Crick was not alone is his supposition that Earth may have been seeded with life by intelligent beings. “The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a number with 40,000 naughts after it. … It is big enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random, they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence,” stated British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle.
Sitchin and many others view human DNA differences and defects as support for the theory that primitive man was genetically altered by nonhumans. If so, where would such beings originate? The ancient Sumerian tablets tell us they came from that other world they called Nibiru.
According to the followers of Sitchin, Nibiru is called the Planet of the Crossing, because its orbit crosses the solar system between Mars and Jupiter. It then proceeds on its elliptical orbit, which takes it far outside the solar system before being pulled back by gravitational force. Nibiru has been symbolized in numerous societies—particularly Egyptian—as a winged disc, a circle with wings stretching to either side.
Some scientists claim that a planet that far from a sun could not support life, but others say that if such a planet had a strong confining atmosphere and a molten core like the Earth, it might generate its own life-sustaining heat.
Life on Earth evolved based on its one-year orbit around the sun, the solar year. Researchers theorize that life on Nibiru developed based on its one-year orbit around the sun—3,600 years to us on Earth. It then stands to reason that life on Nibiru would have evolved somewhat sooner than on Earth. Its beings may also be long-lived compared to the normal life span of a human, which would seem to be immortal to many insects, with their weeklong lives.
I
N ADDITION TO ALTERNATIVE VIEWS ON THE ORIGINS OF
E
ARTH,
several scientists and authors have speculated that as many as three moons in our solar system may not be natural objects.
In 1959, Russian astrophysicist Iosif Samuilovich Shklovsky calculated the orbital motion of the Martian satellite Phobos and concluded, based on several factors, including its changing speed, that the moon is artificial and hollow. He noted than none of the other moons in our solar system are as small as the two Martian moons—Phobos and Deimos—and that both orbit much too close to Mars. Shklovsky realized that Phobos’s velocity and position no longer matched its mathematically predicted course. The combination of its odd and changing velocity, coupled with anomalies in its gravitational and magnetic fields, led Shklovsky to conclude that Phobos was nothing less than some sort of huge spacecraft.
At the time, the famous astronomer Carl Sagan, who coauthored the 1966 book
Intelligent Life in the Universe
with Shklovsky, agreed, stating, “A natural satellite cannot be a hollow object.” Sagan argued for serious consideration of paleocontact—that is, extraterrestrials in early Earth history—and called for reexamination of myths and religious literature for evidence of such contact. In 1960, Sagan was joined by S. Fred Singer, a special adviser on space developments to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who speculated that Phobos might be an orbiting space station. The chief of applied mathematics at NASA, Raymond H. Wilson Jr., joined Shklovsky and Singer, saying that “Phobos might be a colossal base orbiting Mars.”
Although in later years Sagan backpedaled from his belief in early extraterrestrial contact, he wrote then that “it seems possible that the Earth has been visited by various Galactic civilizations many times (possibly every 10,000 years) during geological time. It is not out of the question that artifacts of these visits still exist—although none have been found to date—or even that some kind of base is maintained within the solar system to provide continuity for successive expeditions.” He added that such visits would require a base in proximity to Earth and suggested the back side of the moon.
Both then and now, conventional scientists have publicly scoffed at the notion of ETs on Earth. But author and publisher Dirk Vander Ploeg has since pointed out that the United States Naval Observatory verified Shklovsky’s calculations. Ploeg interpreted this verification as a concession that mysterious alien ships might be orbiting Mars for purposes unknown. “Speculations over what the giant artificial spaceships might be have ranged from massive Martian space observatories, to half-completed generational interstellar spaceships, or even gargantuan planet-killing space bombs left over from an interplanetary war waged millions of years ago,” he wrote.
One of the moons of Saturn also has been suspected of containing something alien, if not being an artificial spacecraft itself. Iapetus, the planet’s third largest moon, has puzzled researchers since its discovery by Italian astronomer Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1671. Like our own moon, Iapetus is in a near-perfect circular orbit and one side always faces its planetary host. But even more puzzling are square and hexagonal craters that, according to one former NASA employee, appear to be gigantic artificial plates holding the moon together, making Iapetus resemble nothing so much as the Death Star in George Lucas’s film
Star Wars
.
Because of its swirling two-tone coloration—a distinctly dark side and a light or white side, due to differences in surface reflectivity—Iapetus has been called the yin-yang moon, referring to the Chinese symbol indicating a connectedness even between opposites in the natural world.
But the most astonishing aspect of Iapetus is the strange mountainous ridge which encircles the equator of the entire moon. Some of the peaks reach nearly thirteen miles in height, making this oddity the tallest mountain range in our solar system. Despite a number of theories, no one can adequately explain how the ridge was formed or why it is confined to the equator. The cause of this moon’s unusual inclined orbital plane is also unknown.
Richard C. Hoagland, a former consultant to NASA and science adviser to Walter Cronkite and CBS News, stated that “ ‘the Great Wall of Iapetus’ now forces serious reconsideration of a range of staggering possibilities that some will most
certainly
find … upsetting: That, it could really
be
a ‘wall’ … a vast, planet spanning,
artificial
construct!!” (emphasis in the original). Hoagland went so far as to speculate that the entire moon might be an artificial nine-hundred-mile-wide “spacecraft.”
Hoagland does not stand alone in this assessment. Tobias Owen and Donald Goldsmith, authors of
The Search for Life in the Universe
, wrote, “This unusual moon is the only object in the solar system which we might seriously regard as an alien signpost—a natural object deliberately modified by an advanced civilization to attract our attention. …”
Could the clues to Iapetus’s purpose in the solar system be hidden in the mythology surrounding its name? In Greek mythology, Iapetus was the Titan son of Uranus, who was the god of the heavens and who was married to Gaia, mother of the Earth. Iapetus was the father of Atlas, a Titan who held up the Earth, and Prometheus, a god who brought knowledge in the form of fire and light to humankind. Robert Graves, British mythologist and author of
I, Claudius
, cited old Jewish traditions that equated the name Iapetus (Iapetós in Greek) with Japheth, a son of Noah. These Greek gods were all considered progenitors of the human race, and they fit quite neatly into the Sumerian accounts of extraterrestrial visitors creating a worker race. Only the names change through succeeding languages and cultures.
Even our own moon, long the object of both human fear and reverence, continues to be enmeshed in controversies. Lights, moving shadows, unexplained structures, and even the moon’s unnatural orbit might be explained by intelligent design, but such an idea would exclude this being done by human beings from Earth, at least those in our recorded history.
After six moon landings between 1969 and 1972 and the return of some 842 pounds of rocks and soil samples plus the placement of five nuclear-powered scientific stations on the lunar surface, there still have been no clear-cut answers to the moon’s mysteries.
The moon is far older than previously imagined, perhaps even much older than the Earth and sun. By examining tracks burned into moon rocks by cosmic rays, scientists have dated them to 5.3 billion years ago, making them almost a billion years older than our planet. This puzzle was compounded by the fact that the lunar dust in which the rocks were found proved to be a billion years older than the rocks themselves, indicating that it may have come from somewhere else, perhaps as a result of traveling through space. The heavier moon rocks are found on the surface and do not match the surrounding soil.
The moon is extremely dry and does not appear to have ever had water in any substantial amounts, as none of the moon rocks, regardless of location found, contained free water or even water molecules bound into the minerals. Yet instruments left behind by Apollo missions sent a signal to Earth on March 7, 1971, indicating that a “wind” of water had crossed the moon’s surface and lasted for fourteen hours. Although NASA officials attempted to explain this cloud of water as water vapor escaping from tanks on two separate Apollo descent stages, many declined to accept this theory, pointing out that the two tanks—from Apollo 12 and 14—were some 108 miles apart, yet the water vapor was detected at the same flow rate at both sites, although the instruments faced in opposite directions.
The presence of maria, or large seas of smooth solidified molten rock, on the moon indicates nothing less than a vast outpouring of lava at some distant time. It has now been confirmed that some of the moon’s craters are of internal origin. In comparison to the rest of the moon, the maria are relatively free of craters, suggesting that craters were covered by lava flow. Yet scientists have found no evidence of volcanic activity on the moon. Some have associated this lava flow with mascons, large dense circular masses that lie twenty to forty miles below the center of the moon’s maria. They were discovered because their denseness distorted the orbits of spacecraft flying over or near them. One scientist proposed that the mascons are heavy iron meteorites that plunged deep into the moon while it was in a soft, formable stage. This theory has been discounted because meteorites strike with such high velocities that they would vaporize on contact. Another mundane explanation is that the mascons are nothing more than lava-filled caverns, but skeptics say there isn’t enough lava present, nor is lava dense enough, to accomplish this. “What they are is a major moon mystery,” wrote author Don Wilson. “It now appears that the mascons are broad disk-shaped objects that could be possibly some kind of artificial construction. For huge circular disks are not likely to be beneath each huge maria, centered like bull-eyes in the middle of each, by coincidence or accident.”
Almost three thousand seismic disturbances termed
moonquakes
were recorded between 1969 and 1977 after Apollo missions placed seismographic equipment at six separate sites on the moon. Most of the vibrations were quite small and perhaps were caused by meteorite strikes or falling booster rockets. But many other quakes were detected deep inside the moon. This internal creaking is believed to be caused by rocks settling due to the gravitational pull of our planet, as most moonquakes occur when the moon is closest to Earth. But in November 1958, Soviet astronomer Nikolai A. Kozyrev of the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory photographed the first recorded gaseous eruption on the moon. He attributed this to escaping fluorescent gases. Some scientists refused to accept Kozyrev’s findings until astronomers at the Lowell Observatory also saw reddish glows on the crests of ridges in the Aristarchus region in 1963. Days later colored lights lasting more than an hour were reported at two separate observatories. Something was going on inside the volcanically dead moon.
Perhaps strangest of all the anomalies are the many indications that the moon may be hollow. Studies of moon rocks indicate that the moon’s interior differs from the Earth’s mantle in ways suggesting a very small core or none at all. A 1962 study found the interior of the moon to be less dense than the exterior. “Indeed, it would seem that the moon is more like a hollow than a homogeneous sphere,” concluded NASA scientist Gordon MacDonald.
MIT’s Sean C. Solomon noted, “The Lunar Orbiter experiments vastly improved our knowledge of the moon’s gravitational field … indicating the frightening possibility that the moon might be hollow.”
The most startling evidence that the moon could be hollow came on November 20, 1969, when the Apollo 12 crew, after returning to their command ship, sent the lunar module (LM) ascent stage crashing back onto the moon, creating an artificial moonquake. The LM struck the surface about forty miles from the Apollo 12 landing site, where ultrasensitive seismic equipment recorded something both unexpected and astounding—the moon reverberated like a bell for more than an hour. Frank Press of MIT stated, “ … none of us have seen anything like this on Earth. In all our experience, it is quite an extraordinary event. That this rather small impact … produced a signal which lasted 30 minutes is quite beyond the range of our experience.”
Undoubtedly the greatest mystery concerning our moon is how it came to be there in the first place. Prior to the Apollo missions, one serious theory as to the moon’s origin was that it broke away from Earth eons ago. This idea was discarded when it was found that there is little similarity between the composition of our world and the moon. A more recent theory had the moon created out of space debris left over from the creation of Earth. This concept proved untenable in light of current gravitational theory, which predicts that one large object will accumulate all loose material, leaving none for the formation of another large body. Mainstream science now accepts the theory that the moon originated elsewhere and entered the Earth’s gravitational field at some point in ancient times. But how the body came to orbit our planet is the subject of two theories: one states that the moon was formed from debris after a space object smashed into Earth, while the second states that the Earth captured the moon in its gravitational field while it was wandering through the solar system.
Neither of these theories is especially compelling because of the lack of evidence that either Earth or Luna has been physically disrupted by a past close encounter. There is no debris in space indicating a past collision, and it does not appear that the Earth and the moon developed during the same time period. As for the capture theory, even scientist Isaac Asimov wrote, “It’s too big to have been captured by the Earth. The chances of such a capture having been effected and the moon then having taken up nearly circular orbit around our Earth are too small to make such an eventuality credible.”
Asimov was right to consider the moon’s orbit: not only is it nearly a perfect circle, but the moon’s rotation is synchronized with its period of revolution, so one side always faces Earth, with only the slightest variation. This circular orbit is especially odd, considering that the moon’s center of mass lies more than a mile closer to the Earth than its geometric center. This fact alone should produce an unstable, wobbly orbit, much as a ball with its mass off-center will not roll in a straight line.
In the late 1960s, the Planetary Science Institute’s senior scientist, William Kenneth Hartmann, conjectured that the moon’s creation resulted from a collision between Earth and another body at least as large as Mars. By 2000, computer models seemed to bring further support to what became known as the Big Whack theory. If this theory sounds familiar, it should—it’s basically the story told in the ancient Sumerian tablets.