Zecharia Sitchin
Sitchin's ideas have been resoundingly rejected by scientists, academics, historians (including Sumerologists, Orientalists and Assyriologists) 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.
[3][4] 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.
[21] In 2000, Lorin Morgan-Richards' theatrical performance of ENKI, based on the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, premiered in Cleveland, Ohio under the choreography of Michael Medcalf.
[22] In 2016, Kazem Finjan, the Iraqi Minister of Transport, claimed at a press conference that Sumerians had built and used an airport in the Dhi Qar Governorate to launch spaceships 5000 years ago.
[23] Criticism of Sitchin's work falls primarily into three categories: translations and interpretations of ancient texts, astronomical and scientific observations, and literalism of myth.
American biblical scholar Michael S. Heiser states he has found many inaccuracies in Sitchin's translations and challenges interested parties to use this book to check their validity.
Even if Sitchin is referring to written rather than to spoken language, it is unlikely that his contention can be persuasively defended, since Sumerian ideograms were preceded by the Azilian and Tartarian signaries of Europe as well as by a variety of script-like notational systems between the Nile and Indus rivers.
As with Immanuel Velikovsky's earlier Worlds in Collision thesis, Sitchin states that he has found evidence of ancient human knowledge of rogue celestial motions in a variety of mythological accounts.
In Velikovsky's case, these interplanetary collisions were supposed to have taken place within the span of human existence, whereas for Sitchin these occurred during the early stages of planetary formation, but entered the mythological account passed down via the alien race which purportedly evolved on Nibiru after these encounters.
According to former Immanuel Velikovsky assistant turned prolific critic, C. Leroy Ellenberger,[32] "[Sitchin states that] from an equal start, the Nephilim evolved on Nibiru 45 million years ahead of comparable development on Earth with its decidedly more favorable environment.
Sitchin's explanation that heat from radioactive decay and a thick atmosphere keep Nibiru warm is absurd and does not address the problem of darkness in deep space.
"[33] The scenario outlined by Sitchin, with Nibiru returning to the inner Solar System regularly every 3,600 years, ... implies an orbit with a semi-major axis of 235 astronomical units, extending from the asteroid belt to twelve times farther beyond the sun than Pluto.
Later researchers have argued that the conclusion from the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium cannot be drawn due to a lack of a comprehensive gene database for comparison.
Salzberg also argues that gene loss combined with sample size effects and evolutionary rate variation provide an alternative, more biologically plausible explanation.
[35] Peter James, co-author of the controversial book Centuries of Darkness,[36] has criticized Sitchin both for ignoring the world outside Mesopotamia and more specifically for wholly misunderstanding Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian literature: He uses the Epic of Creation Enuma Elish as the foundation for his cosmogony, identifying the young god Marduk, who overthrows the older regime of gods and creates the Earth, as the unknown "Twelfth Planet".
The Babylonian names for the planets are established beyond a shadow of a doubt—Ishtar was the deity of Venus, Nergal of Mars, and Marduk of Jupiter—and confirmed by hundreds of astronomical/astrological tables and treatises on clay tablets and papyri from the Hellenistic period.
The gods can cross galactic distances, but by the time they get to Peru, their spaceships are imagined as World War II prop jobs that need an enormous landing strip.
