The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (4 page)

The mythological aspects of this study expand upon research
conducted by Zecharia Sitchin 25 years ago regarding the writings of the
ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia.
²²
He offered an intellectual
argument for the existence of a mysterious planet termed ‘Nibiru’ that was
observed from Earth during historical times and venerated by many cultures. Its
meaning is ‘the Ferry’, implying its nature as a crossing point between two
places.
²³
This is a rather enigmatic name, and one that I don’t
think Zecharia Sitchin ever satisfactorily explained, but the meaning should
become clear during the course of this book.

Sitchin
equated Nibiru with the Babylonian god Marduk from the Creation Myth called the
‘Enuma Elish’. I think this Marduk was the Dark Star, the sun’s binary
companion. Marduk was the ambitious young hothead of a god who decided to take
all the other gods on in a titanic struggle for cosmic dominance. He is the
‘Son of the sun’, a phrase that finds a real meaning in the binary Dark Star.
This planet was described by the Babylonians as a ‘red star...that bisects the
heavens’,
²⁴
and as the ‘Celestial Lord’ greater than all the other
planets.

How could the ancients have known of such a planet if it had not
passed through the solar system during historical times? They had no advanced
telescopes to seek out distant planets among the comets, and were reliant upon
either their own historical observations, or the receipt of information about
this ‘Nibiru’ from elsewhere. This is where Zecharia Sitchin becomes highly
controversial. He claims that Nibiru is the home of the gods of Mesopotamia, in
a flesh-and-blood sense.

His maverick ideas have been almost universally dismissed by the
academic establishment. However, I believe that the core ideas presented by
Zecharia Sitchin are correct, but in need of some technical modifications. This
book sets out to argue that case.

A massive planet in a comet-like orbit is actually consistent with
modern science, and could offer conditions on its moons conducive to life, but
not in the way originally envisioned by Sitchin. Even so, his claim of an
undiscovered planet is fundamentally sound, and I believe that it is awaiting
discovery. And what a monumental day that will be! The future discovery of the
Dark Star will provide us with a greater potential for life than Mars ever
could. If Sitchin is right, it may also give us new insight into our own
origins.

This book will provide extensive evidence to suggest that the Dark
Star’s presence among the comets is a reality. It will look closely at the
nature of ‘Nibiru’, and show how it can be rationalized scientifically. It
brings both myth and science together as a cohesive whole.

But before we start to piece the puzzle together we must first
explore many of the ideas expressed in this first chapter in more depth. We
will start with the ideas of Zecharia Sitchin, and then look at the general
history of the hunt for Planet X. This will provide an excellent grounding from
which to proceed.

¹
P. Moore “Patrick Moore
on Mars” Chapter 11, Cassell 1998

²
I. Wright & M. Grady
“Focus: Life on Mars” Astronomy Now Oct. 1996, pp39-46

³
‘Horizon’ BBC2, “Snowball
Earth” Shown on 22nd February 2001

⁴
M. Milstein “Astronomy”
p38-43 “Diving into Europa’s Ocean” Oct. 1997

⁵
D. Kalk “Alien Haven”
pp32-5 New Scientist Sept. 1999

⁶
S. Battersby “One Hour on
Titan, Forever Bathed in Glory” New Scientist, 22/1/05, pp6-8

⁷
Redding.com, Seattle (AP)
“Mysteries of distant moons await earthly oceanographers” 15/2/04,
http://www.redding.com/news/ national/stories/20040215nat048.shtml

⁸
T. Radford “Titan,
Mystery Moon where it Rains Liquid Methane” The Guardian, 22/1/05, p6

⁹
C. Sagan “Pale Blue Dot”
p140-141, p127 Headline Book Publishing 1995

¹⁰
J. Kelly Beatty
“Bigorbit Object Confounds Dynamicists”
http://www.skypub.com/news/news.shtml#bigorbit
5th
April 2001

¹¹
A. Quillen, D. Trilling
& E. Blackman “The Impact of a Close Stellar Encounter on the
Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt” arXiv:astroph/0401372vl, 2004

¹²
J.B.Murray Mon. Not. R.
Astron. Soc., 309, 31-34 (1999)

¹³
J.J. Matese, P.G. Whitman
and D.P. Whitmire, Icarus, 141, 354-336 (1999)

¹⁴
The Economist Newspaper
Ltd. “X Marks the Spot”
http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/16-10-99/st7748.html
7th October 1999

¹⁵
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_957000/ 957518.stm
5/10/2000 “Mystery of free-floating 'planets'”

¹⁶
A. Lloyd “Winged Disc:
The Dark Star Theory”, 2001, http:/ /www.darkstar1.co.uk
© 7th February 2000

¹⁷
K. Leutwyler “Bright
X-rays, Dim Dwarfs” 17/7/2000
http://www.sciam.com/exhibit/2000/071700dwarf/
¹⁸
C. Sagan “Pale Blue Dot” p392 Headline Book Publishing 1995

¹⁹
Correspondence from M.
Marley, 28/1/00

²⁰
Associated Press “We
Prefer Not to Call It a Failed Star. We Call It a Specially Challenged Brown
Dwarf” http://
www.aci.net/kalliste/
9th
January 2001

²¹
J.G. Hills “The Passage
of a 'Nemesis'-like object through the Planetary System” The Astronomical
Journal, 90, Number 9, pp1876-1882, September 1985

²²
Z. Sitchin “The Twelfth
Planet" Avon 1976

²³
G. de Santillana & H.
von Dechend “Hamlet’s Mill” App. 39, pp430-451,
http://www.apollonius.net/trees.html Thanks to Robertino Solarion

²⁴
B. Van der Waerden
“Science Awakening II” pp66-68 Oxford University Press 1974

6. The Sumerian 'Nibiru'

The
essence of the Dark Star Theory is that certain ancient myths regarding our
solar system are accurate, and that modern science is fast catching up with
them. Those myths have become vague and misinterpreted over time, but they
point in the direction of a series of specific astronomical events that have
shaped the world we live in today.

The
ancient myths in question originate from the first historical civilization,
known as Sumer, which crystallized dramatically in Mesopotamia 6000 years ago.
Its ruined ancient cities now rest in what is now Iraq, and this area is
rightly referred to as the ‘cradle of civilization’. Its origins are
mysterious, not least because the development of Sumer seemed to appear out of
nowhere. Scholars are in disagreement as to whether the Sumerians migrated to
the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates, or whether they were an
indigenous people.
¹
But changes in the geography of the region
played a part, as the waters of this region receded back to the Persian Gulf, leaving
a ‘fertile crescent’ from which the Sumerians created a ‘garden paradise’.

Sumer
seemed to burst into life, fully-fledged about 6000 years ago. The first
Sumerian cities were highly organized affairs with centralized governments and
social class structures. Each city was populated by up to 10,000 people, rising
to 50,000 by 2700 BCE. Agriculture still took up the time of the majority of
workers, but this created a stable enough supply of food for the cities to
allow its other citizens to work as masons, bakers, weavers and other
tradesmen, overseen by a municipal bureaucracy. The age of the specialist
craftsman was born.
²

One should not underestimate the achievements of the Sumerians
during this period, which predated the rise of Dynastic Egypt. They produced
‘superb painted pottery’ and ‘magnificent’ stonework, were the ‘first inspired
builders of monumental architecture’ and produced exquisite epic poems.
¹
Their creation myths formed the basis for many of the accounts in the Old
Testament, through the migration of the Sumerian patriarch Abraham to Egypt.
Yet Sumer was just one step removed from the Stone Age. The Danish-American
Sumerologist Thorkild Jacobsen considers the transition to be linked to the
invention of writing, almost ‘overnight’.
³
He expressed his wonder
at how the blueprint of an advanced society could have been achieved so
suddenly. Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us that so many scholars puzzle
over how ancient Sumer came into existence, and probe into the mystery of where
its people came from.

The impact on the world of this emergent civilization cannot be
underestimated. Despite being only one step removed from its Neolithic
hunter-gatherer predecessor, Sumer managed to put into place most of the
fundamental aspects of a civilized society as we would recognize it today.

Sumerian ‘Firsts’

The Sumerians can be accredited with inventing writing, political
and religious infrastructure, and the building of complex buildings, such as
Ziggurats, high-rise buildings and archways. They also invented metal-work,
involving smelting, refining and alloying; the use of bitumen as a fuel and for
waterproofing, caulking, painting, cementing and moulding. They had advanced
understanding of medicine and surgery as well as veterinary science. Their
agriculture was well developed, including extensive irrigation by canals. Their
astronomical knowledge was remarkable, and they were the first to establish a
calendar. They had a formal system of education, where schools taught not just
language and writing, but botany, zoology, geography, mathematics and theology.
They were civilized enough to develop a complex legal system. Last, but by no
means least, they developed a refined and complex system of mathematics, called
the sexagesimal system.
⁴

The sexagesimal system does not appear to be an obvious choice of
mathematical method for a fledgling society emerging from primitive times. It
is a complicated form of base 12, and this seems to reflect an early
categorization of the zodiac by the Sumerians into 12 houses. Their calendar
was based on 12 lunar months with an intercalary month inserted periodically to
adjust the calendar back to the solar cycle.

Records of the Sumerian zodiacal system stem from at least 3800BC,
the time of Sargon of Akkad, a remote period long before the emergence of
pre-dynastic Egypt. In 1903, Plunket described the then emergent knowledge of
the Akkadian and Sumerian astrological works:

“That the constellations of the Zodiac were from a remote age
recognized by the dwellers in Mesopotamia is scarcely to be doubted. We find on
the boundary stones in the British Museum representations of several of their
figures. The Bull, the Tortoise (in lieu of the Crab), a female figure with
wings, the Scorpion, the Archer, and the Goat-fish, are all portrayed, not only
on boundary stones, but also on cylinder seals and gems.”
⁵

The
Sumerians thus created the Zodiac, an arbitrary division of the constellations
that lie on the ecliptic, an invisible line drawn across the heavens along
which the sun appears to traverse. These same 12 houses of the Zodiac crop up
throughout history, and we still have them today, although some alteration has
occurred to several of them. This is remarkable, not just from the perspective
of the Zodiac actually having been developed by the first civilization to
emerge from Neolithic times, but that this contribution to astronomy has stayed
with us for the next 6000 years.

The
scientific knowledge required to explain the advanced knowledge of the
Sumerians far exceed what they should have been capable of, if one is to
presume a linear evolutionary development of knowledge. Like all of the
remarkable achievements of the ancient Sumerians, their knowledge appeared as
if out of nowhere, including astronomical knowledge of the Precession of the
Equinoxes. This particular scientific understanding rests on careful scrutiny
of the sun’s apparent backward shift along the ecliptic, and through the
Zodiacal houses, over time.

This
movement is slow, shifting only one degree during the lifetime of a human
being. It is only over a period of about 2150 years that the sun is able to
shift fully from one Zodiacal house to another, presaging the Dawn of a New
Age. Such knowledge is not acquired through study of astronomy during one
lifetime, but becomes apparent only after many, many generations. One would
expect such knowledge to emerge later on during Mankind’s development, not to
be accepted science right from the start of our first civilization!

So
we can see that the Sumerians had an exceptional grasp of astronomy and
cosmology.

Like
so many of the Sumerian ‘firsts’, this points to an inheritance of knowledge
from a period before Sumer emerged. The texts they have left us imply something
quite extraordinary, however. They tell us that their science and laws were
given to them by the gods.

The
Sumerians left us vast quantities of written material, in their particular
style of ‘cuneiform’ script. Much of this material was written on clay tablets,
then preserved by baking. Furthermore, they developed the use of ‘cylinder
seals’ for imprinting these tablets. The Sumerians were great keepers of
records, and left us a legacy of written work, including the famous ‘Epic of
Gilgamesh’, the story of one of their semi-divine rulers.

Their
cultural legacy was handed down to the later Mesopotamian civilizations of
Akkad, Assyria and Babylon, as well as Persia, Egypt and, arguably, India. In
their many accounts of their past and present, they were quite clear about how
their advanced knowledge was attained. It came from the ‘gods’, who, it is
said, lived among them, and who bequeathed them the gift of civilization.

Given
the remarkable culture that formed the spring-board for so much of mankind’s
development in the following millennia, how is it that so few people are even
aware of the historical existence of the Sumerians? After all, the ancient
Egyptian culture has gained a strong foothold in the popular psyche. Part of
the solution is historical. Western culture has traditionally considered itself
to have been developed from scratch by the Romans and Greeks.

Our
ancient languages were Latin and Greek, and these cultures were the European
super-states of their time. They represent the modern Western ideal of cultural
dominance and imperialism. Furthermore, the Church developed through the
Romans, and all official learning through the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, the
Reformation and beyond was directly controlled by this institution, using Latin
as its holy language. The idea of European and North American intellectual
dominance is ingrained within modern scholarship.

So,
although the Greeks clearly obtained a great many of their religious and
intellectual ideas from the Egyptians, we still consider the Greeks as the
original philosophers and cultural creators. We marvel at the technical
abilities of the Egyptians, yet choose to ignore the impact they had on the
development of Western culture. The Mesopotamian civilizations are one step
further removed still. The Biblical passages dealing with the Babylonians tend
to have been from the perspective of a subjugated people, the Hebrews, who were
held captive in Babylon in the 6th century BC. As such, the Babylonian (hence
Assyrian, Akkadian and Sumerian) culture is generally seen in a more negative
light. The far older Sumerian culture didn’t stand much of a chance of
establishing its true place in history when it was unearthed over the last two
centuries.

Part
of the problem was the growing realization amongst scholars that the creation
stories in the Old Testament found an earlier equivalent in the Mesopotamian
literature, rendering the Genesis account in the Bible as a later development
of Sumerian and Akkadian culture. This was deeply offensive to many Christian
and Hebrew scholars, who continue to ignore these controversial findings.

When
Assyriologists began to work through very ancient clay tablets that had been
unearthed from the Akkadian cities 150 years ago, it became clear that Akkad
had been derived from an older culture with a wedge-shaped writing that was unlike
anything yet discovered. These very ancient writings revealed the secrets of
the sudden development of Sumerian civilization from nowhere. The Sumerians
claimed that they had been taught all they knew by a group of powerful gods who
lived among them, whom they called the Anunnaki.

The
Sumerians served their masters and described in detail their very Earth-like
activities. In many respects, the Anunnaki were just like us, but more powerful
and remarkably knowledgeable. All of the crystallizing development was
accounted for by direct intervention of these enigmatic ‘gods’. Furthermore,
these gods, or Anunnaki, were subject to death like mortal humans, implying a
temporal existence. Yet, scholars have wrapped the gods of Mesopotamia in the
cloak of myth.

The ‘12th Planet’

An
alternative approach to the study of Mesopotamian myth was made in the 1970s by
Zecharia Sitchin, who made a personal study of Middle Eastern languages and
archeology whilst working as a journalist in Israel.
⁶
Sitchin read
the ancient texts and came to a rather different conclusion about the origins
of Sumerian civilization. He proposed that the Sumerians weren’t alluding to
mythical allegory when they spoke of their gods; they were literally describing
flesh and blood characters who were historically contemporary with them. Their
service to their gods was less religious, more day-to-day work to support an
infrastructure that centred upon these powerful beings.