Zecharia Sitchin (July 11, 1920 – October 9, 2010) was an author of a number of books proposing an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributed the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he claimed was a race of extraterrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He claimed that Sumerian mythology suggests that this hypothetical planet of Nibiru is in an elongated, 3,600-year-long elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sitchin’s books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages.

Sitchin’s ideas have been resoundingly rejected by scientists, academics, historians (including Sumerologists, Orientalists and ᴀssyriologists) and anthropologists who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory. His 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.

Sitchin was born to a Jewish family in Baku, the capital of then Soviet Azerbaijan, and raised in Mandatory Palestine (which in 1948 became the modern state of Israel). According to an interview in the New York Times he received a degree in economics from the University of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel before moving to New York in 1952. While working as an executive for a shipping company, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform and visited several archaeological sites.

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

According to Sitchin’s interpretation of Mesopotamian iconography and symbolism, outlined in his 1976 book The 12th Planet and its sequels, there is an undiscovered planet beyond Neptune that follows a long, southern tilted elliptical orbit (he also indicated that part of its orbit is to the north of Earth’s equator), reaching the inner Solar System roughly every 3,600 years. This planet is called Nibiru (although Jupiter was the planet ᴀssociated with the god Marduk in Babylonian cosmology). According to Sitchin, Nibiru (whose name was replaced with MARDUK in original legends by the Babylonian ruler of the same name in an attempt to co-opt the creation for himself) collided catastrophically with Tiamat (a goddess in the Babylonian creation myth the Enûma Eliš), which he considers to be another planet once located between Mars and Jupiter. This collision supposedly formed the planet Earth, the asteroid belt, and the comets. Sitchin states that when struck by one of planet Nibiru’s moons, Tiamat split in two, and then on a second pᴀss Nibiru itself struck the broken fragments and one half of Tiamat became the asteroid belt. The second half, struck again by one of Nibiru’s moons, was pushed into a new orbit and became today’s planet Earth. Sitchin also speculated that Pluto (which he identifies as both Gaga and Isimud) 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.

According to Sitchin, Nibiru (called “the twelfth planet” because, Sitchin claimed, the Sumerians’ gods-given conception of the Solar System counted all eight planets, plus Pluto, the Sun and the Moon) was the home of a technologically advanced human-like extraterrestrial race called the Anunnaki in Sumerian myth, who Sitchin states are called the Nephilim in Genesis. He 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. Sitchin states that these “gods” were the rank-and-file workers of the colonial expedition to Earth from planet Nibiru.

According to Sitchin, Enki (the Sumerian god of water and human culture) suggested that to relieve the Anunnaki, who had mutinied over their dissatisfaction with their working conditions, that primitive workers (Homo sapiens) be created by genetic engineering as slaves to replace them in the gold mines by crossing extraterrestrial genes with those of Homo erectus. According to Sitchin, ancient inscriptions report that the human civilization in Sumer, Mesopotamia, was set up under the guidance of these “gods”, and human kingship was inaugurated to provide intermediaries between mankind and the Anunnaki (creating the “divine right of kings” doctrine). 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. Sitchin states the exact year is 2024 BCE. Sitchin says that his research coincides with many biblical texts, and that biblical texts come originally from Sumerian writings.