Ancient AliensArticles

1996 interview with Zecharia Sitchin

Sitchin next to his replica of the statue of Gudea taken during this interview. (image credit: Manuel Fernandez)
Sitchin next to his replica of the statue of Gudea taken during this interview. (image credit: Manuel Fernandez)

This interview was recorded in Sitchin’s home office in Manhattan’s Upper West Side on March 13, 1996. It was originally intended for the international Spanish magazine Año Cero (Year Zero), published in Madrid but distributed throughout Latin America as well. Later, a Japanese version was published in the now-defunct Tokyo magazine Borderland, and an edited version in the original English in Fate magazine in the U.S. However, this is the first time that the full, unedited transcript of the interview is presented, as a tribute to the great, late Zecharia Sitchin. Besides the range of highly interesting topics covered, it also shows Zecharia’s thought process and the way he dealt with difficult questions like predictions for the return of Nibiru. The brief texts in brackets are my own clarifications for certain names or issues cited in the interview.

ANTONIO HUNEEUS: I believe that the Spanish-speaking public is familiar only with your first four volumes of The Earth Chronicles series. You have published since then three additional books, right?

ZECHARIA SITCHIN: That’s correct.

AH: Perhaps one of the most important is Genesis Revisited, which was also the subject of the documentary film Are We Alone?

ZS: Yes.

AH: In this book, you attempt to bridge the gap between the ancient Sumerian records and modern scientific discoveries. Can you give us an idea of its contents?

Genesis Revisited Book CoverZS: Well, what should be interesting, Antonio, is how I came to write the book. The first book, The 12th Planet, was published in 1976, we are here 20 years since publication, not just since writing, and over those 20 years or a little less, by the time I got to Genesis Revisited, I followed of course all the discoveries in the various scientific fields, be astronomy or biology, etc. and each time, let’s say there was a news that it was due to advances in DNA, it was established that there was an Eve, a first mother from which all humans today stem, no matter what they are or what their race is, about 250,270,000 years ago, so I would say first to myself and then to the family and others and mentioned, and say, you know, it coincides and corroborates not just the Biblical tale of Adam and Eve, but corroborates through genetic advances and through our discovery of how to create so-called test tube babies by mixing the male sperm with the female egg and then re-implanting it, etc., corroborates not just the Biblical tale which comes from the Sumerian tales, but corroborates the methods used to bring about the Eve. Then comes news a few years later that there was also a first Adam, the male one, so here is one thing. Then there are some other things about the acceptance by all the scientists today of the theories that used to be disagreed or debated about the continents or plate tectonics, and there were articles and studies showing that [at] one time all the continents were in one side. What they don’t say is to complete the story and say, if all the continents were on one side, so what was on the other side? The other side was a tremendous gap, so this is the Sumerian story of how the Earth came about, that it was really half a planet, half a planet called Tiamat that was broken up in the collision with Nibiru, Marduk, so here is another corroboration and so on and so on. And each time I would say, you know, this really, what can I do to speak out and tell people, but the Sumerians said it already. OK, then it came to the point that the spacecraft called Voyager 2—first were the Pioneers and others—but especially Voyager 2 was traveling beyond Jupiter and Saturn to the vicinity of Uranus and Neptune, and it was nearing Uranus and NASA broadcast live the transmission from the spacecraft and you could see, sitting at home—I happened to be in Chicago that time—how electronic piece by electronic piece the image of the planet comes out until you see a blue green planet, beautiful, and I literally jumped from my seat and shouted, but that is exactly how the Sumerians described it as a blue-green watery planet, so I went and wrote an article that, it was published by the way in Más Allá [a well known magazine from Spain], [Michael] Hesemann published it in Germany [in Magazin 2000], and I send it to OMNI here, predicting what would be found at Neptune some 7 or 8 months later, that it would be really a twin of Uranus in many respects, and then said, I know that because I fully believe and accept Sumerian knowledge which describes the two planets as twin blue-green planets; it was published overseas, here OMNI didn’t publish it, but then after it was corroborated, when they saw what happened in Neptune, they published a 2-page spread and they said, this article was sent to us before this and admitted that they sat on it, so I had my confirmation. So this and other things led me to, and one time during that period I met my editor at Avon and I told him, you know, I am really bursting, I am bursting, people don’t realize how every day, every day we get corroboration of ancient knowledge; he said, so why don’t you write a book? and thus came Genesis Revisited with its sub-title, “Is Modern Science Catching-up with Ancient Knowledge?,” and the answer is yes, and each chapter deals with the planets, how Earth was created, how according to the Sumerians the moon came about, the story of Eve, that there was an Eve, and etc., etc. So this is a review in 1990 and I have piles of new materials for perhaps and update of Genesis Revisited because the interesting thing, Antonio, is not just that all new discoveries in any field corroborate the Sumerian knowledge, but that nothing that has been discovered contradicts the Sumerian knowledge, that is a point I want to stress, nothing is discovered that says, well, if this is so, then they were wrong.

Sitchin in Egypt. (image credit: Zecharia Sitchin)
Sitchin in Egypt. (image credit: Zecharia Sitchin)

On Planet X

AH: Well, but here is a question. I don’t have the reference here but I am sure you are familiar, that there were recent scientific articles in mainstream publications that stated the current consensus now was that they were thinking over the idea of a Planet X, they were saying now they think there is no Planet X, so how do you respond?

ZS: Well, the notion that there is no Planet X stems from the work, I forget his name now, I’ve corresponded with him, someone at JPL [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], and what I can tell you is a few things. Number one, by way of a general statement, the many reasons for saying there is no Planet X is by implication, in other words, if there would be such a planet, we would have found it by now, I think somebody also said, if there were extraterrestrials we would meet them by now, so if we don’t meet ETs, they don’t exist [the so-called Fermi Paradox], if we didn’t find Planet X, it doesn’t exist. Now, to that you tell the story about the thief who was brought to court and two witnesses gave evidence that they saw him steal; so the judge turns to him and says, what do you got to say for yourself? We just heard two witnesses that say that they saw you steal; so he says, your honor, two saw me steal, I can bring you a hundred that did not see me steal, so that’s the same kind of evidence, in other words, we didn’t find it, so it’s not there. This is one. The second thing is that the main [scientist] who put an end to the Planet X excitement, made a certain statement and I wrote him a letter and he wrote back and said, yes, what I said or what I wrote does not mean there is no Planet X, it really means that I think it would be futile to look for it, so that’s the second part of the answer; and the third one, Antonio, is that all this started to happen after that the planet was seen by IRAS [Infrared Astronomical Satellite] in 1983 and I deal with it in Genesis Revisited, and there was a clamp down after that, the hurried discussions at the time between Reagan and Gorbachev and by Bush and Gorbachev and all the agreements to cooperate in space, all of a sudden Gorbachev dropped the objection to Star Wars. As you know, there is no more Star Wars program, the budget for Star Wars has even been increased, it’s about 4 and half billion dollars a year, officially, unofficially who knows, so against whom is this defense?

AH: They claim asteroids, you know, it’s the new PR.

ZS: OK, so? I don’t buy it, I don’t buy it, so there is another fact now where you can refer to the video Are We Alone?, where I interviewed on camera for almost two hours Dr. [Robert] Harrington, who was a top astronomer, I think he was Supervising Astronomer at the United States Naval Observatory, which is part of the U.S. Department of Defense, it’s not just a university project, its the DOD, and he was convinced as he said in many lectures or articles, and even radio or tape, that he is right about the search for the planet, and what happened is that at the interview in his office at the U.S. Naval Observatory, we are sitting facing each other across his desk, and one of the producers and the cameraman were like that and he was talking, and neither I nor the producer could believe our ears, because what he was saying was more or less as follows: you are asking me if there is some person called Zecharia Sitchin, we, I don’t know, we cannot tell you for sure but if [there] would be such a person, I would say that he probably has grey hair and he is wearing glasses and he would be living in New York City, I mean, I don’t know if there is such a person but in the meantime he describes the person, so obviously he met me, so he says, I would say, yes, it’s probably 3, 4 times the size of Earth and it could have an atmosphere, it’s a nice planet which has life on it, and he goes on and on and describes a planet that officially doesn’t exist, so we looked at each other and the guy knows all about this planet, and he says, yes, like you said in your book, it comes at 30 degree angle to the ecliptic and it would come, in Biblical times it would come [from] Sagittarius the way you say and now it would be from Libra where we are looking. [Note: ZS asked at this point to turn off the recorder and mentioned off-the-record Dr. Harrington’s premature death, the closing down of his station in New Zealand and a lack of cooperation from the USN Observatory since then, implying—but not wanting to go public—that there was a conspiracy.]

Bob Harrington
Dr. Bob Harrington

On Mars: Structures, Phobos-2, Observer

AH: That covers that. Now, in your movie you deal considerably on the issue of the planet Mars, both on its purported alien monuments and in the so-called Phobos incident involving the Soviet probe in 1989. Can you summarize your findings?

ZS: Well, I can tell you that, by the way, in the translation of Genesis Revisited into Italian, issued a few months ago, and into Swedish, I added like a postscript dealing with Mars Observer.

AH: I was going to ask you about that too.

ZS: What I said is that, first of all, the photographs from the surface of Mars taken in the 1970s by the various spacecraft, the Viking and the Mariner, show without doubt in my mind and in many other peoples’ minds, structures on Mars. Now the most famous feature that has been advertised, promoted by others is the so-called face on Mars.

AH: Yeah, this is well known in Spain.

ZS: The face on Mars, although in the book I reproduced the face and some things about it, I myself am more convinced by other features than by the face, because NASA to this day claim that the face is just a product of wind, sand, it’s a natural thing, if you go here, you go there…

"Face on Mars" (upper left) and other Mars anomalies.
"Face on Mars" (upper right) and other Mars anomalies.

AH: Yeah, but there are different photos taken at different orbital inclinations.

ZS: Yeah, yeah, they say so, so if you go here, you go there on Earth, you see some mountain, I’ve seen it myself in a few places, one in Brazil that looks like the face of a lion and another one looks like the face of Jesus, and they say yeah, but it’s illusions, it’s natural phenomena. But when you study archeology, one of the first rules you learn is that there are no straight lines in nature, in nature everything meanders, the rivers, the mountains, the valleys, and nothing in straight lines, so nothing is in 90 degree angles; and quite a number of the features on Mars, and this I must stress, they are all NASA photographs, whether I show them or others show them, neither I nor others were on Mars to take the pictures, not even Manuel [Fernandez, who was taking photos of the interview], these are NASA photographs and therefore, when you look at them and you see walls at right angles to each others, when you see so many other features that represent walls and skyscrapers and all kinds of other things that definitely—I don’t want to say man-made because that implies that we were on Mars before, and I don’t want to say alien-made because I don’t consider xxxx [the Anunnaki?] as aliens, I don’t like the term, but let’s say by somebody, not by nature alone. So these are there, one of them specifically that I showed on GR looks like the half of a modern airport, and as a matter of fact this was done in the video, NASA at one point, asked for international suggestions for a space base on Mars, and among the submissions was one by the Japanese, and if you take the Japanese design and put it on top of the transparency, on top of what you see in the NASA photograph in the 1970s, is almost identical.

AH: This is in the movie?

ZS: Yes, this is in the movie, so now, so who was there to do that? In their descriptions of our planetary system, in their discussion of travel between Nibiru—the planet of the Anunnaki, I assume that you will bring into the Anunnaki and Nibiru…

AH: Sure.

ZS: The Sumerians said that there was a change of course as their spacecraft neared Mars, Mars is referred to as the way station; so all this plus the NASA photographs and the Sumerian text dealing with Mars, and the Sumerians even have a route map in the British Museum from Sumerian times, that shows how there is a turn made at Mars to pass between Mars and Jupiter, led me to the conclusion—which I discussed in the book—that the Anunnaki had a space base on Mars. Now, if you then look at what happened to Phobos, the Soviet spacecraft in 1989 which was one of two, Phobos-1 was lost inexplicably, and Phobos-2 did make it to Mars, started to sent pictures; I don’t have it in the book but I have it in the video, that among the pictures that Phobos-2 sent from the surface of Mars, which orbited for some 26 days, were also right-angled structures and what looks like the grid of a city, a huge city.

AH: This is the one from Hydroate Chaos, right, like a grid?

ZS: Yeah, and the interesting thing is that it showed both in what they called the visual camera, which is the regular camera, and in the infrared camera, the same grid showed up in both, and I have slides, the video show the combination of the two, and there is no doubt that there is something there that still to this day emits heat, radioactive or whatever; so that it showed that and then on the last day orbiting the planet, it suddenly showed the sharp-edge elliptical shadow… [Phone ring intermission] …so what this city is hidden but definitely you see a grid and it’s artificially made, and then in the last day before it changed its mission, which was actually March 26th 1989, a shadow, an elliptical shadow appeared, and one of the Soviet leaders in the counterpart of NASA admitted afterwards in an interview that they granted to the producers of Are We Alone?, they said that, ‘if you want to speculate, you can call it a flying saucer, we don’t say so,’ that’s what they said, OK, but then the spacecraft was switched over to a different orbit to perform its real mission, and that’s why the two spacecraft were called Phobos-1 and Phobos-2, because Mars as you know has two so-called moons or moonlets, the larger of which is suspected to be an artificial celestial object.

AH: Right, [Iosif] Shklovsky’s old hypothesis of an artificial hollowed Phobos.

ZS: Yeah, it is, a part is hollow, and in some of the photographs especially released by the Soviets, you could see a very nice definitely round opening into the inside; between the photos taken by the Americans in the 1970s and the photos taken by the Soviets almost 10 years later, another phenomenon that was interesting was that on the surface of the moonlet Phobos there are like tracks, and some of the tracks that appear in the Soviet photos do not appear, are not shown in the earlier NASA photos, so the Soviet mission was to have their spacecraft, in this case Phobos-2, fly in tandem with the moonlet at about 50 meters or 50 feet—I forgot which one, check in my book—above it, and to bombard it with laser beams, and it was then as the spacecraft was positioned to do that, that it suddenly went into spin and then disappeared, it was sending all along…

AH: By disappeared, you mean, lost contact with Earth?

ZS: Well, yeah, it was there and it was gone, nobody knows where, but it certainly went into a spin before that as if it was hit by something. Now, it was sending all along photographs as it neared Phobos, and I have about 38 photographs from the Soviets at the time, and I have a few photographs from that sequence from the last few frames.

AH: Right, including the one…

ZS: No, not yet, but I have as it nears Phobos, you know, you see it nearer and nearer and then there was the so-called last frame, which I did not have, that it became available in the West when Marina Popovich, in a press conference in the Soviet/Russian Consulate in San Francisco, showed it publicly, and that shows a missile-like object appearing suddenly between the Phobos moonlet and the Phobos spacecraft, and that is either the last or last-by-one shot. Now, nobody in the West, I don’t know how officially it’s done, but media, press, etc. could verify that last, let’s call it the Marina Popovich photograph, but I can, I can tell it to you know, I have never written it because the sequence numbers on that Popovich photograph fully agree with the other photographs that I have a few frames.

AH: I’ve talked to many Russians, as you know, nobody has ever disputed that the photo was real. I mean, they have disputed the UFO interpretation of the photograph. You know that article by Tom van Flandern?

ZS: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AH: Where he said it’s a small little piece near the spacecraft camera. [Note: ZS asked to stop the recorder and then said a few things off-the-record about the late Tom van Flandern.]

ZS: So though it’s not denied by whoever knows, it doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been no skepticism of it, maybe it was made up in a studio, you know, the usual, but I have the sequences and it’s definitely authentic.

The last image taken by the Phobos II
The last image taken by the Phobos II

AH: Before we leave the issue of Mars, since the publication of your book and the release of your video, we had this other malfunction involving the Mars Observer, and there were many conspiracy theories put by Richard Hoagland and others. Now, what is your view?

ZS: Well, when it was nearing Mars, I happened to be in London in a meeting with some friends, and one of the questions was, what you think it will find? and I said, well, first let’s see if it gets there, and after it was lost one of those who was at the meeting send me a letter and said, I want to put it in writing that this is what you answered when the question was asked, first, let’s see if it gets there. Now, I of course didn’t know that it would get there or wouldn’t get there, but I had reasons to doubt because, as I say in a book or articles or lectures, this whole thing brings to my mind the incident of the tower of Babel in the Bible, when mankind was building the tower whose head could reach the heavens, which today we call it a launch tower, and it was done in a place called Babylon, which in Babylonian comes from Babili, which means ‘gateway of the Gods,’ so that’s the place which we call today a spaceport, and somebody came down, the Bible definitely says, that whoever they called by name, came down and it did not like what mankind was doing and spoke again the plural like in the creation of men story, ‘let us make the Adam in our image and after our likeness,’ so it’s plural, and said to unnamed colleagues, basically we cannot let mankind do that because if they do that who knows what else they can do, and put an end to it. So it seems to me that this is what happened with Mars Observer, a bit of the Tower of Babel story, a bit of the Phobos-2 event, that somebody was there before, has been reactivating the spaceport and probably using—I say probably because it’s a guess—using the moonlet as the artificial base, rather than on the face of Mars itself, and just doesn’t want us to take a close look, in other words, if we just photograph from a distance, fine, but if you come to bombard me with laser beams, forget it, so that’s basically. Now, some of the explanations about the loss of Mars Observer were: one, that nothing happened to the spacecraft, it was just a malfunction of the communication equipment, although you know there are always back-ups, etc., a malfunction, so that the spacecraft went into orbit around Mars as programmed and is still orbiting but not broadcasting. More plausible at the time or accepted, was an idea pushed by NASA that the instructions that were given to it to change course, that’s when it happened, not to start filming but to change course, somehow went awry and the spacecraft just sailed passed Mars. Now, if it sailed past Mars it is still a member of the solar system and therefore the predictions were that if that happened, it would orbit the Sun and come back into view or tracking view from Earth about a year later. Now, the year later went by and nobody said a word, you did not read in any NASA statement, any of the astronomy magazines, in any of them there wasn’t a word that was said, well, we were expecting it to reappear but it didn’t, as if none ever said it, so it’s not the explanation then, that something happened to spacecraft itself, that’s the enigma.

AH: So you leave it open but you don’t think is coincidental?

ZS: Right, I must leave it open because I was not there and I don’t know everything that NASA knows, and I am sure that the instruments told them more than what they released to the public, but what really happened, I don’t know.

On UFOs & Divine Encounters

AH: Well, connected to all this that we are talking, the Mars base and so on, comes the subject of the modern UFO phenomenon, which you also discussed for the first time in Genesis. So, how much of the so-called UFO evidence do you accept as valid?

Divine Encounters Book CoverZS: Well, what I said in Genesis Revisited, in combination with what I said in the books that preceded it, and where I show even more strongly and clearly in the new book Divine Encounters, is that anyone who thinks that the UFO phenomenon began in 1947 with the Roswell incident, just doesn’t know history, because the experiences of mankind with so-called unidentified flying objects, which I say in the ancient times were IFOs, identified flying objects, because the people in antiquity had no doubt that they knew what they were, what they represented and who operated them. It goes back to the beginnings of mankind’s recorded experiences; in the new book Divine Encounters I even show that the cave art, you know, from caves in France or Spain that go back, 20, 25, 30,000 years almost to the beginning of the spread of cro-magnon man, contain depictions not just of animals, all of them very realistic, one of the amazing things is the realism of the animals that are depicted, there is no doubt that the artists saw them, saw the animals, it’s not imagination, also include depictions of UFOs, and I give in the book a selection of 10 or 15 of them that undoubtedly are UFOs; and then of course you go to the Sumerian depictions, to the depictions of the island of Crete, when you go to the depiction of an underground silo in the Sinai peninsula, in the tomb of the Governor, so there is no doubt that it goes on and on. Now, what is the explanation for the current crop of UFO sightings, the real issue that has to be tackled just as when I wrote the first book… [End of Side A of the tape] …The 12th Planet, the first book, took me 30 years to research, and by the time I was more or less convinced that the Earth was visited by extraterrestrials, then books came by others, by [Erich] von Däniken and even before von Däniken by Robert Charroux in France and others dealing with extraterrestrials, so there was really no point in writing another book except that I felt that if I had to write, concrete answers had to be answered. If ETs came to Earth, question Nº 1, from where did they come? and unless you answered the question—neither von Däniken nor others answered the question, I think they are just talking, creating curiosity of people, by saying who could build the pyramids, who could do this and who could do that, and when you say, I don’t know, he says, ETs, but from where did they come? You know, the SETI programs, that is a baby of Carl Sagan and his group which it stands for Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence, you notice that they don’t look for ET beings, they look for ET intelligence, in other words, if there are some rocks that have a brain, then that’s what they are looking for, not people.

AH: It’s the radio signals they are scanning.

ZS: Yeah, but it’s for the intelligence behind the signals. Second, they are looking over there, 5 light years away, 10 light years away, and if you say, yes, even mathematically if there are so many stars, millions of stars and millions of galaxies, etc. then at least you can mathematically presume that if only 1% of the galaxies and 1% of the stars and 1% of the planets have some kind of life, so there is another life elsewhere, but it’s life over there, and therefore there is no way we could ever see them, they couldn’t get here, so let’s forget the whole nonsense, so-called nonsense of ETs. So I said, it’s interesting or very significant that they are looking for radio signals, because if the search would have taken place 100 or 200 years ago, they would be looking for bonfires because that’s how you signal, you light a bonfire on top of a mountain and that’s how you signal the next mountain, so now they look for radio signals, maybe they should be looking for laser beams, maybe they should be looking for telepathic communication, I don’t know; so in other words, just to say because we know radio, to say this is the way somebody who is, according to my findings who traveled in space already 450,000 years ago, you could say they are still using radio to communicate it’s not realistic.

AH: Well, you know, this has even been pointed out by scientists. There are critics within the scientific community like Robert Jastrow.

ZS: Well, OK, alright, so well, I am happy to hear that, anyway, so you have to say where they come from, and the Sumerian answer which I elaborate, is that they come from another a planet in our own solar system, that’s the key difference between my conclusion and all the SETI search, not light years away; before I know I have an answer from where they come there is no point in writing the book. The second question is why did they come, because with any technology as advanced as you are, it is an expenditure of energy, of resources, so why would they come here? Because in terms of the universe, we are just a speck of dust, so why would anybody bother to come here? The third question is, did they come on purpose, or did they just happened to come here, in other words, where they traveling, you know like the Star Trek people from A to B and had an accident, like a plane traveling sees a road and comes down; did they just see this small planet and just came down, but then it would be a one time visit, but the Sumerian evidence is that they kept coming and going, coming and going, so that’s the third question; and the fourth question is, when did they come, and again in my opinion at the time it was not enough to say, well, they came in ancient times, in prehistoric times. When? So when did they come? Did they keep coming and going? Why? and from where? They are also answered in the first book.

So the same thing, Antonio, and this is more your field than mine, the UFO as your readers should know, you are the only source or the only authority on UFOs that I quote in Genesis Revisited because I found that you are the only one that is reliable and excuse the expression in the interview, that doesn’t bullshit, I don’t know how to translate it in Spanish, so this is your field. I feel that all the people that talk about UFOs, either believe in them or sighted them, this encounter or the 4th encounter or were abducted or whatever, have to answer this series of questions. First of all, from where are they coming. Now, somebody says, there is a secret base in the ocean near the Bahamas, whether I agree or not agree but it’s an answer, it’s a theory; if somebody says they are coming from the center of the Earth, OK, it’s an answer, plausible or not; if some say, they are really coming from Area 51 in Nevada, OK, it’s an answer; if some say, this is really all a Nazi invention and the Nazis still have some secret base in South America and now they are reemerging to control the world, plausible or not, I don’t know. In my opinion, linking it with all the ancient evidence, and on the assumption that what was seen and witnessed in ancient times over tens of thousands of years is really the beginning of what we are seeing today, that I think that the explanation is that space base on Mars has been reactivated not yet by the Anunnaki, just as happened in the past, but by their emissaries. The whole notion that comes from the Bible of angels, as I point out on my new book Divine Encounters, really is a translation of the Hebrew term malahim, which literally means emissaries. In the new book Divine Encounters, I show that there were all kinds of such emissaries, sometimes depicted as winged beings because of their ability to fly, not as birds, but in UFOs or plane-like contraptions in the skies of the Earth, and that some of them and mostly the earlier ones and probably those that are seen now, reported now, were really robots, androids, and incredibly, Antonio, there is a text that I quote in the new book, a text that deals with how do you determine if the emissaries you see are living beings or androids.

AH: This is a Sumerian text?

ZS: A Sumerian, well, let’s say Mesopotamian text, whether we find the Sumerian original or not I don’t recall, but let’s say Mesopotamian text dealing with how do you determine, I mean, who is the one that comes and tells you, do this and don’t do this, and is it just a robot, or is he some kind of lower rank Anunnaki.

AH: I remember in a paper you presented to the MUFON Symposium in Chicago in 1991, you presented the hypothesis that what we call the Greys in ufology talk, were not real beings from Zeta Reticuli or whatever, but androids, the servants of the Anunnaki.

ZS: Right, now I enlarge on the subject and I quote the text, a very interesting text.

AH: You have me at a disadvantage in that I haven’t yet read the book, it just came out, right?

ZS: It just came out, yeah.

Sitchin_0001

On Calendar Cycles: Stonehenge, the Zodiac, Mayas

AH: Let’s see, in your fifth book, When Time Began, you talk a lot about the Calendar and you talk about the first New Age. Again, since this has not been published in Spain, can you describe some of its most important features?

ZS: Well, first, let’s say, a first recorded New Age, the so-called New Age begins with each precession of shift about 2,160 years, from one zodiacal house to another, so the so-called new ages begin every 2,200 years from the time that the xxxx [spaceport?] is created and somebody devised the zodiac, but when I said the first age, I mean the first new age whose circumstances and events and significance in what happened when this new age began are on record, so we can learn lessons of what to expect when a new age begins.

AH: You talk there quite a bit about Stonehenge?

ZS: Well, I talk about Stonehenge, I talk about the stone structures in South America, but Stonehenge is primarily, the guy who called me was from England and he says one of the British Ministries conducted a fresh 2-year study of Stonehenge and he is going to send me a copy of the report, and confirms the dates I have in my book.

AH: So what you are saying is that the knowledge of the builders of Stonehenge is all connected?

ZS: It was connected with the change from the age of Taurus to the age of Aries.

AH: Now, when would be the next new age according to your calculations?

ZS: Well, that was by the way a problem and eventually led to the use of nuclear weapons to obliterate the spaceport in the Sinai, which I describe in the book The Wars of Gods and Men, so the problem is this: first of all the question is, who devised the zodiac? Now, there are two parts to the answer. The first answer is that we associate it with the Greeks because it’s a Greek word which means the animal circle, because of the notion that you see whatever, a lion, a virgin and so on and so forth, which by the way no one, not even a trained astronomer looking into those constellations sees a lion or a bear, so I associated it with whoever really devised [the zodiac]. Secondly, this change, I don’t know if I have to explain it to you because you know it, the whole notion is that on the first day of Spring, when the Sun rises, the Earth is here, the Sun is here, when the sun rises it’s called heliacal rising because it is not dawn yet so the sky is still dark and the sun just begins to light the sky, and that is the moment when you can determine where the sun rises against the background of the stars, because once the it’s a little more up you don’t see the stars. So this is the moment of heliacal rising is interesting enough, I am taking groups of friends twice a year, [points out about watching the heliacal rising from the airplane in his tours] and then on the first day of spring in the spring equinox, which again was determined by the Anunnaki, you see the constellation against which it is rising. Now, the change of ages is due to a phenomenon called precession, which is explained as a retardation in the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. In other words, the Earth orbits around the Sun and of course every year comes back to the same spot, but there is a slight retardation for whatever reasons, there are all kinds of explanations that amount to 1 degree in 72 years, so to notice even a 1 degree change, you know, it’s here but it’s a little there, is 72 years which is like a lifetime. A change of a zodiacal house which mathematically is 30 degrees, 30 times 12 is 360 degrees, takes 72 times 30, is 2160 years, so as a devise mathematically, you divide the whole circle into 360º, you divide that into 12 houses—again the reasons for why 12 I won’t repeat—and therefore is 2160, so mathematically you can say from the last time 2160 years the new age has arrived, the age of Taurus which was the age of Enlil and his clan ended and the age of Aries, which was the age mainly of Marduk, the son of Enki, is begun, so therefore Marduk, the supremacy on Earth is to pass from Enlil and his son Ninurta to Enki and his son Marduk, but when you look at the heavens this is not so, because the constellations are not identical, some are smaller, some are larger, it so happens that the constellation of Taurus is one of the larger ones, so if you looked at the sky from observatories as Stonehenge was, and somebody like Marduk or his son Nabu would tell you a new age has arrived, but if you look at sunrise on the day of spring equinox, you’d still see it’s rising in Taurus, so this was the conflict; has Marduk’s time arrived or not yet, he said yes, the other said, no, just look, look, what we had to argue, whatever instrument we are using, and there is a description in my book of the instruments, quite sophisticated, and it’s still Taurus. Finally, it led to clashes and to the use of nuclear weapons to deprive the space port in the Sinai from Marduk and his followers, this ties it with the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the time of Abraham, but eventually Marduk almost by force took over the succession, the supremacy on Earth, and the changes were tremendous, it was almost like not just new supreme god, it was like a new religion, everything became more rigid, scientific knowledge began to dwindle, and it’s from that time almost the 2000 years to the time of Jesus and all through the middle ages there was a constant decline of scientific knowledge, what we associate with it, research, thinking, understanding, everything declined, there was a complete change in the role of woman, who in Sumerian times had almost total equality with men, they ran businesses and almost like high priestesses, and all this changed, things became much more cruel, there was more bloodshed, more warfare, the changes were tremendous.

AH: When did we switched from that era to Pisces?

ZS: OK, so now the question is what do we go by, do we go by the basic formula that say 72 years times 30, 2160, it’s a new age; or do we say, look at the stars? It’s not yet or it’s already, I don’t know, I am not looking at the skies, there is a lot involving more and more and more around the Maya calendar, and I just came back from Yucatan with the group, lectured at the… on each tour besides my own site briefings, there are almost daily briefings, after dinner, etc. each one gets a folder of briefing notes, 30 pages, it’s very thorough, it’s really like a study tour… so there is the calendar which comes to it’s major, major complete cycle in the year 2012, 2013, there is an argument about one year, more or less, that could well be a prediction of the new age. According to the Maya, Aztec calendars have all these ages which they call Suns, always ended with some kind of a calamity, so take your pick.

AH: But you have of course written about the Maya calendar in The Lost Realms.

ZS: Right, the Maya, the Hindu, the Hindu really stems from the Sumerian, I mean, all of them stem from either Sumerian or Egyptian, but the Hindu’s is basically Sumerian with it’s cycles, the grand cycle is 432,000 years, which is 120 sars, again ten times 12, the 12 keeps appearing all the time.

AH: Now, let’s see, in the first three books you took the story pretty much chronologically all the way to the time of Abraham, but then in the books since you have jumped to other places and to other eras. Do you intend to go back?

ZS: Well, first of all, When Times Began takes it again to Babylonian times which is already passed the Sumerian, and then in Divine Encounters I tell of all the encounters, being in dreams, in visions, there are instances that might look as if they are episodes of the Twilight Zone program, there are instances where the only way we, with our technology, can describe [it] is holographic visions or virtual reality, that somebody is taken, not only sees a three-dimensional thing, doesn’t really exist, but is shown to him, but he is taken into it and keep visit, like visit a temple that doesn’t exist yet but he is taken like a tour inside the temple.

AH: Like virtual reality, like today we call virtual reality. Is this from Biblical accounts?

ZS: Well, from Babylonian, Assyrian, this already takes us into the first millennium so it’s even closer than the previous books.

AH: So in your last book you take the story to the first millennium BC?

ZS: Ah, up to and including.

On Jesus & Nibiru’s Return Predictions

Sumerian clay tablets (image credit: National Geographic)
Sumerian clay tablets (image credit: National Geographic)

AH: I know this is kind of a loaded question, but will you at any time deal with the question of Jesus?

ZS: Yes.

AH: Do you want to say anything about it?

ZS: Well, I will, it’s linked. There were three questions that everybody kept asking, whether in letters or Q&A or in interviews, and the three questions were, not necessarily in that order: One was, who was Yahweh? the god in the Bible, who was he, was he one of them, was he not one of them, etc. The second question was, what about Jesus, how does he fit in, does he fit in, was he a son of god, etc. And the third question, which is the most frequent one, is the question of the return, when are they coming back, when is the planet coming back; if I don’t answer it, they say, when was the last time… Now, the question of Yahweh is dealt in the book Divine Encounters and it’s a major, major opus which I hope but I can only predict will be a major text book to be studied by scholars, by archaeologists, by theologians, so one of the three is answered. The other two are connected because one cannot deal with the question of the return of Jesus without going, in Divine Encounters for the first time I make references to the New Testament, one cannot deal with Jesus and the return without dealing with the New Testament, the second coming, the return of the Kingdom of Heaven to Earth, etc. etc. be it Jewish terminology, the Messianic times, so they are linked, and the problem is that I cannot just guess estimate, not just say, well, sure, in the next, I am not saying, I am giving an example, say next day, next month, by the end of the century, I cannot do that because by now with seven books that have been translated into 13 or 14 languages, translations now start to appear in Poland, in Rumania, in Czechoslovakia, people accept what I say as, you know, if Zecharia Sitchin says it, then it’s so, it was so, it happened so and it will be so, I cannot just say like and I would not say anything before I am myself convinced that I have the right answer and I can support it with evidence. Now, the right answer depends on two sets of facts, one set is today’s evidence from astronomy, for example, there is this whole issue of the new comet Hale-Bopp with an orbit of 3,500 years, a retrograde orbit like Nibiru, too bright for it’s distance, etc. etc., where does it fit into this whole phenomenon, so there are all these things on the one hand which I cannot just deal with the ancient data, ignoring on how it conforms with the new data. So in order to tell you the answer I have really to establish when was the last time, that too will not be precisely answered as people ask for because even the comet, which again has a 30 degree angle and retrograde, etc. like Halley’s comet, which you ask what’s its orbit, they say 75 years, but it’s sometimes 74, it’s sometimes 76 because as it passes by other planets it depends where it’s near the Sun, what is the gravitational forces of let’s say Jupiter, it’s against it, does it add to the slingshot effect or does it block it, so even 75 average the orbit, you have what is 1, 1 and half years 2% deviation, so the same applies to Nibiru, when I say 3600 years it’s a mathematical number, it could be 3500, it could be 3520, it could be 3680, well you know what’s 2% of 3600, 72, 75 years plus or minus and you have a range of 150 years, but first I have to establish when was the last time, the last time again, I have a lot of evidence but what does this evidence tell me, is it the time it was first seen, was it the time that it was at perihelion, you know, closest to the Sun, is it the time that it’s closest to the Earth, which is not necessarily the time closest to the Sun, so…

AH: So you haven’t reached that stage?

ZS: I am working on it, I have friends that use their computers for me and calculate, I put my brother to help me originally in The 12th Planet who is an aeronautical engineer, worked for NASA for a while, I put him to work, it’s coming together but I am not ready yet.

AH: Even I remember by going back to your earlier books and calculating roughly, it’s still going to take like a thousand years.

ZS: Well, I wouldn’t comment, I will not comment on it.

AH: And maybe you don’t want to comment on the last question, I mentioned Jesus, so what about Mohammed, does he fit into this?

ZS: I don’t know, that’s a very late phenomenon, I forget, 600 something AD, it’s really not ancient times, no, I don’t think it plays any role.

AH: Well, the last question was what lies in the future of your research, but I think we’ve already been discussing this.

On Gudea’s Vision/Experience

ZS: [final comments on Gudea’s statue while Manuel Fernandez is taking photos] … in a dream [Gudea] saw three gods appeared to him, and they were instructing him to built a temple, one of them had a star map indicating to him the alignment of the temple, another one had a brick which was to be the brick of the size and shape that he was to make in order to build the temple, and the third one had a tablet and on the tablet was the plan, the architectural plan of the temple. Now, if you remember instances of the Twilight Zone where at the end of the program neither the viewer nor the hero, whatever the story was, know, did he imagined it, was it a dream, did it really happened it, was it reality, unreality, whatever, and you concluded he imagined because it couldn’t have really happened, but during the episode whoever came to help him or to save him gives him a ring, and the story is over and you conclude it was all imagination, but then the person puts his hand into the pocket and finds the ring, so what was all unreality it suddenly is reality and that was the Twilight Zone, so he [Gudea] had a dream where the three deities, two male and one female appear to him, and the one showed him the size and shape of the brick to use, and the other showed him the sky map with the right alignment, and the third showed him a tablet with a plan of the temple, and it was a dream, the Sumerian text makes clear that he was sleep and suddenly in the dream they appeared to him, it’s a dream, and then he wakes up and finds on his knees the tablet with the plan of the temple, so he is exactly in a Twilight Zone incident and that’s what happened to Gudea, yes, that is the inscription [on the back of the statue].

AH: Wasn’t there a similar story with the Pharaoh Tutmosis and the Sphinx? He too had a dream?

ZS: Right, Tumosis the IV, yeah, but the Sphinx spoke to him, he didn’t have anything physical like Gudea.

[END OF RECORDING]

Read more about Sitchin here: Zecharia Sitchin, one of the giants of paleocontact, passes away

Antonio Huneeus

Open Minds Investigative Reporter J. Antonio Huneeus has covered the UFO field from an international perspective for over 30 years. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications in the U.S., Latin America, Europe and Japan. He was also the co-author of the Laurance Rockefeller-funded “UFO Briefing Document – The Best Available Evidence” and edited the book “A Study Guide to UFOs, Psychic & Paranormal Phenomena in the USSR.” Huneeus studied French at the Sorbonne University in Paris and Journalism at the University of Chile in Santiago in the 1970s. He has lectured at dozens of UFO Conferences all over the world and been interviewed by many media outlets including The Washington Post, the Sy-Fy and History Channels, Nippon-TV, etc. He received the “Ufologist of the Year” award at the National UFO Conference in Miami Beach in 1990 and the “Courage in Journalism” award at the X-Conference in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in 2007.

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