The Ancient Alien Question (7 page)

The second part of Bramley’s theory involved who was behind this. Who were these people behind closed doors? Bramley went all out, and concluded they were alien beings. The idea may seem preposterous, but logically, who else but an alien could manipulate humankind across the globe, throughout time? Only someone who stood above it all...

Bramley noted that “the notion of alien intervention in human affairs is generally tolerated when it is expressed as a work of science fiction, but it is often poorly received when suggested as fact.” He added:

There are few subjects today as full of false information, deceit, and madness as “flying saucers.” Many earnest people who attempt to study the subject are driven around in circles by a terrific amount of dishonesty from a small number of people who, for the sake of a fleeting moment of notoriety or with the deliberate intention to obfuscate, have clouded the field with false reports, untenable “explanations,” and fraudulent evidence. Suffice it to say that behind this smokescreen there is ample evidence of extraterrestrial visitations to Earth. This is too bad.

An in-depth study of the UFO phenomenon reveals that it does not offer a happy little romp through the titillating unknown. The UFO appears more and more to be one of the grimmest realities ever confronted by the human race.
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The UFO field is rich with stories of government conspiracies and cover-ups, all claiming that the governments of the world know the truth but actively hide it from their citizens, and that there is an extraterrestrial presence on Earth—and has been for many decades. What is intriguing is that Bramley wrote before the decade when a series of revelations from individuals who claimed to have served in military, intelligence, or government institutions began to “leak” to the public. These people testified to the presence of extraterrestrial races that competed among themselves and with clandestine human organizations for influence over humanity.

The most prominent figure in gathering the whistleblowers’ stories is Steven Greer, who published them in
Disclosure: Military and Government Witnesses Reveal the Greatest Secrets in Modern History
in 2001. Greer has gathered the testimonies of more than 100 of these witnesses in written and/or video format, making them available for the general public as well as for a congressional inquiry. One of the most famous whistleblowers is Colonel Philip Corso, who alleged that President Eisenhower signed a treaty with extraterrestrial beings. In
The Day After Roswell
, he writes: “We had negotiated a kind of surrender with them as long as we couldn’t fight them. They dictated the terms because they knew what we most feared was disclosure.”

Most whistleblowers say that these treaties were established after the 1940s, following UFO crashes or contact being established. They say that it was done quite officially, though secretly. But where Bramley differs from this typical UFO stance is that he states that the aliens have
always
been present, and operate
not via secret treaties, but via manipulation of governments, humans, or situations: war.

Bramley began researching the history of human warfare in 1979 and was initially merely going to focus on that phenomenon in his book. It was during this research that he identified a major contradiction: We pretend to be religious human beings, who state that there is a “soul” inside us. But thousands of years of religion still has not been able to create a worldwide paradigm shift to the idea that the soul is far more important than the body. In the materialistic 21st century, the body still reigns supremely. Despite proclaiming to be “spiritual,” body characteristics seemed to divide us, specifically something as silly as the color of our skin. Why was it that skin color has been at the foundation of so much hate? For Bramley, the only logical conclusion was that someone very early on in human history had told humankind he was superior to the other skin tones—and told this to
each
group: blacks that they were superior to whites, whites over blacks, and so on. They did this so that whenever we met, we would fight.

“Human history is a seemingly endless succession of bloody conflicts and devastating turmoil,” Bramley writes. He found another oddity: “Inexplicably, in the light of astonishing intellectual and technological advancement, Man’s progress has been halted in one crucial area: he still indulges the primitive beast within and makes war upon his neighbors.” Bramley argued that “it is easy to understand the mental stimuli in two alley cats squabbling over a scrap of food, but it would be a mistake to attribute as simple a state of mind to a terrorist planting a bomb in an airport.”
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Bramley thus felt that we could not simply blame it on the idea that humans will always fight. To underline the idea that we are not animals intent on war, he observed: “The Renaissance was a short period of history revealing that when repression is eased, when intolerance and war-inducing philosophies diminish in importance, and when people are able to think
and act more freely, human beings as a whole will naturally and automatically move away from war.” He thus concluded that humankind was not naturally prone to war.
⁴

It seemed that throughout history, some hidden hand was constantly stirring nations, creating division, a cause for conflict for no apparent reason other than to divide and conquer. As this was a feature of most ages and most locations on Earth, Bramley found it quite logical to assume that it wasn’t a group of people, like the Illuminati (the favorite culprits of some conspiracy scenarios), that could be this hidden hand. No, it could logically only be an extraterrestrial civilization. He labeled this hidden hand “The Brotherhood,” which consisted of a group of humans with enormous power, but who themselves were controlled by our oppressive extraterrestrial ringmaster.

Bramley felt that very few people realized or even wanted to look at who started wars and for what purpose, simply because they were not looking at the world from the proper perspective: “Most comprehensive history books contain brief references to this type of manipulative third-party activity. It is no secret, for example, that prior to the American Revolution, France had sent intelligence agents to America to stir up colonial discontent against the British Crown. It is also no secret that the German military had aided Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the Russian revolution of 1917. Throughout all of history, people and nations have benefited from, and have contributed to, the existence of other people’s conflicts.”
⁵
In short, a conflict between two tribes normally came about when a third party was stirring up trouble behind the scenes. The worst rifts have been caused when an uninvited party decides to act as intermediary, most often whipping both sides into a frenzy, from which an
entente cordial
can never be reached.

Bramley noted that it was The Brotherhood who always, under whatever guise, tried to take control of the world—the stirrer behind the scene. But in the final analysis,
Gods of Eden
,
despite its popularity, was never able to prove the existence of an alien brotherhood that had manipulated us from behind the scenes for millennia. But it did show powerful examples of how a few individuals could control many, and how contradictory humanity really is.

The Twelfth Planet

If aliens are to blame for most of the strife on our blue planet, where are they? Are they indeed, as Icke claims, hidden behind human flesh masks? Or are they instead directing the stage from beyond our planet? That is precisely the best-known and most enveloping of all ancient alien theories, from Zecharia Sitchin. He claimed that the alien rulers of planet Earth originated from an as yet undiscovered planet in our solar system, and that they came to earth hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Sitchin had an interest in ancient history that began as a young boy, when, in a lesson on Hebrew scripture, he asked about the Nephilim. The Nephilim were mentioned twice in the Bible, in Genesis 6:4 and Numbers 13:33, and were described as the offspring of the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men.” Who were they? His teacher brushed the question off, and at that point Sitchin began to try to find the answer for himself.

Raised in a Jewish environment, he realized that the Jews were relatively new kids on the blocks and that much of their mythology was borrowed from Babylon and Sumer. He began to study the Sumerian language and weighed the accuracy of their translations, at a time when there were very few scholars in that discipline. In his first book,
The Twelfth Planet
, published in 1976, he argued that several Sumerian words had been mistranslated and were actually references to spaceships and other alien-related devices. Most importantly, he concluded that these Sumerian texts spoke of the existence of a 12th planet in our
solar system, whose inhabitants had colonized Earth more than 400,000 years ago. We, humankind, were a genetic modification, created for specific purposes, which was the availability of a workforce on Earth, which the aliens from the planet Nibiru (the Sumerian name for the 12th planet) had colonized for its mineral deposits, especially gold. The Nephilim were precisely these alien overlords, and Sitchin had finally found the answer he had been looking for since his childhood.

Life on Nibiru faced a slow extinction 450,000 years ago as the planet’s atmosphere eroded. When one Nibirian fled to Earth, he discovered our planet rich in gold, which would allow for its homeworld’s atmosphere to be replenished. The aliens then began to mine our gold—first extracting it from the Persian Gulf—and sent it back to Nibiru. For this purpose a series of spaceports were created in the Middle East. Sitchin went on to conclude that the Great Pyramid was built by and for the aliens—the gods. He spoke of Pyramid Wars, the division of the Earth between the aliens, and the creation of humankind in a lab around 300,000 years ago as a race that could work in the gold mines for the aliens. Mostly, he sees alien rivalries, before the Anunnaki, a group of Sumerian and Babylonian deities, realize that the demise of Nibiru in 13000
BC
will trigger an immense tidal wave—the biblical flood. The Anunnaki take an oath to keep the impending doom secret from humankind, but one of them breaks rank and informs Noah, beginning an age when humankind is allowed to begin to rule the Earth, whereas the aliens largely maintain a hands-off policy, though they promise that they will return.

Most of the Ancient Alien conspiracy theories can be traced back to Zecharia Sitchin. He either created them, or they were created by others using Sitchin’s material. In conspiracy corners, his conclusions are often taken as fact. In
Gods of the New Millennium
, British author Alan Alford writes how he “happened to discover in 1989, Sitchin’s contribution to proving the
intervention of flesh-and-blood gods in the creation of mankind” and how this “cannot be overstated.”

As his research progressed, Alford became one of many who learned that Sitchin’s theses did not hold water. When Alford published his dissent from Sitchin’s conclusion, he reported that all kinds of allegations were slung his way, including that he had been “turned” by the CIA.

The problem—or advantage—of Sitchin’s work is that you are either a total believer or a total skeptic. This is typical of Sitchin’s work and his proponents, in the sense that it is an all-or-nothing approach: Sitchin is either totally wrong, or totally right. There is hardly any middle ground.

Sitchin’s interpretations were all derived from his understanding of the Sumerian language. Since 1976, no scholar of Ugaritic ever corroborated his claims, and as more experts in the Sumerian language were created, none came even close to endorsing Sitchin. In fact, most noted that Sitchin had greatly mistranslated Sumerian.

One of his most vociferous critics is Michael Heiser, who has an entire Website,
SitchinIsWrong.com
, devoted to refuting Sitchin’s theory. From 2001 onward, Heiser invited Sitchin to an open debate, but the latter always refused. Heiser therefore wrote an open letter to Sitchin, inviting him to present evidence in support of his theory. In it, he writes: “The reader must realize that the substance of my disagreement is not due to ‘translation philosophy,’ as though Mr. Sitchin and I merely disagree over possible translations of certain words. When it comes to the Mesopotamian sources, what is at stake is the integrity of the cuneiform tablets themselves, along with the legacy of Sumer and Mesopotamian scribes. Very simply, the ancient Mesopotamians compiled their own dictionaries—we have them and they have been published since the mid-20th century. The words Mr. Sitchin tells us refer to rocket ships have no such meanings according to the ancient Mesopotamians themselves.”
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One key term in Sitchin’s theories was the word
MU
, which he defined as “an oval-topped, conical object,” and “that which rises straight,” from which he concluded that it was a space probe, used by the alien astronauts to travel between their orbiting space stations and our planet. However, the Mesopotamian lexical lists define the word as “heaven” and sometimes “rain”—at odds with Sitchin’s interpretation.

A century ago, G.M. Redslob pointed out that the translation of the Sumerian
shem
as “name” was incorrect. This was seized upon by Sitchin, who stated that a
shem
was actually a space capsule. But Sitchin was equally wrong. Quite clearly, the word
shem
is related to the word
shamaim
, meaning “heaven.” Both
shem
and
shamaim
stem from the word
shamah
, meaning “that which is highward.”