The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (22 page)

According to Zecharia Sitchin, Nibiru meant "Planet of Crossing"
in the sense of crossing over a boundary or barrier. It is a metaphoric cosmic
"ferry". He also pointed to the following quotes from the Babylonian
version of the
Enuma Elish
to further clarify its character:

“NIBIRU: The Crossroads of
Heaven and Earth he shall occupy. Above and below, they shall not go across;
They must await him.

NIBIRU: Planet which is
brilliant in the heavens. He holds the central position; to him they must play
homage.

NIBIRU: It is he who
without tiring, the midst of Tiamat keeps crossing, let ‘CROSSING’ be his name
- the one who occupies the midst”.
¹

For Zecharia Sitchin, these excerpts from the Enuma Elish provide
the additional and conclusive information that allows him to arrive at the
claim that Nibiru crossed the asteroid belt during its perihelion passage.
However, although it is abundantly clear to any reader of the Enuma Elish that
Nibiru is an astronomical phenomenon of some sort, the evidence as to what it
might be is ambiguous at best.

Previous work by the scholar and Jesuit priest Franz X. Kugler,
entitled “Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel” appears to have influenced
Sitchin. It was here that the idea was first proposed that the central figure
in the epic, Marduk, might be likened to a "fast-moving celestial body,
orbiting in a great elliptical path just like a comet".
¹
The
argument is compelling, given the various clues in the Enuma Elish.

The path travelled by Marduk is 'loftier' and 'grander' than the
rest of the 'gods'. It implies that Marduk lies beyond them, as we have
described for the Dark Star. Yet, still, the direct quotes about the associated
phenomenon 'Nibiru' describe something observable.

Kugler's argument seems to have been the intellectual seed that
sparked off Sitchin's wide-ranging theory about the planet Nibiru, and the
pantheon of gods associated with it. Since 'regular' comets sweep through the
planetary zone during their perihelion passages, it must have seemed reasonable
to Sitchin that Nibiru/ Marduk would behave in the same way, particularly as
its point of origin as a member of the solar family began with its catastrophic
encounter with the celestial Tiamat at a location between Mars and Jupiter.

The fact that this solution for the meaning of “Nibiru” was
considered by scholars before Sitchin is lost on many of his critics,
particularly those in the academic community.

In 2003, I was interviewed on film by three post-graduate
journalism students, who were completing their studies at the University of
Westminster, London. They were making a documentary called “Waiting for the
Apocalypse”, which featured several prominent astronomers, including the
celebrated Astronomer Royal, Sir Martin Rees.
²

The video outlined three possible threats from space: impact
events from asteroids and comets, the infiltration of cosmic viruses into the
atmosphere, and the coming of Nibiru. Unfortunately, this fascinating video is
not available commercially, but I have published some details about it onto the
Internet.
³
I felt compelled to do this because the video contained
some controversial criticisms leveled against Zecharia Sitchin by two
Sumerologists, who are curators at the British Museum.

They contended that Nibiru is actually the planet Jupiter and that
the original Sumerian word simply “means a pass, means a passing over from one
place to another”.
³
They questioned Zecharia Sitchin's scholarship,
even wondering whether he had ever worked with the cuneiform texts themselves.
I wrote to him about this, and he responded with the following thoughts,
emphasizing the long history of this debate:

“The notion that Nibiru is just another name for Jupiter goes back
to the debate a century or so ago between Kugler and Winkler and their writings
on 'Chaldean' astronomy, when Pluto had not yet been discovered. They assumed
that the ancients, without telescopes, could not be aware of planets beyond
Saturn, so when they encountered in astronomical texts more planetary names
they assumed it just (was) one more name for Jupiter or Mars
etc.

"(At least we have an acknowledgment that NIBIRU is (a) named
in Mesopotamian astronomical texts, (b) is a planet --
i.e.
Sitchin did not
invent Nibiru as a figment of imagination. I deal with that at length in
"The 12th Planet".)

"Establishment thinking has been thus: Someone (say Sitchin)
saying this or that means 'B' must be wrong, because everyone knows that it
means 'A' (4).

This seems to answer the criticisms leveled by Christopher Walker
and Dr. Irving Finkel of the British Museum. Zecharia Sitchin's work is controversial
in many ways, but, regarding the specific meaning of “Nibiru”, his theory was
not plucked out of mid-air. There was some scholarly basis underpinning it in
the work of Franz X. Kugler.

However, further questions remain unanswered, as we will now
consider.

For years, I have puzzled over the many anomalous and often
intractable problems presented by Zecharia Sitchin's Nibiru. A planet that
behaves like a comet did not seem to me likely to support life forms similar,
if not identical, to us. In 1999, I proposed that the only way that sufficient
warmth could be generated among the comets, would be if such life existed on a
planet orbiting a Dark Star that was itself orbiting the sun.

For various reasons, I suggested that the Dark Star was itself
Nibiru, passing directly through the planetary solar system during perihelion
with its own retinue of planets. This was a bold claim, given the size of the
brown dwarf required. But I now realize that I was wrong, for some of technical
reasons we have already covered.

I remain absolutely convinced that the Dark Star exists, and that
it is a binary 'star' orbiting the sun that approaches the planetary zone every
several thousand years. But I now believe that this Dark Star is not itself
Nibiru. It is simply Nibiru's own parent 'star'. I think it probable that
neither the Dark Star, nor the terrestrial Homeworld of the Anunnaki, are
easily seen from Earth. The closest approach of the Dark Star is way beyond
Pluto, through the so-called Kuiper Gap at the edge of Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt.

What I am proposing is that the observed planet Nibiru is the
outermost planet of the Dark Star system. And apart from it being unable to
maintain life, Nibiru is essentially how Sitchin describes it; a reddish
terrestrial planet that brightens with a cometary aura when moving amongst our
sun's family of familiar planets. Nibiru itself is a massive comet the size of
a planet, much as Sitchin initially suggested.

But, there is no one living on this frozen rock. It is a barren
outpost of the Dark Star planetary system. It appears in the sky merely as a
sign that the Dark Star Marduk has once again arrived at perihelion, and for
this reason the word Nibiru became one of Marduk's 50 names. Nibiru is a
celestial 'ferry', moving across the cosmic darkness, to the hidden Dark Star.

My next suggestion is that Nibiru does not appear to orbit the sun
properly when viewed from Earth!

This is a remarkably bizarre claim, I know. But it is part of the
problem posed by Sitchin's Nibiru. Indeed, it was the primary objection leveled
at me by Dr. John Murray, the English astronomer who wrote a paper providing
indirect evidence of a brown dwarf orbiting the sun. (He also appears on the
documentary “Waiting for the Apocalypse”.
²

Dr. Murray looked at the set of constellations that Nibiru passed
through at perihelion and stated, frankly, that the body was simply not
orbiting the sun.
⁴
This seemed to create a gaping hole in Sitchin's
theory. At the time, I put this down to possible misinterpretation of ancient
texts. Now, I realize that this anomaly was actually part of the
puzzle...Sitchin's incomprehensible orbit turned out to be right all along.

The 3-Body Solution

The solution I am proposing neatly answers a number of other problems.
In fact, everything seems to fall in to place quite neatly.

Nibiru is seen to enter the planetary solar system moving
backwards through the sky (the so-called 'retrograde motion' of Nibiru). This
is one of the puzzling aspects of Sitchin's account. The backwards motion of
this body has always implied that it could not have been an original member of
the solar system, making its initial capture nothing short of miraculous. Is
there a way that a body can appear to move backwards, even though it is actually
moving in the 'normal' direction through the sky?

Any student of the stars will recognize this pattern. The outer
planets are sometimes seen to undergo retrograde motion, particularly Mars.
This was a major puzzle for early astronomers, who charted the movements of the
wandering planets across the heavens.

Why did some of the planets seem to stop, and then, for a short
while, move backwards? This motion was due to a phenomenon called 'parallax'.
As the Earth spun relatively quickly around the sun, an observer looking out
into the solar system would see planets overtaken in a relative sense. Their
motion was seemingly negated, and from an observational point of view,
temporarily reversed by the actual movement of the Earth around the sun.

Before Copernicus released that the sun was the centre of the
solar system, this effect was quite inexplicable. It resulted in models of the
solar system that allowed for additional movements of the outer planets around
their own 'spheres'.

I think that something similar is going on with Nibiru. Let us say
that Nibiru is a rocky planet at the edge of the Dark Star system, rather like
Pluto is in the sun's. Let us say that Nibiru's orbit is quite extended. It
seems quite possible then, that as the two halves of the binary star system
move towards each other at perihelion, that the outer rims of each system would
overlap. The outermost planet of the Dark Star system might enter the planetary
zone of the solar system, becoming a visible comet.

One might also conclude that Pluto, and perhaps other outer Solar
planets temporarily enter the Dark Star system, moving within the orbit of
Nibiru. Perhaps that is why tiny Pluto's orbit is eccentric and inclined; such
a 'crossing' alters its orbit over time. The other planets would be too large
to significantly perturb, being significant gas and ice giants bound more
heavily to the sun.

Such a scenario affects the way the outer planet of the Dark Star
system would be perceived by an observer on Earth. In the same way that the
outer planets appeared to pre-Copernican star-gazers to be moving backwards
when they weren't, Nibiru also seems to be moving backwards. But this, too, is
an illusion.

I now believe that the Dark Star orbits the sun in a similar way
to the other planets; pro-grade. This must be the case, because otherwise its
capture by our sun would have been a statistical improbability. It seems much
more likely that Marduk, the Dark Star, has always orbited the sun, having
emerged from the sun's birth cluster as a binary. As such, it must have formed
within the proto-planetary disc of the sun, moving uniformly around it, like
the other planets.

This removes the difficulty posed by a 'capture' scenario, which
is statistically unlikely, although not impossible. The pro-grade orbit is also
in keeping with the discovery of Sedna, which also has a pro-grade orbit. I
strongly suspect that there is a relationship between the orbits of Sedna and
the Dark Star; probably taking the form of a resonant orbit. Indeed, the
movement of a brown dwarf through the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt at perihelion would
explain many the apparent anomalies of the bodies found in its scattered disc.
It makes sense of the science.

There seem to be seven planets in the binary Dark Star system,
according to the myth. I suggest that one of the inner planets is a habitable
world similar to Earth. It is warmed by its proximity to the brown dwarf, and
is bathed in its very dim, reddish light. I will call this the Homeworld.

All of the planets orbit the Dark Star in a pro-grade movement, in
keeping with the initial formation of the binary star system 4.6 billion years
ago. They also orbit the Dark Star in much less time than it takes for it to
transit perihelion around the sun. Even the outermost planet, which cuts
through the outer planetary system of the sun, is moving faster than the Dark
Star.