by Andy Lloyd
“When the stars of Enlil have disappeared the great faint star, which bisects the heavens and stands, is Marduk-Nibiru SAG.ME.GAR; he changes his position and wanders over the heavens.”14
The Babylonians astronomical knowledge is widely recognized as being considerable. Nibiru-Marduk was clearly understood in astronomical terms, yet its description does not readily lend itself to any known celestial body that astronomers recognize today. These passages also show that Sitchin’s interpretations of the ancient texts were neither fraudulent nor misguided, as many have claimed.
The passages also present us with evidence that Nibiru/Marduk appeared to the Mesopotamians as a red star during historical times, and that its heavenly passage was unusual. It was faint, red, stood still in the sky and then wandered like a planet. This is highly unusual, to say the least. It is no wonder that the nature of Nibiru remains controversial.
The closest match to these observed accounts of the appearance of Nibiru is that of an unknown and rarely seen celestial body. A comet would be an obvious choice were it not for the red color. It would have to be a very special comet; one whose color is red. But even then there would be problems.
When we look at comets, we see only the material being blasted off its surface by the heat of the sun. Its actual body is lost to sight within this huge stream of gas. But if the cometary body was big enough ― perhaps the size of a planet ― the gases driven off would be relatively less. We would start to see the world itself.
So Nibiru seems to be a massive comet of planetary proportions, one whose gravity retains relatively more of its volatile gases as it moves among the more familiar planets. Its surface is red, which is in keeping with many of the bodies in the outer solar system whose surfaces are strewn with reddish organic material. Yet it also appears as a comet.
This would make sense of the ancient Mesopotamian myths. Except that Marduk seems a rather more sizable god than is implied by this description of a reddish planetary comet. Marduk is described in monumental terms; the ‘Sun of the Heavens’. To my mind, this implies a body that generates its own heat; a brown dwarf that is the sun’s binary companion. That ability to produce heat out among the comets is crucial to the sustainability of an atmosphere, liquid water and life.
It is clear that Nibiru is a planetary comet, but I now doubt that Nibiru is absolutely identical to Marduk of the Babylonian creation myth. Marduk ‘created’ Nibiru in the heavens, and takes the name as one of fifty. But are they entirely the same?
I believe that the answer to this riddle is that Marduk is the binary companion, the Dark Star that orbits the sun like a comet. Marduk crashed through the solar system and caused great chaos some 4 billion years ago, as described by Zecharia Sitchin. It then migrated out into a larger orbit as a result of its encounters with the sun’s other planets.
What the ancient Mesopotamians saw and recorded in their astrolabes and star lists was one of Marduk’s moons, or planets, appearing among our planets for a short while, and behaving very strangely.
This is a complex explanation. The reason I have opted for it after many years of research is because of the scientific evidence. To understand Nibiru, we cannot just read myth.
We must also understand how that myth might fit into physical reality. Science has learned an awful lot about the outer solar system in recent years. That new knowledge needs to be incorporated into the hunt for Planet X. That knowledge, I believe, points towards the explanation I have presented here, and this book will present the logic that lies behind it, which I believe to be compelling.
At this stage, it would be very helpful to look back over the history of the search for a tenth planet, and to then bring forward that new scientific knowledge. We must leave the myths and legends of ancient Sumer and time-travel to the last century, and consider the data emerging from just the last few years.
References
1 D. Rohl “Legend: The Genesis of Civilization” pp29-31 Arrow 1999
2 “The Cassell Atlas of World History” Cassell 1997
3 C. Sagan & I. Shklovskii “Intelligent Life in the Universe” pp456-463 Holden-Day Inc., 1966
4 Z. Sitchin “The 12th Planet” p245-246 Anon Books, 1976
5 E. Plunket “Calendars and Constellations of the Ancient World” p8, John Murray, London 1903
6 L. Lawhon “Nephilim. The Theories of Zecharia Sitchin” http://ufos.about.com/science/ufos/library/weekly/aa010801a.htm
7 Z. Sitchin “The 12th Planet” Chapter 7 Avon 1976
8 G. de Santillana & H. von Dechend “Hamlet’s Mill” App. 39, pp430-451, http://www.apollonius.net/trees.html
Thanks to Robertino Solarion
9 R. Temple “The Crystal Sun” Century 2000
10 The Babylonian "Enuma Elish"
11 Z. Sitchin “When Time Began” pp110-2 Avon 1993
12 C. Sagan “Pale Blue Dot” p140-141, p127 Headline Book Publishing 1995
13 Z. Sitchin “When Time Began”p161 Avon 1993
14 B. Van der Waerden “Science Awakening II” pp66-68 Oxford University Press 1974, with thanks to Pat Thomas
7. Planet X, Past and Present
The idea that there is a massive undiscovered planetary body orbiting the sun is almost 100 years old now. It is certainly not a new idea, but is one whose popularity has fluctuated down the years. At the moment, it is a possibility that is regaining a certain amount of scientific credibility. An idea, perhaps, whose time has arrived.
Our science and technology seems to progress at an accelerating rate, and this tends to make us all a little complacent about what remains to be discovered. It seems common sense that any scientific endeavour lasting 100 years would have certainly reached a conclusion by now, as the means to discover the answer has improved. Yet, many of the most important scientific questions remain unanswered: a cure for cancer; a renewable energy source; a unified field theory in physics, to name but a few. These problems remind us that our knowledge of the cosmos, the Earth and ourselves is far from complete, and that science has much to learn.
And so it is with our knowledge of the solar system. Because we are looking further and further into space with larger and more technologically refined telescopes, we have a tendency to assume that everything in-between has been discovered, catalogued and understood. This is far from the truth in reality.
Astronomy is only as good as its ability to pick up light sources, or sources of other types of radiation, and distinguish them from other similar sources. Our eyes, searching the heavens at night, perform the most simple form of astronomy, detecting the light from distant stars. Yet we cannot see closer objects, including the outer planets of the solar system beyond Saturn, nor the asteroids and distant comets.
Even so, we know that these objects are there, because they have been detected and photographed by our telescopes and spacecraft. We don’t need to see them with our own eyes. Similarly, we cannot see far more distant objects than our neighborhood stars, for instance distant galaxies. Yet telescopes, and sometimes just binoculars, allow us to see these incredibly distant swirling masses of stars. Because we can clearly ‘see’ so far, we think that our knowledge of the heavens is nearly complete.
However, we are dependent upon light for our knowledge. Almost all of the objects in the sky that we can see emit their own light. A few simply reflect sunlight, like the Moon and the five planets visible to us as we look up at the heavens.
As these planets become more distant from the sun, the amount of light they reflect dwindles such that the massive outer planets Uranus and Neptune are too faint to see. This brightness deteriorates very rapidly as you consider objects in the outer solar system. So although we can easily see thousands of stars light years away, it becomes extremely difficult to detect even planetary-sized bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune.
Astronomy is rather like looking down a long garden at night-time. You might be able to see the light from the house behind your back fence, but beyond a small distance your own gard
en is in darkness. It is within this darkness that our knowledge of the outer solar system resides, even after 100 years of peering through the gloom.
Just because we can see the lights over our back fence, does not mean we should assume we know what’s prowling about at the bottom of our own garden. The extent of our sun’s gravitational influence may be about 50,000 Astronomical Units, or 50,000 times the distance from the sun to the Earth. Our current knowledge of solar system objects includes only those within about 50 AU, which is just 1/1000th of the distance to the edge of the sun’s influence.
Continuing my analogy, if our nocturnal garden is 100 metres long then our current view out of the window at night takes in just 10 centimeters of the patio! Beyond that we have no clue what’s out there beyond inference and theoretical considerations.
Yet, for some reason, we think we can assume an excellent knowledge of what’s out there beyond Neptune. We can’t.
For many years, people have speculated that other planets lie beyond Neptune and Pluto, waiting to be discovered. Some evidence has emerged to back this conjecture up, and some arguments have been leveled against such an idea. The result is that the current scientific consensus is that we have a pretty good idea about what the other 999/1000th of the solar system looks like, without ever having seen it, and that there are no more big surprises in store. Anyone who thinks there are ― is thought to be fantasizing, or is labeled a ‘crank’.
Well, I beg to differ. There is plenty of astronomy-based evidence for a so-called ‘Planet X’, and plenty of good reasons to remain open-minded about the possibilities. Not only that, but there is the potential here for great science.
Pluto and Planet X
The term ‘Planet X’ was first coined by Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell is also famous for his interpretation of perceived markings on the surface of Mars, his ‘canals’. But, despite the tarnishing of his reputation (which resulted from his belief in intelligent life on Mars, creating such marvels of extraterrestrial engineering), Lowell was a great scientist.
Originally, the scientific speculation about Lowell’s undiscovered Planet X was built upon observed ‘wobbles’ in the orbits of the outer planets, Uranus and Neptune, based upon data gathered over the previous century by astronomers. At that time, it was not considered unlikely that more planets remained to be discovered. Science seemed to be enjoying a golden age and great discoveries were changing people’s lives for the better. Nothing seemed impossible. This massive perturbing influence at the edge of the solar system was just a new challenge beckoning for yet another great discovery.
As it turned out, a new planet was discovered -- but not the one anticipated. Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930 was made while he searched for Planet X at the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh was a young amateur astronomer who had been recruited by Vesto Slipher, the director of Lowell Observatory. The ex-farmboy from Kansas pored over hundreds of photographic plates searching for Lowell’s Planet X, a time - consuming and laborious process.
Eventually, he was rewarded on 18th February 1930. However, it turned out that Pluto is too small to have been the object perturbing the outer planets. Tombaugh continued his search for another 13 years, but failed to find Planet X. His sky searches were, by the end of those 13 years, so comprehensive that astronomers assumed that no Planet X could still await discovery.1
The claim that Planet X is still out there has always been a very controversial one among astronomers, and all hope that it may have a grounding in fact seemed to have been killed off by E. Myles Standish, Jr. at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. Standish publicly expressed his doubts that there had ever really been problems with the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. He argued persuasively that previous anomalies over the past two centuries were explainable by "...systematic errors in the observations, and, in some cases by faulty data reduction and interpretation".2
Standish wrote a paper in 1993 outlining his theoretical work, based upon improved measurements of the masses of the outer planets during the Voyager spacecraft fly-bys. He claimed that the effect described by Lowell could now be negated, and that Lowell had been quite wrong to attribute the alleged wobbles to a massive undiscovered planet.1 Yet, Pluto had been discovered in the location predicted by Lowell for Planet X, in the zodiacal constellation of Gemini, even though it was evidently not the sought after massive planet. This was simply coincidence in the eyes of Standish and others, and the thoroughness of Tombaugh’s sky searches 60 years before was seen as further evidence that Planet X was dead in the water.
This opinion has held sway since Standish’s influential paper in 1993 (at least until relatively recently, when new anomalies emerged). However, before 1993, many scientists had continued to ponder openly upon the possibility of a Planet beyond Pluto.
The late Carl Sagan, a popular and brilliant scientist from Cornell University, described the potential for a dark sister companion orbiting the sun back in 1985. Sagan acknowledged the speculation surrounding a proposed Nemesis ‘star’ orbiting the sun at a great distance. He even proposed a fictional scenario where ancient peoples mythologized this ‘Death Star’ as the sun’s Dark Sister.3 The ‘Death Star’ ― presumably taking its name from the equally fictitious moon-like battle station of George Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy ― could periodically bombard the solar system with comets when its elliptical orbit caused it to brush through the comet clouds. This, in turn, could create a periodic extinction cycle.
This idea was not a particularly new one, even in 1985. A controversial article in Newsweek (28th June 1982) described the possibility that there may be a binary dark star at some considerable distance beyond the orbit of Pluto. Furthermore, a tenth planet might be orbiting around this binary system:
“A 'dark companion' could produce the unseen force that seems to tug at Uranus and Neptune, speeding them up at one point in their orbits and holding them back as they pass...(John) Anderson (of JPL.) thinks the best bet is a dark star orbiting at least 50 billion miles beyond Pluto, which is 3.6 billion miles from the sun. It is most likely either a brown dwarf ― a lightweight star that never attained the critical mass to ignite ― or a neutron star, the remnants of a normal sun that has burned out and collapsed”.4
Catastrophism was enjoying a revival in the early 1980s. It was around this time that the world was coming to grips with the notion that dinosaurs had been wiped out by an asteroid or comet impact, as proposed by Luis and Walter Alvarez.5 It was a phenomenal notion, based upon the remarkable quantities of iridium found at the K-T boundary. In 1984 two paleontologists, David Raup and John Sepkoski, then proposed that there was a pattern to extinction events on Earth.6 A cycle of 26 million years appeared to have emerged from their data.
This seemed to call for some kind of cosmic-scale periodicity to explain it. The idea of a ‘Nemesis’ dark companion orbiting the sun every 26 million years was proposed in Nature by two independent teams of physicists; Daniel Whitmire and Albert Jackson7, and M. Davis, et al.8 The orbit of this massive companion, a ‘black dwarf’, might pass through the Oort Cloud periodically, showering the solar system with comets, and causing a clockwork extinction pattern in tune with Raup and Sepkoski’s data.9
IRAS
One can see the amount of speculation about Planet X, and/or a distant ‘Dark Star’, was quite considerable in the mid-eighties, prior to the sceptical paper by E. Myles Standish. But doubts about the proposed Nemesis object were already widespread among many mainstream scientists, and the catastrophists were in a minority to begin with. The fact was that such an object had not been discovered by the 1983 IRAS survey, which had methodically scanned the heavens in the infrared band seeking invisible, but warm objects. This sky survey, it was widely argued (and still is...) should have found any undiscovered planets.
After all, the infrared telescope which was carried by IRAS (the InfraRed Astronomical Satellite) was quite capable of seeing ‘thro
ugh the dust and gas that obscures stars and other objects when viewed by optical telescopes’.10 One would have expected Planet X, if it was out there, to shine like a beacon in the dark.
In fact, news did break at the time regarding a ‘sighting’ of Planet X by the IRAS team, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. The Washington Post science team broke the story, declaring that “a heavenly body possibly as large as the planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an orbiting telescope called the Infrared Astronomical Observatory”.11
According to JPL’s Public Relations Office, which was contacted by Zecharia Sitchin in 1984, the finding had been ambiguous. Presumably, was that their way of accusing a reporter from the Washington Post of overstating the case? This report in the Washington Post has been reproduced many, many times over the Internet, and has indeed become the focal point for many who believe that knowledge of a tenth planet exists within official circles, but has been withheld from the public.
Part of that belief no doubt stems from a misguided understanding of the efficacy of the IRAS sky survey. This has not been helped by members of the mainstream astronomical community, sometimes talking up the failure of the IRAS study to detect another solar system planet. This perceived failure is seen as definitive by many, tolling the death knell for Planet X.
Tom Chester, who worked on the IRAS project and who has a sceptical attitude towards the existence of Planet X, once informed me that the coverage of the inferred sky search was 95% complete. Taken on face value, this appears to create a big problem for a potential sizable body out there. Patrick Moore tells us that IRAS discovered no less than 200,000 infrared signatures in the sky.12 Given this extraordinary amount of data, it is tempting to conclude that a thorough search for Planet X was essentially completed by IRAS.