Zecharia Sitchin, Anunnaki and Planet X Nibiru
In 1976 Zecharia Sitchin published The Twelfth Planet, which supplied an array of evidence to support the assertion that the earth had been visited by ancient alien astronauts in its past. Sitchin based his conclusions on the written records of Sumer, the sudden civilization that sprang up virtually overnight in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley of modern Iraq. Historians cant begin to plausibly explain how Sumerians were transformed from Stone Age farmers to extremely sophisticated city dwellers almost instantly around 5,000 years ago. The mystery is so deep and so profound, few historians dare attempt to deal with it.
Sumerians used a cleverly subtle graphic technique known as kuniform, which is readily acknowledged as the first form of writing. The wedges were pressed into clay tablets that were then put into the first clay ovens and fired into stone to provide what became the gold standard of knowledge in all subsequent cultures: written in stone.
Historians are so baffled by the things Sumerians wrote, they classify nearly all of it as myth, nothing more than flights of fancy by surprisingly creative primitives.
Sitchin rejected the myth title officially applied to Sumerian writings, and treating them as the true history Sumerians said they were. Taking a close look he found an astonishing array of facts that could be corroborated by modern research. What he found was literally mind-boggling in 1976, and it remains so today.
Were the Anunnaki the Nephilim in the Bible?
According to Zecharia Sitchin and his interpretation of ancient Sumerian texts, the Anunnaki were extraterrestrials (aka "angels"?), who were an extremely long-lived race, potentially living as long as 500,000 years. Laurence Gardner reduces this to more on the order of 50,000 years, and notes specifically that the Anunnaki were not immortal. Sitchin and Gardner also disagree on the date of the Great Deluge/Flood; Sitchin assuming a time frame of 11,000 B.C.E., while Gardner assumes one of 4,000 B.C.E.