The Nephilim

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
61

Sure, Duck, I’m trying to keep things above the waist here and to have fun and to explore things. I’m all for it.

Regarding Sitchin, the emphasis here is on the impossibility of the planet Nibiru swinging into close proximity of our planet and then vanishing for 3600 years. What always struck me as improbable was how this planet, even if it were only as far out as Pluto, could sustain life. Don’t they need something other than an entirely frozen planet, like sun/heat/photosynthesis? The science end of the Nibiru explanation does suffer a working model explaining how any of it could happen. No question about it. I came to the conclusion that the mechanism for the Annunaki coming to earth is not understood yet.

The ancient Sumer culture was very advanced, and they themselves said they were taught everything by people who “fell” to earth (but did not look like David Bowie). The part of their myths dealing with Tiamat fighting Marduk etc., (which Sitchin says are names for planets and the fight is actually a near-collision), is the flimsiest plank of Sitchin’s platform.

Instead of throwing out all of Sitchin’s work because his model for transfering people from one planet to the next is flawed/useless/absurd, I have been focusing on whether the rest of his arguments make sense. What I mean is, take the Annunaki presence as a given. This means assuming the Sumerians meant what they wrote, nothing more. You don’t have to believe their planet is on a 3600 year eliptic, although this IS what Sitchin says. What I found fascinating about these books was how the Sumer culture influenced/begat the Akkadian one, which begat the Egyptian one, and so on, and how the stories and histories of each are parallel, showing that in many cases they are describing the same events.

In addition to Sitchin’s arsenal of sins, perhaps the main one is trying to tackle something as large as explaining myth and religion in the ancient world. If nothing else, Sitchin knows his shit about Sumer. I think he knows quite a lot about the ancient world. Maybe he knows zip about astrophysics, but this does not discount the information he posits that has nothing to do with astrophysics. It is beyond my ability to prove or disprove astronomical formulas and the like. BadAstronomer seemed to have done a good job showing how the math/science just doesn’t add up. Unfortunately, if I just believe him and believe he is an authority on the topic (which he likely is) then I have made the fallacy of “appeal to authority.” That’s why I am trying to wade through everything to get a grasp of it.

Lastly, I think that Sitchin does stand largely alone in his expertise on Sumer. It’s not a hot area for dissertations. Egypt and Egyptologists like to find the firsts for everything within Egypt, and the study of Sumer has challenged much of this chauvinism. Granted it may sound like another cop out, the fact that Sitchin does not have many colleagues studying Sumer, so one should not automatically assume he is right just because he says he is. When he presents a translation of a cylinder seal, or a stela, or a scroll, he makes a good argument.

There are some topics I am intrigued by, and Sitchin addresses lots of 'em. Things like:

  1. who built the ancient megalithic monuments?
  2. why were the monuments built?
  3. what destroyed them?
  4. what existed before the Flood?
  5. where do our religious beliefs come from?
  6. just what the hell are those pyramids for?
  7. how do civilizations spawn new offshoots?
  8. what did the ancient peoples know?

And so on. If one accepts the premise that intelligent life exists outside earth, then one can reasonably say there is a likelihood these people are more advanced than we are. If they are more advanced (several thousand years more advanced), who knows what types of ships and engines they have? How could we explain to a Viking in 400 AD the concept of a plasma drive? Or laser surgery? Or bacteria? Or nylon? If one simply will not allow the premise that there are aliens, then none of this will make it through. All of the people that keep getting cited on here believed it, though: Asimov, Hawkings, Ellison, Dick, Sagan, et al.

The part of Sitchin’s theory where he explains how the Annunaki come and go is the least scientific part. If he had said, “somehow, they got here,” then it would’ve been a whole lot less contentious. I haven’t seen any cases where Sitchin just throws his hands up and says, “I have no clue how this happened.” Instead, he is always advancing hypotheses (or wild guesses), some make more sense than others. I personally believe the Sumerians and Egyptians had an amazingly advanced culture that cannot be explained by the conventional, traditional, mainstream theories.

Kirk out!
—Anvil

62

Thanks, BadAstro, for your considered remarks. You’re right on every count. What I meant by “I don’t care what anyone thinks” is, it is not important to me what beliefs someone holds dear. If someone is Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Scientologist, it really doesn’t make a difference. Unless we are talking about WHY they subscribe to these hokey, factless, groundless, unscientific clubs called “religions.” So if someone were interested in reading more about the Nephilim and were not satisfied with the Staff report that basically said, “it means ‘giants’,” then I recommended reading a Sitchin book (the post heard round the world). I always love a good discussion and exchange of ideas, so in that sense I DO care what people think. But I am not trying to convert anyone, nor start a cult. When someone begins insulting me and making ad hominem attacks on me or Sitchin, I feel compelled to rejoinder.
The negative posts have fallen into 3 categories:

  1. the Sitchin science is bunk, and so is he
  2. anyone who believes in aliens or God is bunk
  3. I can’t see it, so it must not be there

And then there have been the illustrative posts by BadAstro, Duckie, and a couple others. This topic or debate continues. I wish Sitchin himself would weigh in on some of this, because I seem to be alone in defending his side, and my grasp of all this is tenuous at best. For the record, I should say where I’m coming from, because if someone disagrees with me on these basics, then they will never under any circumstance accept what I am saying.
I believe in God, I believe in extra-terrestrial life, and I believe that some fishy shit happened way back in Sumerians times.

Fish out,

—Anvil

63

I made a point in an earlier post to mention I may not be considered an expert on all things astronomy (I’ll note I blew it in my first post to this thread, forgetting that the planet would spend most of its time moving slowly, far from the Sun, until Podkayne corrected me). I never use the word “authority”, for the very reason you name. Appealing to authority leads you down a merry path to believing everything you hear. Of all the things that irk me (and a lot of things do), nothing irritates me more than having people believe what I say just because I have a “PhD” after my name. That’s insanity, and is against everything for which I fight on my website!

Don’t believe me. Look things up! Investigate! Figure it out for yourself!

The best thing someone can ever say to me is not “I believe you”, but “You made me think about it.” I live for that.

64

Anvil You said

and then

I’m joining the discussion late. If I am misreading something, forgive me.

I think that your first statement which I quoted above is not true. While I agree that the likelyhood of life outside earth is almost a certainty, the likelyhood is that at least half of the life forms are less advanced than we are. And the likelyhood that one of the advanced lifeforms have somehow managed to violate our currently held theories of space/time is rather remote(but not impossible).

As to your second assertion, that “Asimov, et al…” believed it–did you mean anything other than “they believed that life probably exists outside of the earth?”

65

Actually, I would guess that the vast majority of lifeforms will be substantially less advanced than we are; most will be bacteria and the like.

However, the point usually made is that we advance so quickly that in 1000 years our tech will be almost unrecognizable to us now. A civilization that started out just a million years before us (a tick of the Galactic clock) will have been able to spread far and wide by now.

This does not mean aliens are coming here to excoriate cow anuses, though (which bothers me: why travel hundreds of light years to do that when you can clone a cow anus safely at home?). It means that there is something we don’t yet know about interstellar travel, or alien species, or both. They have not been here that we have seen (despite Sitchin’s claims, IMO), so where are they?

66

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by The Bad Astronomer *
**

BadAstro, haven’t you ever tried Crunchy Bovine Ringpiece? It’s quite delicious, and well worth a long interstellar journey. :wink:
And until we find other inhabited planets we’ll never know if we are at the top or the bottom of the advanced civilization chart. With as many galaxies that are out there, there have to be at least a few races of beings that surpass us. That’s what I meant by a “likelihood.” I haven’t submitted papers for a good decade now and have fallen into lazy grammar, poor spelling and imprecise language. During this next work week I will try and pinpoint where Sitchin talks about the periodic sightings of his Monster Planet and also what he had to say regarding the perturbations of the planets and their orbits as an effect of Monster Planet’s barging into our solar system.

67

Oh yeah, and I meant that Civilizations will be more advanced than ours, not necessarily lifeforms in general. While it’s true that we are practically the same DNA sequence as a flatworm, a feeble argument can be made that we are the most advanced critters on the planet. I imagine that the vast majority of life out there will be bacteriological, fungoid, or viroid. And then there’s the Giant Space Spiders we’re going to have to contend with…

68

I urge you to review the thread, DDG, and take note of which poster is making all the references to bodily functions.
Hint: it’s neither jab nor I–unless you object to my single use of the word “hooey.”

I’d figured that once Anvil trotted out the you’re fascists / you have no lives routine, we’d seen the last of him/her, which is why I continued participating in the thread. However, seeing as (s)he has returned and the ad hominem attacks have continued, I’m going to follow DDG’s suggestion and be polite. As I feel no need to hang around and be polite to someone who has been rude to me, I shall simply bow out of the discussion with the following exception:

Anvil, if you have any questions about what I wrote, I will be happy to explain, provided that you refrain from attacking the person rather than the argument, and from falsely accusing us of the same.

69

Okay, okay, as soon as I posted that, I knew I was probably gonna get jumped on for that, 'cause it didn’t come out quite the way I intended. What was going through my head was, “Eh, it’s mainly just Jab and Podkayne and me, with the BA, so I’ll just mention it to J & P.” Sorry if I offended, I realized after I posted it that it sounded kinda tight-butt schoolmarmish. :frowning: “Now, claaaaasss…” (insert graphic of frowning teacher. )

Because, the thing is, I really don’t wanna see this land in the Pit, and I was thinking, like, “Wait, wait!”

'Kay? Sorry. :frowning:

70

'Sokay, DDG, no offense. I know it is a great burden to be the Voice of Reason, and I am always thankful to hear from Cooler Heads. But even before I read your post I figured the conversation had gone south, so, unless Anvil has questions, I’m outta here. Have fun.

71

“Improbable?” More like “impossible.”

They were not much more advanced than the other civilizations that existed at the time. If the Sumerians were visited by generous extra-terrestrials, why is it that the Sumerians did not have electricity, for example?

No, I’d say that the flimsiest part is the entire visitation-by-extraterrestrials bit.

Why is this a “given”?

Appeal to authority is not always a bad move, IMHO. It is a bad move if you say an archaeologist believes it’s impossible for aliens to visit the Earth, but not if you cite an astronomer or a physicist. IOW, appeal to authority can be okay if you appeal to the correct authority.

Ingenious, resourceful humans.

It depends on the monument, doesn’t it?

WHAT Flood? Noah’s flood never happened (at least not as described in the Bible, anyway).

Our desire to explain the unexplainable; our desire for comfort in the face of death.

Egyptian pyramids are monuments to certain Pharoahs.

People left their home civilizations and wandered off to start their own; invasion and conquest.

They probably knew a few things we don’t, but we know a great deal of things they could not have imagined.

I just finished reading a book* about what really happened in Roswell, New Mexico (an Army experiment involving balloons to see if the sounds of Russian nuclear tests could be detected from a distance) and the forward to the book was written by writer Jerry Pournelle. In it, he recounts a discussion he had with Asimov about visitation by E.T.s and Asimov stated flatly that while he believed that it was possible for there to be life on other worlds, he did not believe that aliens had ever visited the Earth at any time. I can confidently say that the opinions of Hawkings, Ellison and Sagan are/were identical to Asimov’s. (I don’t know dick about Dick.)

*Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe by Karl T. Pflock. Pflock believes that aliens have visited the Earth, but that the Roswell Incident did not involve aliens.

72

Do I really want to post on this…?

Anvil said:

Sorry I’m late. I read the book (The 12th Planet), though it was a few years ago. I will admit that Sitchin makes an interesting case and can be very convincing. But only because the topics require a wide breadth of knowledge, and some esoteric stuff like being able to translate Sumerian.

The thing is, he relies on his own unique translations that other Sumerian scholars disagree about. What makes his translations more correct? Only that they adhere to his notion that ancient mythologies might really be historical records. Pretty thin.

What is most damning to me in his theory is the utter lack of artifacts from the aliens. They had rocket ships and the ability to perform genetic manipulation and high technology to get between the planets, but somehow the only surviving artifacts are clay tablets and stone monoliths? How come every single artifact is made from natural Earth materials? No exotic polymers, no strange alloys, not even anachronistic uses like steel.

andygirl said:

Oh come on. It’s called referencing the source material instead of relying on second and third-hand accounts.

Podkayne said:

This really is uncalled for. This happens all the time. One person is responding to criticisms from a half a dozen to a dozen other people, yet somehow he’s supposed to get every point and be the next respondent after every critical post, to boot. Give him a little time. Andygirl requested time to go work up her comments, do the same for Anvil.
Anvil said:

and

Depends on if you want to learn fairy tales or not. About thing agreeable that can be learned is there is a Sumerian connection and the word Nephilim has something to do with “fallen ones”. The rest is speculation, fantasy, and unsupported extrapolation of translations.

Anvil said:

As filtered through the perceptions and biases of Sitchin. But yes, it is interesting how later cultures were influenced by earlier ones. Of course, there’s nothing unnatural about that. The societies did not develop in isolation.

Anvil said:

Yes, but do you want wild speculation, or something with basis in fact (at least as close as we can discern afterwards)? For instance, item 4 presumes there was a Flood, but in fact the closest anyone can come is perhaps saying the Mediterranean crashed through and flooded the Red Sea, and that is by no means (a) as rapid as depicted in the myths, (b) global in scale, or (c) conclusively proven to coincide at the right timeframe to be the source of the stories.

Anvil also said:

Is it believable there is other advanced life out there somewhere? Certainly. Is it conceivable they might be able to find a way to travel the truly vast (one might say cosmic :wink: ) distances from other planets to here? Perhaps - no telling just what technological and scientific revelations are currently hidden from us but one day discoverable. But the more of space you open up for inclusion in the possibilities (i.e. other galaxies), the more difficult it is to accept that even if there is intelligent and advanced life there that it would ever be able to come here, within a reasonable span of humanity reaching a suitable level to recognize them. They would have to practically stumble onto us. By the time our current TV and radio emissions reach even the other side of the Milky Way, we as a race will probably have evolved past the point of using our eyes, ears, and mouths to communicate. Our descendants may not even recognize those types of signals as communication - even if by some bizarre chance they happened to reach an advanced civilization that just happened to be able to instantaneously jump from their planet to here. That’s the scope of the distances involved.

Okay, I’ve droned on long enough.

73

[sighs and shakes head sadly]
Irish, you’re SO naive. What did you think was out there in the Area 51 warehouse all these years–frozen aliens?!

[chuckles indulgently]
Silly boy.

:smiley:

74

I’m a little late getting in here, and y’all seem to have monitored yourselves, which is all to the good. I am a Happy Moderator.

However, just so I can tell the honchos that I’m doing my job: this forum is to remain one of civil debate. Wisecracks are fine, personal insults are not. The line is sometimes a fine one, certainly, so there is some latitude, but the line is there. Let’s stay on this side of it.

75

Awwwwww …

What the heck was the problem there? (And no, I don’t feel like waiting until I’ve read the rest of the thread).

76

No, Anvil, reading per se won’t hurt you, but, as Jimi Hendrix said, “I’m tired of wating all of my precious time.”

Actually, of course, those books may have a few interesting historical nuggets in them (although your pointing to the books themselves as “evidence” doesn’t cut it by a long shot), and doubtless they have at least laugh value – much like that Polish guy’s (Szukalski?) theory of “Zermatism” (or whatever the hell he called it, what with the Yetis and the humans mating and such). And in the end, who the hell knows what really happened for sure? But credible evidence sure is nice.

Pope Bob
“Why don’t you come with me, little girl, on a magic carpet ride?”

77

Nina Hagen?
Pope Bob
“Mars needs acid!”

78

I’m guessing that what happened with the “aliens win the war for the Americans” link is that Dex originally included the link in jest, but then, after time to consider that Anvil at least is perfectly serious about all this, and might not have understood that the link was meant to be sarcastic, deleted it the next day.

79

My high-school physics teacher would ding you for that statement. Units, please? (Actually, it’s clear in this case that, if the equation is both to hold for the Earth and to reflect – as it obviously does – Kepler’s laws, the units must be [Earth] years [sidereal?] and A.U., but it’s still bad form.)

80

There are some non-astronomical theories that are within respectable bounds, such as the rather obvious inference that the Noachic flood may relate to the recent discovery that the Black Sea was once dry land inhabited by man.