Andy Lloyd's Dark Star Blog
Blog 10 (January 2014)
Star Trek goes to Nibiru
Before Christmas, I was alerted to an intriguing crossover between Sitchin's theories and the immensely popular Star Trek sage, by one of my regular correspondents, Roger, who wrote:
"I recently, finally, saw Star Trek: Into Darkness. Imagine my surprise to see that the first scene was located on Planet Nibiru, where primitives witnesses an alien spaceship rise from the ocean, hover over an active volcano and zip off into space. The incident spawned a new religion! I guess the scene was homage to Zecharia Sitchin." (1)
Obviously, I impressed upon Mrs DarkStar the need to include said movie in my Christmas stocking. She obliged, and I was able to determine that Roger was, naturally, absolutely right. Why should I have doubted such a clear claim? Because I had always been under the impression that the creator of Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry was not a huge fan of Ufology in general. Perhaps my gut-feeling here is due to the oil-water relationship between Ufology and Sci-Fi in general, because a quick Internet search shows that Roddenberry was at least open to amazing possibilities:
"When asked if he'd ever seen a UFO, Roddenberry replied, "No, I haven't, but at the same time you can hardly work seriously in science-fiction or you can hardly be an educated person, and say that such things are impossible. I think it would probably be the most mathematically incredible happening you could conceive that this is the only place in this great universe where happenings that we call life occurred. Therefore, I think that, as many people would say, it's likely there are people ahead of us and behind us."" (2)
But, even so, I was surprised. Then I spoke with my brother-in-law, James, who is a dedicated Trekkie. When I said I was going to watch the new films because of this Nibiru connection (Santa permitting), he pulled a face. Enjoy them as great movies, he said, but don't think of them as Star Trek: This new series of films is, of course, from the creative mind of J. J. Abrams and has woven into its thread the capacity to re-write Star Trek history.
So, I guess, it's Mr Abrams who's expressing the interest (humorous, or otherwise) in Sitchin's Nibiru. This is in keeping with a rather stronger interest in UFO-themed ideas by the new Star Trek director (3), who has been reportedly 'let in on the know' by NASA astronauts about extraterrestrial life:.
“The 31-year old actress [Alive Eve] says her ‘Star Trek into Darkness’ director JJ Abrams was once told by an astronaut that he had come across extra terrestrials in space and JJ revealed all during a Skype chat with other astronauts aboard the International Space Station. She told chat show host Jimmy Kimmel; “JJ said he sat next to an astronaut who had told him that he had seen ‘forms of shapes’ that made him believe in alien life which you know is really scary. And exciting.” (4)
This thread could be construed as second-hand showbiz tittle-tattle, so make of it what you will. It might make some sense of the movie name-dropping of Nibiru, though?
Andy Lloyd, 8th January 2014
References:
1) Correspondence from Roger Curnow 26 November 2013
2) Will Stape "What Star Trek's Gene Roddenberry Thought of UFO's & Psychic Phenomenon" 5 July 2007, (article no longer online)
3) "J.J. Abrams Asks NASA About Aliens 2013 HD"
Earth-like Water on Moon
Lee Covino and I have been researching and writing about the commonalities of water here and in the asteroid belt for years. Indeed, one of the implications of Sitchin's theories about how the Earth developed within the solar system is that isotopic ratios between Earth and the asteroids should be similar. Please note that we're talking here about asteroids, not comets. This is an important distinction. Take this article from Discovery magazine last month:
"The moon, long thought to be bone dry, actually contains a surprising amount of water. In the latest twist, these stores turn out to be just like those on Earth, and probably filled by the same source: ancient asteroids. These icy missiles likely bombarded the inner solar system billions of years ago, delivering water to the inner planets. Around this time, scientists believe, a stupendous collision between a Mars-size rock and the young Earth produced debris that eventually coalesced to form our moon.
Brown University’s Alberto Saal and colleagues measured the ratio of hydrogen to deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron) in lunar rock samples from the Apollo missions. This ratio reflects where in the solar system the material formed. Moon samples had the same hydrogen-deuterium ratio as found in asteroids and Earth’s oceans. The simplest explanation, says Saal: The moon’s water was on Earth at the time of the giant impact." (1)
There's a lack of clarity in the first paragraph about the nature of these 'icy missiles'; A glossing-over that is not dissimilar to the late veneer effect itself! The late veneer theory indicates that the water on Earth (and thus the Moon, too) is brought here from impactors from space. By definition, these impactors must be comets, not asteroids. Why? Because the asteroids remain stubbornly in the asteroid belt - and Earth is not. So how could 'ancient asteroids' have been the impactors? What the article is actually alluding to is ancient comets, whose water isotopic ratios can, and should, be quite different.
This glossing over belies a very simple, yet vitally important issue. If the water on Earth, the Moon and on bodies in the Asteroid Belt is the same, then how did that come to pass? Unless there actually was some kind of interaction between these distinct zones in the past. Which leads us to Zecharia Sitchin's interpretations of the true nature of the Mesopotamian cosmological myths about Tiamat and Nibiru.
Andy Lloyd, 8th November 2014
Reference:
1) Liz Kruesi "The Moon's Water Came From Earth" 17 Dec 2013 with thanks to Brian
Anomalies Suggest We Are Space Criminals?
Are humans some how different from the rest of the animal kingdom? Sure we are! But are the differences so great that some kind of outside intervention is called for? Traditionally, that intervention took the form of a deity creating us in His own image. One might argue that a modern twist of the religious theme is that aliens played a part in our advanced evolution compared to the rest of our peers on this planet. Or one might consider that just to be good science - after all, there are so many anomalies in how we blasted ahead of the rest: all of us seemingly simply the products of hundreds of millions of years of evolution by natural selection.
An ecologist from the US has collated many of these anomalies which, he argues, shows that we aren't actually best suited to the Earth's environment. We're particularly susceptible to back-pain, Ellis Silver notes, and given that we evolved from the African Savannah, then why the propensity towards nasty sunburn?
‘"Mankind is supposedly the most highly developed species on the planet, yet is surprisingly unsuited and ill-equipped for Earth's environment: harmed by sunlight, a strong dislike for naturally occurring foods, ridiculously high rates of chronic disease, and more,’ he told Yahoo. Dr Ellis says that humans might suffer from bad backs because they evolved on a world with lower gravity. He also says that it is strange that babies’ heads are so large and make it difficult for women to give birth, which can result in fatalities of the mother and infant. No other native species on this planet has this problem, he says.
"He also believes humans are not designed to be as exposed to the sun as they are on Earth, as they cannot sunbathe for more than a week or two – unlike a lizard – and cannot be exposed to the sun every day without problems. Dr Ellis also claims humans are always ill and this might be because our body clocks have evolved to expects a 25 hour day, as proven by sleep researchers." (1)
All very good points. This is nothing new to those of us interested in alien intervention in the distant past, however. Such arguments have been doing the rounds for many years, although more in terms of the visitation of beings from other world who sought to give the primate stock on Earth a bit of a fillip.
Dr Silver ponders a variation on the theme, as he imagines that our very ancient ancestors may have been alien criminals transported to Earth as fully evolved Homo Sapiens between 60 and 200 thousand years ago (2) - presumably like the imperial British used Australia as a vast penal colony. Which suggests to me that we Earth humans are now likely to be much better at cricket than our alien progenitors.
Andy Lloyd, 8th January 2014
References:
1) Sarah Griffiths, "Humans do NOT come from Earth – and sunburn, bad backs and pain during labour prove it, expert claims" 14 Nov 2013,
2) Yahoo, "Human beings came from another planet, not Earth, new book claims" 30 Sept 2013
Ancient Voyages
I'm enjoying Frank Joseph's new book The Lost Colonies of Ancient America which is about ancient links between the Old and New World. It has a very solid chapter on Sumerian voyages and global trade. Tin, copper and other metals seems to have been the major motivation from Sumerian exploration, and the remarkable similarities in the monuments built in Sumer and Peru around 2600BCE fortify other evidence suggesting the Mesopotamians introduced civilisation to the Americas. More in my coming book review.
Of help to my research into the fabled 'Followers of Horus' was this passage, in the chapter on Egyptian sea-faring capabilities:
"Manetho, a third-century-BC compiler of the Egyptians' earliest traditions, told how they believed their civilisation was initiated by the Smsu-Hr, or "Followers of Horus", and the Mesentiu, "Harpooners", two related peoples who landed at the Nile Delta in great fleets of ships before the dawn of recorded history. They arrived from a so-called "Primal Mound" (mountain), cited additionally in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, as Sekheret-aaru, an island of deep wisdom, because this "Field of Reeds" was sinking into the seas of the "Distant West".
You could readily argue from this that that Sekheret-aaru was Atlantis, and that the fabled Followers of Horus were Atlantean refugees who found fertile landing grounds in what later became Egypt. Is it possible that these same travellers from the West were the proto-Sumerians? If so, this would readily explain why the Sumerians later seemed so adventurous during recorded history, braving the hazards of a trans-Atlantic crossing into the not-so-unknown.
Andy Lloyd, 8th January 2014
References:
Frank Joseph "The Lost Colonies of Ancient America: A Comprehensive Guide to the Pre-Columbian Visitors Who Really Discovered America" New Page, 2014, pp41-2,
The Lost Colonies of Ancient America
Also see: Sally Taylor 'The Ancient Copper Mines of America' 2007, with thanks to Lee
Dating the Exodus
Related to this Egyptian theme is the recent book 'The Exodus Reality' by Scott Alan Roberts and John Richard Ward which I reviewed last month. Subsequent to that review, I received some enlightening correspondence from author Riaan Booysen about the Exodus:
Hello Andy,
I came across your review of the recently published The
Exodus Reality by Roberts and Ward, which I have just
purchased a copy of. I published my own version of the
Exodus events in February 2013 - in a book called Thera
and the Exodus – The Exodus explained in terms of
natural phenomena and the human response to it. This
book deals with the relationship between the biblical
Exodus and the after-effects of the eruption of the
volcano on ancient Thera, modern Santorini.
I am fully aware of the dating issues surrounding this link, and specifically linking the eruption to the reign of Amenhotep III, as I contend in my book. This is a discrepancy which is yet to be resolved by the chronologists in one way or another. In my book I show that two eruptions must have occurred, one during the reign of Ahmose I and the other during the reign of Amenhotep III. Exactly how these dates can be reconciled with the latest dating ca. 1613 BCE I would not know.
However, there are many aspects of the Exodus that cannot be explained in any other way than having been caused by a volcanic eruption. I have proposed a shift in Amenhotep's reign to 1450 BCE, but this is rather tentative. The difference between the radiocarbon date of 1613 BCE and Amenhotep III's reign of 1360 BCE is in the order of 250 years, which appears to refute any such link without any doubt. However, when one delves into the mathematics of radiocarbon dating, it quickly becomes evident that the 250 year difference is due to an overall error in the C14/C12 ratio of only 3%, and many assumptions have to be made in the RC dating process.
Riann
My head often goes into a spin when it comes to Egyptian chronologies, perhaps because I've now read so many competing theories. I think Riann's points illustrate just how fragile these chronologies are. This then demonstrates how tentative the dates for any Biblical Exodus from Egypt were.
Readers interested in the timing of the passages of Nibiru will know that these are also something of a moving target. Many consider the Exodus to have been an event triggered, or at least coincident with, a disaster and mass migration from Egypt. Those who think that Nibiru should be upon us have included in their arguments dates for the Exodus around the 1600BCE mark. That this date may be wildly off the mark actually helps their cause, I think, as it opens up other dating possibilities some time in the future.
As a personal aside, Mrs DarkStar and I had a wonderful honeymoon on Santorini way back when. Amazing scenery across to the remains of the volcano there, although the novelty of the black sand on the beaches did wear off after a while.
Andy Lloyd, 8th January 2014
Reference:
Scott Alan Roberts and John Richard Ward "The Exodus Reality: Unearthing the Real History of Moses, Identifying the Pharaohs, and Examining the Exodus from Egypt" New Page Books, 2013
A 'Planet Mass' Brown Dwarf
The distinction between brown dwarfs and gas giant planets continues to puzzle astronomers. Placed at the lowest end of the star spectrum, these sub-brown dwarfs are not only elusive, but also mysterious. Questions remain as to how they are able to form, their relationships with their parent stars, and how they should be classified.
One of the candidate objects studied closely by astronomers to help answer these questions is called ROXs 42Bb, a sub-brown dwarf orbiting a very young star some 440 light years away. It is about 9 times the mass of Jupiter (9Mj) and is located much further away than our nearby gas giant is to the Sun - some 30 times further away, or about 150 astronomical units away from the parent star (1). That creates a useful precedent for a similar-sized Dark Star object in our own solar system, whose wide, eccentric orbit is likely to be much further out than even this distant figure. It has also set astronomers to ruminating about how such a body formed:
"[Thayne] Currie [of the University of Toronto] says that the new object starts to blur this distinction between planets and brown dwarfs, and may lie within and begin to fill the gap. "It's very hard to understand how this object formed like Jupiter did. However, it's also too low mass to be a typical brown dwarf; disk instability might just work at its distance from the star. It may represent a new class of planets or it may just be a very rare, very low-mass brown dwarf formed like other stars and brown dwarfs: a 'planet mass' brown dwarf." (2)
Either way, it did form and its existence speaks volumes about the possibilities for our own early solar system.
Andy Lloyd, 12th January 2014
References:
1) Currie, T. et al. "Direct imaging and spectroscopy of a candidate companion below/near the deuterium-burning limit in the young binary star system, ROXs 42B" The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 780(2): L30, 11 Nov 2013
2) The Daily Galaxy "Unknown Object Orbiting a Young Star Challenges Current Understanding" 8th January 2014 (article on longer available online) with thanks to Lee
Giants Upon the Earth
My long-term friend and colleague Greg Jenner wrote to me recently with an update on this research into the recorded existence of Giants down the years.
Here's what he wrote:
Hi Andy
I have just located a wealth of information about Giants of yore in North America….and around the world for that matter. Provided is the link:
Very old articles from the prestigious ‘New York Times’ newspaper were reporting giant skeleton bones unearthed as early as 1885. One article is of particular interest to me (about a Giant buried City in Missouri).
[Greg attached a copy of the original NYT article. For ease of reference, the article is presented and commented upon on this webpage:
Another New York Times article states…. “bones [were found] of a frame that could not have been less than 12 feet in length [and] the forearm was 4 feet long [with a] well-preserved jaw the lower teeth…the largest [tooth a] walnut in size…” Feb. 11, 1902.
It seems we have an alternate history over here that has all been hushed up. I believe this information is important to our cause so feel free to use it however you want. Finally, we have some tangible information about the giant-race that once lived in our past.
This article might also be of interest to you:
In the year 1890 some human bones of enormous size, double the ordinary in fact, were found in the tumulus of Castelnau, (Herault) and have since been carefully examined by Prof. Kiener, who, while admitting that the bones are those of a very tall race, nevertheless finds them abnormal in dimensions and apparently of morbid growth. They undoubtedly reopen the question of the “giants” of antiquity…”
(Ref: A Race Of Giants In Old Gaul, New York Times - Oct. 3, 1892, available on this webpage:
Greg
Is this cumulative evidence on both sides of the Atlantic indicative of a race of giants, perhaps, one might speculate, related to the Anunnaki? Does the existence of evidence for said Giants pose a threat to archaeology to the extent that it is suppressed in academic study? Or was there a propensity amongst fin de siècle journalists to exaggerate the findings at these sites?
I don't know the answer to these important questions, but given some of the remarkable discoveries in the last decade of ancient species of human that defy previously held beliefs about the evolution of humanity amongst scientists, I would not want to rule out such a possibility being real. I look forward to Greg's latest research appearing in print, hopefully soon on the Dark Star website.
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