Summary
Highlights
Zecharia Sitchin, in his 1976 book "The 12th Planet," proposes that the Sumerian Anunnaki deities were extraterrestrials from a planet called Nibiru. He suggests they landed on Earth over 450,000 years ago, created humanity as a slave species to mine gold needed to repair Nibiru's atmosphere, and were involved in humanity's early development and also a great flood.
The ruins of Nineveh yielded thousands of Sumerian cuneiform tablets, dating back to 3000 BC, containing what are considered the world's first written accounts. These tablets describe the Anunnaki as giant, eight-foot-tall beings who came to Earth for gold. They are said to have created humans in their image to toil for them, forming a narrative echoed in biblical stories of creation like Adam and Eve.
Ancient chronicles of sky beings creating human life are common across various cultures. From the Sumerians to the Quran, Maya Popol Vuh, and ancient Egyptian texts, many traditions suggest language and wisdom were gifts from gods from the sky. These shared narratives, along with petroglyphs in the American Southwest and cave paintings in Lascaux depicting human-animal hybrids, lead ancient astronaut theorists to believe in a global pattern of alien intervention in human evolution.
The discovery of 20,000 to 30,000 tablets in Nineveh included the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish. This myth tells of the god Marduk creating humans from the blood of Kingu and clay. Ancient astronaut theorists interpret this not as mythology, but as a factual account of alien visitors, the Anunnaki, possessing advanced genetic knowledge, engineering docile workers by blending hominid and their own genes to create humans.
Mysterious statues from Sierra Leone, known as Nomoli, with internal chromium spheres, and ancient figurines resembling spacesuits, are presented as physical evidence of alien visits. Local legends speak of blue 'sky stones' raining down with the Nomoli gods, which, upon analysis, defy easy classification as natural or man-made. Some theories suggest these stones could be remnants of alien spacecraft heat shields.
The Zuni Indians of New Mexico, one of North America's oldest indigenous tribes, possess a rich history etched into rocks containing petroglyphs depicting celestial figures. Tribal elders and archaeologists study these drawings, created around 1200 BC, which appear to show modern-looking space travelers and their vehicles, often referred to as 'spacemen' or 'sky people' in Zuni mythology, underscoring their belief in extraterrestrial origins.
In Val Camonica, Italy, ancient petroglyphs include figures resembling helmeted 'spacemen' and an object known as the 'Camunian rose,' which some interpret as an alien vessel. The local myth of Phaethon, who descended to Earth in a fiery chariot and possessed advanced skills like metallurgy, is seen as a possible account of a UFO landing and interaction with ancient people, suggesting the petroglyphs portray actual sightings.
The Dogon tribe of Mali, believed to be descendants of ancient Egyptians, have a mythology centered around the sky god Amma and the creature Nommo. Their legends speak of a god descending from the sky in an ark surfing on fire. What's particularly intriguing is their advanced astronomical knowledge, specifically of Sirius B, a star invisible to the naked eye and only confirmed by modern science in the 1970s. The Dogon's detailed symbolic representations of Sirius B's orbit, passed down through generations, suggest a pre-scientific acquisition of this knowledge, attributed by some to extraterrestrial beings like Nommo.