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THE CASE OF THE LURKING PLANET
"Far beyond the
solar system's nine known planets, a body as massive as Mars may once have
been part of our planetary system -- and it might still be there;”
The lead paragraph in a
science-fiction script?
The lead paragraph from an article by Zecharia Sitchin about Nibiru?
No. It is the lead
paragraph in a report in Science News of April 7, 2001 headlined "A
Comet’s Odd Orbit Hints At Hidden Planet.”
The article reports the conclusions of
an international team of astronomers who have studied an unusual comet
discovered last year, designated 2000 CR/105. It follows
a vast elliptical orbit around our Sun – an orbit that takes it way out to
some 4.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, and brings it back at its closest
to the Sun to the vicinity of Neptune; it is an orbit whose period “takes
roughly 3,300 years” (according to Sky&Telescope News of April 5,
2001).
“Such an oblong orbit is usually a
sign that an object has come under the gravitational influence of a massive
body," wrote R. Cowen in Science News. Was this
the gravitational pull of Neptune? In a study to be
published in the Journal Icarus, the team of astronomers (led by
Brett Gladman of the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice, France), after
analyzing all the possibilities, does not think so. An
alternative solution, they say, is that “the comet's orbit could be the
handiwork of an as-yet unseen planet” -- as massive
as Mars -- "that would have to lie some 200 AU from the Sun," in the
so-called Kuiper Belt of cometary and other planetary debris.
This would also explain "why many members of the Belt have orbits
that angle away from the plane in which the nine known planets orbit the
Sun."
“Undoubtedly, something massive
knocked the hell out of the Belt," Harold F. Levison of the Southwest
Research institute in Boulder, Colorado, told the magazine. “The question is
whether it is still there now."
“Comet’s Course
Hints at Mystery Planet,” was how the journal Science
headlined the discovery news in its issue of 6 April 2001.
The special report, written by the Dutch astronomer Govert Schilling,
summed up the findings in the following lead paragraph:
"A Supercomet
following an unexpectedly far-flung path around the sun suggests that an
unidentified planet once lurked in the outermost reaches of the solar
system, an international team of astronomers reports.
What's more, the mysterious object may still be there."
Now,
As the Sumerians Said…
Readers of my books may well join me
now in saying: So what else is new?
Ever since the publication of my first
book (The 12th Planet) in 1976 I have asserted that Sumerian and
other ancient Near Eastern texts and depictions showed familiarity with a
complete Solar System that included, beside the Sun and the Moon, ten (not
nine) planets -- the tenth planet (or twelfth member of the Solar System)
having a vast elliptical orbit that lasts 3,600 years. Its Sumerian name was
Nibiru.
I have-suggested that Sumerian/Akkadian
texts such as Enuma Elish (also called the Babylonian Epic of Creation) were
not mythological tales, but records of sophisticated advanced knowledge.
Establishment scientists and scholars (see a previous article,
The Case of the Misplaced Teapot, as an
example) resist such an inevitable conclusion because it requires the
acceptance of the ancient claim that Earth had been visited by
Extraterrestrials, the ANUNNAKI ("Those Who From Heaven to Earth Came") of
Sumerian lore.
According to the ancient texts as
interpreted by me, Nibiru was a planet ejected from some other planetary
system in outer space that was captured into our Solar System as it passed
near Neptune. It became involved in a collision with a
pre-existing planet where the debris of the Asteroid Belt are now.
As a result of that collision, some 4 billion years ago, the Earth
and the Moon came to be where they are now.
And, what do you know? In an article
titled Neptune Attacks! In the 7 April 2001 issue of the magazine
New Scientist, Ivan Semeniak wrote thus:
“There is new
evidence that a sudden barrage of deadly debris crashed against the Earth
and the Moon 3.9 billion years ago… What triggered this onslaught?
Something in the structure of the Solar System must have changed.”
The “something,” I am more certain
than ever, was Nibiru.
May 2001
ZECHARIA SITCHIN
© Z. Sitchin 2001
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© Z. Sitchin
Reprinted with permission. |
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