About Zecharia Sitchin
Zecharia Sitchin (11 July 1920 – 9 October 2010) was an author of a number of books proposing an explanation for human origins involving ancient astronauts. Sitchin attributed the creation of the ancient Sumerian culture to the Anunnaki, which he claimed was a race of extraterrestrials from a planet beyond Neptune called Nibiru. He claimed that Sumerian mythology suggests that this hypothetical planet of Nibiru is in an elongated, 3,600-year-long elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sitchin's books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into more than 25 languages. Sitchin's ideas have been resoundingly rejected by scientists, academics, historians (including Sumerologists, Orientalists and Assyriologists) and anthropologists who dismiss his work as pseudoscience and pseudohistory. His work has been criticized for flawed methodology, ignoring archaeological and historical evidence, and mistranslations of ancient texts as well as for incorrect astronomical and scientific claims. == Early life == Sitchin was born to a Jewish family in Baku, the capital of then Soviet Azerbaijan, and raised in Mandatory Palestine. According to an interview in the New York Times he received a degree in economics from the University of London, and was an editor and journalist in Israel before moving to New York in 1952. While working as an executive for a shipping company, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform and visited several archaeological sites. == Ideas and works == Similar to earlier authors such as Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken, Sitchin advocated hypotheses in which extraterrestrial events supposedly played a significant role in ancient human history.
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