Received in e-mail: Science News Reports Evidence of Planet X!

THE CASE OF THE LURKING PLANET

"Far beyond the solar system's nine known planets, a body as massive
as Mars may once have been part of our planetary system -- and it
might still be there;"

The lead paragraph in a science-fiction script?
The lead paragraph from an article by Zecharia Sitchin about Nibiru?

No. It is the lead paragraph in a report in Science News of April 7,
2001 headlined "A Comet's Odd Orbit Hints At Hidden Planet."

The article reports the conclusions of an international team of

astronomers who have studied an unusual comet discovered last year,
designated 2000
CR/105. It follows a vast elliptical orbit around our Sun – an orbit
that takes it way out to some 4.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, and
brings it back at its
closest to the Sun to the vicinity of Neptune; it is an orbit whose
period "takes roughly 3,300 years" (according to Sky&Telescope News of
April 5, 2001).

"Such an oblong orbit is usually a sign that an object has come under
the gravitational influence of a massive body," wrote R. Cowen in
Science News.
Was this the gravitational pull of Neptune? In a study to be
published in the Journal Icarus, the team of astronomers (led by Brett
Gladman of the
Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur in Nice, France), after analyzing all
the possibilities, does not think so. An alternative solution, they
say, is that "the
comet's orbit could be the handiwork of an as-yet unseen planet" --
as massive as Mars -- "that would have to lie some 200 AU from the
Sun," in the
so-called Kuiper Belt of cometary and other planetary debris. This
would also explain "why many members of the Belt have orbits that
angle away from
the plane in which the nine known planets orbit the Sun."

"Undoubtedly, something massive knocked the hell out of the Belt,"
Harold F. Levison of the Southwest Research institute in Boulder,
Colorado, told the
magazine. "The question is whether it is still there now."

"Comet's Course Hints at Mystery Planet," was how the journal Science
headlined the discovery news in its issue of 6 April 2001. The
special report,
written by the Dutch astronomer Govert Schilling, summed up the
findings in the following lead paragraph:

"A Supercomet following an unexpectedly far-flung path around the sun
suggests that an unidentified planet once lurked in the outermost
reaches of the solar system, an international team of astronomers
reports. What's more, the mysterious object may still be there."

Now, As the Sumerians Said…

Readers of my books may well join me now in saying: So what else is
new?

Ever since the publication of my first book (The 12th Planet) in 1976
I have asserted that Sumerian and other ancient Near Eastern texts and
depictions
showed familiarity with a complete Solar System that included, beside
the Sun and the Moon, ten (not nine) planets -- the tenth planet (or
twelfth member
of the Solar System) having a vast elliptical orbit that lasts 3,600
years. Its Sumerian name was Nibiru.

I have-suggested that Sumerian/Akkadian texts such as Enuma Elish
(also called the Babylonian Epic of Creation) were not mythological
tales, but
records of sophisticated advanced knowledge. Establishment scientists
and scholars (see a previous article, The Case of the Misplaced
Teapot, as
an example) resist such an inevitable conclusion because it requires
the acceptance of the ancient claim that Earth had been visited by
Extraterrestrials,
the ANUNNAKI ("Those Who From Heaven to Earth Came") of Sumerian lore.

According to the ancient texts as interpreted by me, Nibiru was a
planet ejected from some other planetary system in outer space that
was captured into
our Solar System as it passed near Neptune. It became involved in a
collision with a pre-existing planet where the debris of the Asteroid
Belt are now.
As a result of that collision, some 4 billion years ago, the Earth and
the Moon came to be where they are now.

And, what do you know? In an article titled Neptune Attacks! In the 7
April 2001 issue of the magazine New Scientist, Ivan Semeniak wrote
thus:

"There is new evidence that a sudden barrage of deadly debris crashed
against the Earth and the Moon 3.9 billion years ago… What
triggered this onslaught? Something in the structure of the Solar
System must have changed."

The "something," I am more certain than ever, was Nibiru.

May 2001

ZECHARIA SITCHIN