THE CASE OF THE LAYERED ASTEROID

Once Again, Modern Science Corroborates Ancient Knowledge

by Zecharia Sitchin

It is not every day that I get an overseas call with someone shouting; Congratulations!   

But it happened on Friday, February 18th 2000; and the reason was NASA's press conference the day before, reporting the first findings by the spacecraft NEAR (Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous,) of its examination of the asteroid Eros.

Potato-shaped and about 21 miles long, Eros is one of countless bits and pieces of planetary matter that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, collectively called the Asteroid Belt.  One theory is that these are remains from the time when primordial matter around the Sun coalesced into planets, but these bits and pieces failed to do so.   Another theory is that these are remains of a planet that did form there, but that it somehow broke up; the inability to explain how or why it broke up has been the reason why this theory has not been embraced by scientists. 

What NASA Announced

To learn more about the origin of the asteroids, NASA launched NEAR four years ago (February 17, 1996) for the purpose of reaching and going into continuous orbit around the asteroid named Eros; this was successfully achieved on St. Valentine's Day, February 14, 2000.

And the first findings. reported at a news conference on Friday February 17th, triggered the congratulatory call to me; for they corroborated an ancient cosmogony pieced together in my 1976 book The 12th Planet.

“Eros has an ancient, heavily cratered surface," reported Dr. Andrew Cheng, chief project scientist.  "There are also tantalizing hints that it has a layered structure, as if it were made up of layers, like plywood."

 Such stratified features, Dr. Cheng explained, could occur if the asteroid was melted while it was part of a planet (quoted by Associated Press Science News, 2/18/00-, emphasis by Z. S.).

 What Sitchin Said

In The12th.Planet I asserted that an ancient Sumerian text, best preserved in a later Babylonian version called Enuma Elish, which has been taken by scholars to be an allegory or myth about gods fighting in the heavens, was in reality a record of a sophisticated cosmogony dealing with the formation of our solar system..

The protagonists Tiamat and Nibiru (which the Babylonians renamed "Marduk" in honor of their national god), I wrote, were not allegorical or mythical celestial gods but actual planets -- one (Tiamat) that existed between Mars and Jupiter, the other (Nibiru,/Marduk) an, invader from outer space that, passing by our solar system and pulled in by the system's gravitational pull, ended up colliding with Tiamat.  In this Celestial Battle (as the ancient text names the catastrophic event), Tiamat broke up; one half of her was thrust into a new orbit to become Earth; the other half was smashed in an infernal collision to become the “Hammered Out Bracelet” (which we call the Asteroid Belt):

Nibiru (Marduk) enters our solar system from outer space.