27 Facts About Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin was an author of a number of books proposing an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts.

Zecharia Sitchin claimed that Sumerian mythology suggests that this hypothetical planet of Nibiru is in an elongated, 3,600-year-long elliptical orbit around the Sun.

Zecharia Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Zecharia Sitchin's ideas have been resoundingly rejected by scientists, academics, historians and anthropologists who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory.

Zecharia Sitchin's work has been criticized for flawed methodology, ignoring archaeological and historical evidence, and mistranslations of ancient texts as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims.

Zecharia Sitchin was born to a Jewish family in Baku, the capital of then Soviet Azerbaijan, and raised in Mandatory Palestine.

Similar to earlier authors such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken, Zecharia Sitchin advocated hypotheses in which extraterrestrial events supposedly played a significant role in ancient human history.

Zecharia Sitchin speculated that Pluto was originally a satellite of Saturn but Nibiru's gravity perturbed it, sending it to the outer Solar System and giving the body its peculiar orbital path, intersecting the orbit of Neptune.

Zecharia Sitchin wrote that they evolved after Nibiru entered the inner Solar System, and they first arrived on Earth probably 450,000 years ago, looking for minerals, especially gold, which they found and mined in Africa.

Zecharia Sitchin believes that fallout from nuclear weapons, used during a war between factions of the extraterrestrials, is the "evil wind" described in the Lament for Ur that destroyed Ur around 2000 BCE.

Zecharia Sitchin says that his research coincides with many biblical texts, and that biblical texts come originally from Sumerian writings.

Since the release of his first book The 12th Planet in 1976, Zecharia Sitchin has written seven other books as part of his Earth Chronicles series, as well as six other companion books.

Zecharia Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been published in more than 25 languages.

New York Times reporter Corey Kilgannon has noted that despite academic dismissal of his work, Zecharia Sitchin has "a devoted following of readers".

Zecharia Sitchin was a frequent guest on the Coast to Coast AM radio show, which in 2010 presented Zecharia Sitchin with a lifetime achievement award.

In 2000, Lorin Morgan-Richards' theatrical performance of ENKI, based on the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, premiered in Cleveland, Ohio under the choreography of Michael Medcalf.

Zecharia Sitchin cited the work of Sitchin and others to support his assertion.

Criticism of Zecharia Sitchin's work falls primarily into three categories: translations and interpretations of ancient texts, astronomical and scientific observations, and literalism of myth.

When Zecharia Sitchin wrote his books, only specialists could read the Sumerian language.

Zecharia Sitchin wrote that these ancient civilizations knew of a twelfth planet, when in fact they only knew five.

Seal VA 243 has 12 dots that Zecharia Sitchin identifies as planets.

Zecharia Sitchin's linguistics seems at least as amateurish as his anthropology, biology, and astronomy.

However, Zecharia Sitchin's proposed series of rogue planetary collisions differ in both details and timing.

In Velikovsky's case, these interplanetary collisions were supposed to have taken place within the span of human existence, whereas for Zecharia Sitchin these occurred during the early stages of planetary formation, but entered the mythological account passed down via the alien race which purportedly evolved on Nibiru after these encounters.

Van Flandern, of the US Naval Observatory, which Zecharia Sitchin uses to bolster his thesis, is no support at all.

Zecharia Sitchin uses the Epic of Creation Enuma Elish as the foundation for his cosmogony, identifying the young god Marduk, who overthrows the older regime of gods and creates the Earth, as the unknown "Twelfth Planet".

Zecharia Sitchin merrily ignores all this and assigns unwarranted planetary identities to the gods mentioned in the theogony.