|The fault in our stars|
Zecharia Sitchin (Azerbaijani: Zaxariya Sitçin) (1920–2010) was an economist and crank who believed in a "twelfth planet" called Nibiru that created all life on Earth. It is apparently a "yo-yo" planet that only shows up "every 3000 plus years", or something. It is also responsible for the asteroid belt.
He basically spliced together Immanuel Velikovsky's catastrophism with Peter Kolosimo and Erich von Däniken's ancient astronauts, using as a glue his own contribution to the mix — the long-period planet Nibiru and its inhabitants, the Anunnaki.
Sitchin had a distinct advantage here. His translations of ancient Sumerian works are often "idiosyncratic", and not much like anybody else's. Only a few dozen academics in the world today are competent in Sumerian, so not many people could actually call him out properly on his nonsense.[note 1]
Somehow, he was convinced that he was moments away from being recognized as the most important scientist of all time.
- The 12th Planet, 1976, ISBN 0-8128-1939-X
- The Stairway to Heaven, 1980, ISBN 0-312-75505-8
- The Wars of Gods and Men, 1985, ISBN 0-380-89585-4
- The Lost Realms, 1990, ISBN 0-380-75890-3
- When Time Began, 1993, ISBN 0-380-77071-7
- The Cosmic Code, 1998, ISBN 0-380-80157-4
- The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies of the Return, 2007, ISBN 978-0-06-123823-9
- Official website
- Sitchin Is Wrong.com, written by a professional scholar of ancient Near East languages and cultures
- "Sitchin's Twelfth Planet", by Rob Hafernik
- "Forging the Pharoah's name?", by Martin Stower
- Sitchin's Sumerian Astronomy Refuted
- A Refutation of the Theories of Zecharia Sitchin, by Ian Lawton
- Position Papers
- An astronomer's analysis of the Akkadian Seal
- The Pyramid Mystery
- Zecharia Sitchin's entry at the Skeptic's Dictionary
- Nibiru at Cosmophobia
- Hypothetical Planets
- A collection of Sitchin's ramblings, including pirated versions of several of his kookbooks
- Far fewer than Classical Hebrew, Sanskrit or even Ancient Egyptian.
- Velikovsky's Worlds in Colision came out in 1950, Kolosimo's Timeless Earth in 1964, von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods in 1968, and Sitchin's The 12th Planet in 1976.
- "The Rush Back to Phobos"