sumer. Moreover, Babylonian predictions were not based upon their own astronomical observations but were the result of advanced arithmetic schemes that were not to be tampered with by the astronomers who used them. These "arithmetic schemes" and "procedural texts" are, to a substantial extent, beyond modern scholars as well. In short, Babylonians appear to have carried out complex astronomical calculations which they did not understand but had inherited from the past — a past that moderns assume must have possessed far less information about complex subjects like the universe.

Turning to Sumerian astronomy itself, the sky was broken up into three bands: the Northern, the Central and the Southern. The 12 constellations of the zodiac in the present-day central band correspond exactly to the Sumerian central band in which the stars were grouped into twelve houses. Were this not enough, the Sumerians recognized 28 constellations in the Northern band, something European astronomers came to identify only after the invention of the telescope over three thousand years later.

The Southern band in Sumerian astronomy results in even more surprising conclusions. If correctly identified, the constellations in the southern Sumerian sky include several that are always below the horizon when viewed from a Mesopotamian latitude. Sitchin concludes that only the Nefilim could have revealed the presence of these constellations to the Earth-bound people of Sumer. Furthermore, even the existence of a Southern astronomical band presupposes a spherical planet and not the flat table top believed by so many of Columbus' sailors millennia later. Indeed, in Sitchin's view the whole of Sumerian astronomy is incomprehensible unless one proceeds from the assumption that they considered the Earth as a sphere.

An Akkadian seal (Akkadia being a civilization derived from Sumer) dating from the third millennium B.C. depicts the solar system from a heliocentric perspective that correctly identifies the relative size and place of the planets Mercury through Pluto except that it depicts a planet where the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is today and Pluto is located between Saturn and Uranus.

Since to modern minds, Uranus was discovered the year that the American Revolution ended, and Neptune around the time of the Mexican-American War while Pluto was but a theory until 1930, the question arises as to how did the Sumerians, who presumably were little removed from Neanderthal Man, know about these planets over 4,000 years before modern science? How did they know of a spherical Earth? How were they cognizant of things we consider 20th-century discoveries? Who informed them of such things?

In Sitchin's interpretation of Sumerian astronomy, Nibiru in its elliptical orbit passes between Mars and Jupiter every 3,600 years (the same 3,600 Maurice Chatelain noted) and that on one such journey the planet that existed between Mars and Jupiter was destroyed (leaving the asteroid belt) and the position of satellite-sized Pluto was dramatically altered, which accounts for the elliptical orbit of the farthest planet known to the modern mind.

For those readers who question the likelihood of an unknown planet with an orbital period of 3,600 years, in book three, The Wars of Gods and Men, Sitchin notices that in 1983, after having concluded that Pluto was too small to account for the perturbations in Uranus' orbit, Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that IRAS — an infrared telescope mounted on a spacecraft — had discovered beyond Pluto a very distant "mystery celestial body" about four times the size of Earth and moving toward Earth. Sitchin identifies this body as the planet Nibiru, which is currently inbound in its highly elliptical orbit.

In reading Sumerian texts literally, Sitchin concludes that Earth was visited by extraterrestrials in pre-historic times. It was these visitors who informed the Sumerians about the outer planets; it was these visitors who in effect created modern man with genetic engineering, thus giving birth to the religions of the world; and it was these visitors who created elevated civilizations out of almost nothing.

The depth of Sitchin's scholarship and the power of his work have brought about the event that history indicates is a prediction of the staying power of his paradigm. His creative effort has already formed the basis of other works that interpret his theories further or shoot off into directions of their own — directions that occasionally contradict Sitchin. Whatever the merit of these theories, Sitchin may well have sketched the outlines of a new scientific/historical paradigm that is destined to fuse, and thus supersede, the established theories of Christianity and Darwinism.