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A MESSAGE
TO ZECHARIA SITCHIN FANS
By Alan F. Alford
Author
of ‘Gods of the New Millennium’, ‘The Phoenix Solution’,
‘When The Gods Came Down’, and ‘The Atlantis Secret’.
In 1996 I was one of Zecharia Sitchin’s biggest fans. I wrote
a book entitled ‘Gods of the New Millennium’ which drew
heavily on Zecharia Sitchin’s ideas and gave broad support
to his overall conclusions. The book, relaunched by Hodder and
Stoughton
Publishers in 1997, raced to Number 11 in the UK Bestsellers list.
To many people in the UK, this was the first they had heard
about
Sitchin’s theory and they loved it. All over the world, Sitchin
fans went into raptures over my book. Among them was Neil Freer,
author of ‘Breaking The Godspell’, who declared ‘Gods
of the New Millennium’ to be ‘a landmark work’ and
urged people to ‘read it... even if you have to hock the
cat’.
Another Sitchin fan, the writer Lloyd Pye, hailed it as ‘one
of the best books ever done in this field.’ With very few
exceptions, Sitchin fans recognised that I had achieved the seemingly
impossible;
I had taken Sitchin’s research a significant step further
forward.
For those unfamiliar with Sitchin’s hypothesis, he proposes
that ancient texts describe the visits to Earth of an extraterrestrial
race of gods known as ‘the Anunnaki’. According to Sitchin’s
interpretation of these ancient texts, the Anunnaki-gods came down
to the Earth 445,000 years ago from a planet known as Marduk or
Nibiru – a planet which remains in our solar system on a vast
elliptical orbit of 3,600 years. The Anunnaki then created Homo
sapiens, partly in their own image, using a process of genetic
engineering. The purpose of this ‘creation’ was to engage
Homo sapiens as a slave, and thereby increase the efficiency
of the Anunnaki’s gold mines on Earth. According to Sitchin,
this gold was required back on the home planet of the Anunnaki,
to protect the planet’s atmosphere from degradation. This must
have worked, because many millennia later the leaders of the Anunnaki
allegedly returned to the Earth, granted civilisation to the Sumerians
and Egyptians, and lived alongside these human cultures for more
than a thousand years.
In 1997/98, on the back of a three-book contract from Hodder and
Stoughton Publishers, I set about finding further scientific evidence
of the Anunnaki-gods. The intention was to produce the kind of sequel
that writers normally produce – aptly summed up by the expression
‘more of the same’. To this end, I decided to write a
book about ancient Egypt, partly because Egypt was in vogue following
the publication of ‘The Orion Mystery’ and similar books,
and partly because Sitchin had not fully covered the rich Egyptian
lore in his ‘Earth Chronicles’ series. I therefore began
to pore over the ancient Egyptian writings, looking for evidence
of extraterrestrial contact.
But I did not find what I expected to find. On the contrary, I began
to realise that the ancient Egyptian gods were not flesh-and-blood
extraterrestrials at all. On the contrary, the Egyptian gods were
personifications of celestial powers, exemplified by Ra, the Sun-god,
Thoth the Moon-god, and Nut, the Sky-goddess. But this was only
the tip of the iceberg. Eventually the veil of the mystery began
to lift, and I realised that these celestial gods were merely symbolic
of an even deeper celestial mystery involving a planet which had
exploded millions of years in the past. This was the Egyptian ‘First
Time’ (Zep Tepi), when the gods had descended from Heaven
to Earth. But they had not descended to the Earth in space-ships.
Far from it. They had descended to Earth as meteorites and floodwaters
from the exploded planet. And it soon became apparent that every
single aspect of ancient Egyptian religion could be integrated within
what I termed an ‘exploded planet cult’. The results of
this research were written up in my second book, ‘The Phoenix
Solution’, which was published in August 1998.
Where did this leave Sitchin’s theory of the Anunnaki-gods?
In ‘The Phoenix Solution’, I explained that the descents
of the meteorite-gods to Earth was followed by the ascents (or resurrections)
of their spiritual doubles back up to Heaven. In other words, the
physical gods who had come down to Earth had propagated invisible,
metaphysical counterparts who had risen back up to Heaven. I then
drew a number of comparisons between Egyptian and Mesopotamian traditions,
and concluded that ‘these accounts are so similar to Egyptian
beliefs that we must surely dismiss the idea of rockets and spacecraft,
and treat all the ascents (of the gods) as metaphysical.’
But although Sitchin’s theory may have sprung a leak in my
mind, the same could not be said for his many fans who were following
my work. They went ballistic. Alford had become a traitor and a
turncoat, they said. How could he possibly do it? Had he been ‘turned’
by the CIA?
The reality is that I was never ‘turned’ by anyone other
than the ancient Egyptians, and contrary to popular misinformation,
I have never recanted my support for the ancient astronaut theory.
In ‘The Phoenix Solution’, I tempered my criticism of
Sitchin’s theory with the words: ‘none of this disproves
Zecharia Sitchin’s thesis of extraterrestrial intervention
per se, but it clearly demonstrates that the warring gods of ancient
mythology are not what he supposed them to be... this places the
search for ancient astronauts right back at square one... with nothing
proven but all to play for...’. In short, I had not thrown
out the baby with the bathwater as many writers might have been
tempted to do, and nor do I have any intention of doing so as long
as the origins of Homo sapiens remain so highly improbable
(see ‘Gods of the New Millennium’, chapter two).
My comments in ‘The Phoenix Solution’ were provisional
– pending a more detailed study of the ancient Sumerian myths.
And it was to this task that I devoted myself during 1998/99. Was
Sumerian religion also an exploded planet cult – as in Egypt
– or might at least some of the Sumerian myths describe flesh-and-blood
gods?
I spelled out the answer to this question in my third book ‘When
The Gods Came Down’, published in April 2000. Although Sitchin’s
name is not mentioned in this book, it suffices for the purpose
of this web-page to say that the result is negative to Sitchin’s
thesis of the Anunnaki-gods. The following two extracts from chapter
fourteen of the book encapsulate, in a nutshell, the fundamental
problem that I think has misled Sitchin and so many other ancient
astronaut theorists:
“Once
upon a time... we rightly or wrongly believed that God had been
an exploded planet. But over the past five thousand years we ‘dumbed
down’ our earlier religious beliefs by portraying ex-planets,
meteorites and comets in anthropomorphic terms – either as
human beings (or human artefacts), or as gods with human-like
appearances, or as a God watching over us with a human-like mind,
or as a spirit-like Son of God occupying a real human body.”
“Today,
the conditioning imposed upon us by our religious educations is
such that the vast majority of us are quite incapable of seeing
beyond what we might call ‘the anthropomorphic barrier’.
Even those who deny the orthodox religions fall into a similar
trap of believing that God and the gods were a visiting group
of flesh-and-blood extraterrestrials. But although the majority
of people might laugh at such beliefs, the truth is that the followers
of the so-called ‘ancient astronaut theory’ are no more
foolish than 1.9 billion Christians who believe that a flesh-and-blood
Son of God was sacrificed to save mankind. Both groups of believers
have fallen into the same trap – a very understandable trap
– of failing to see beyond ‘the anthropomorphic barrier’.
And, as far as this perspective is concerned, both groups thus
stand no higher than the little children who believe that a man
in a red and white suit comes down the chimney at Christmas bearing
gifts. We have all been believing in the same fairy tale.”
This
is a deliberately provocative statement, and it will no doubt cause
a great deal of hostility towards myself. But I have chosen my words
carefully. The ‘fairy tale’ which I refer to is our inclination
to take literally the depictions of the descending gods in human-like
forms – whether it be the Anunnaki, Jesus Christ, or Santa
Claus.
But this does not mean I have totally abandoned the ancient astronaut
theory. On the contrary, the exploded planet hypothesis of religion
and myth, when combined with the scientific exploded planet hypothesis
of American astronomer Dr Tom Van Flandern, point firmly towards
the idea of an extraterrestrial race of man (the so-called ‘golden
race’), who once lived upon the planet of Heaven and who may
have migrated from their doomed planet to the Earth millions of
years ago, to survive presumably by hybridisation with a native
species on Earth. This scenario would go a long way towards explaining
the many anomalies in the orthodox account of human origins (see
my book ‘Gods of the New Millennium’, chapter two). This
idea of extraterrestrial intervention, which is supported by Van
Flandern as well as by myself, is explored further in a separate
article on this website.
The
Exploded Planet Perspective
Owing to a threat of litigation, it is inadvisable for me to issue
a detailed refutation of Zecharia Sitchin’s interpretation
of the ancient myths. What I will do, however, is summarise some
of my own conclusions in areas pertinent to Sitchin’s theory,
and allow readers to use their own common sense in deciding which
interpretation of the myths is the most likely.
1 Sumerian religion
The Sumerian religion – like the Egyptian religion – was
an exploded planet cult. The supreme god Anu personified a planet
which had exploded; hence the fact that his name meant ‘Heaven’,
and hence the fact that meteoritic iron was known in Sumer as ‘the
essence of Anu’. Anu fathered the Anunnaki by emission from
his exploding body, causing the Anunnaki to ‘light up the skies
(Epic of Gilgamesh) and then fall to the Earth. This explains
why the Anunnaki-gods were subsequently hidden away in the Underworld,
i.e. in the interior of the Earth (a fact that is readily apparent
to anyone who takes the time to read the ancient Sumerian myths
for themselves). The various other Sumerian gods personified exactly
the same idea, i.e. the physical explosion, and fall, of a planet,
followed by its metaphysical resurrection (the widespread myth of
‘the separation of Heaven from Earth’). This explains
the basic myths of the descents and ascents of the gods, i.e. their
journeys back and forth between Heaven and Earth. Moreover, the
cataclysmic basis of the myths explains why the journeys of the
gods were usually accompanied by fire and smoke.
2 The Battles of the Gods
Ancient man witnessed cataclysmic phenomena in the skies (comets,
meteors and fireballs), and was therefore inspired to tell stories
of the battles of the gods. These battles supposedly occurred at
the very beginning of time, long before mankind was created on the
Earth. The ancients believed in two exploded planets, and this allowed
the myth-makers to envision dramatic wars between the gods who remained
in Heaven and the gods who had been cast down into the Underworld
(i.e. into the interior of the Earth).
3 The Creation of Man
The basic idea underlying all Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Greek myths
of the creation of man is that man was created in the Underworld,
i.e. in the interior of the Earth, pending a later release onto
the surface of the Earth. In the Greek myths, man was thus created
from clay and fire in the womb of the goddess Gaia, who personified
Mother Earth. Similarly, in the older Mesopotamian myths, man was
created in the womb of Mami (alias Ninharsag, ‘Lady of the
Mountain’), who likewise personified the Earth.
The crucial idea behind the creation of man myth was that the Earth-goddess
had been impregnated by the seeds of life in the form of meteorites
and floodwaters from the exploded planet. In Greece it was believed
that man had been created from fallen ‘stones’ or from
the ‘teeth’ of a heavenly serpent, or from the ‘seed’
of the fallen meteorite-god Hephaestus. In Mesopotamia, similarly,
it was believed that man had been created from the ‘flesh’
and ‘blood’ of a sacrificed sky-god, these terms being
metaphors for the meteoritic materials. Both the gods and man had
been created as offshoots from the exploded planet, and hence it
was said that mankind had been created in the image of the gods.
In the course of time, ancient man depicted the fallen gods poetically
in anthropomorphic forms, thus giving rise to the misleading idea
that man had been created in the image of human-like gods. As for
the Anunnaki-gods, who put mankind to work in the excavations, it
should be noted that they were gods of the subterranean Underworld.
4. Enuma Elish
The Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish, makes an excellent
case study of the exploded planet hypothesis of ancient religion
and myth. In an attached article, I offer a decoding of Enuma
Elish, line by line, explaining the respective roles of Apsu,
Tiamat, Marduk and the Anunnaki from the exploded planet perspective.
Please click here Enuma Elish.
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