The 12th Planet: Book One of the Earth Chronicles [Mass Market Paperback]

The idea that "ancient astronauts" (a term I dislike) had a hand in Man's creation and evolution is not new. Sitchin goes far beyond the normal arguments, however. He argues that there is an undiscovered planet in our own solar system upon which life developed and evolved millions of years before life on earth, a planet that seeded earth with its earliest life forms millions of years ago when this undiscovered planet entered our solar system and essentially crashed into a large planet between Mars and Jupiter--the planet in question was broken up into two parts, one eventually forming Earth and the other the asteroid belt. The 12th planet (counting the sun and moon as planets) he calls Nibiru; it is a planet with an eccentric orbit carrying it well past the other nine planets thousands of years at a time. Here life developed and advanced at a very early period. Needing resources, particularly gold, the planet sent forth emissaries to earth. In order to free themselves of the hard labor of mining, these aliens, the Nefilim, created Man by combining their genes with those of the ape men then on earth, a procedure made possible by the fact that the two races were in fact genetic cousins. Thus, the Nefilim became early man's gods, and their stories were told in the artifacts of the ancient Sumerians and of the kingdoms that came after them.

Sitchin makes a determined effort to tie Christianity and the Bible to the tale he unfolds. He effectively, and with good evidence, shows that the early stories in the Bible are based largely on older manuscripts from Sumeria. He explains many of the mysterious passages in the Bible by tying the stories to more complete Sumerian tales--the Elohim, the plural Deity mentioned in the Creation story, the great flood, the Tower of Babel, and others. In this endeavor, he is very successful. While one may not be convinced of his story of life on Earth, one cannot doubt the fact that the early books of the Bible are basically a condensed version of former manuscripts. He makes a convincing argument for his theories, but one will not be and should not be convinced based on this one book. Much supporting evidence is to be found in the later books in the series, where a far richer version of man's history is presented by the author. As unbelievable as many of his ideas sound, Sitchin actually does an effective job of answering many of the big questions that scientists and theologians have been unable to answer about life on earth, the most important of which is an explanation of why home sapiens developed so suddenly and miraculously 300,000 years ago. Right or wrong, his ideas answer a lot of questions and deserve serious study. Sitchin's knowledge of ancient civilizations is immense, and his judgments cannot be dismissed without serious attention paid to them.

What Mr. Sitchin details is a group of beings that have a "superset" of abilities to our own, at least as of many thousands of years ago. The author seems to restrict these beings to being merely of advanced technology, but purely physical. This leads directly to his extraterrestrial conclusions. Personally, I believe the situation is more mixed-dimensional than that.

Another charm of Mr. Sitchin's book is that it invites us to view the world from a "perhaps we are not the top of the food chain" perspective. For instance, the Tigris-Euphrates area is now effectively closed off from the mass of archeologists. It is this possibility, that they may in some way still be here (remember, they may be effectively immortal), that makes this book so highly influential. There is something that we as a species are not yet "getting," and Mr. Sitchin (among many other researchers) is laying a groundwork. Thanks.