In 1976, researcher Zecharia Sitchin published "The 12th Planet," proposing that the Anunnaki were not mythological but historical: an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation from a planet called Nibiru who genetically engineered modern humans approximately 450,000 years ago.
Sitchin's thesis was bold. He claimed the Anunnaki came to Earth to mine gold, needed to repair their planet's deteriorating atmosphere. They created humans by combining their own genetic material with that of early hominids. We are, in his account, a hybrid species, designed as workers for an alien mining operation.
His work sparked a cultural phenomenon. The idea spread through books, documentaries and internet forums. For many, it answered uncomfortable questions: Why do ancient structures like the pyramids appear so sophisticated? Why do creation myths across cultures share such striking similarities? Why does the Sumerian King List record rulers who reigned for tens of thousands of years?
Academic scholars largely reject Sitchin's interpretations. Assyriologists point to mistranslations and selective reading of texts. Astronomers find no evidence for Nibiru's existence or its proposed orbit. Geneticists see no trace of extraterrestrial intervention in human DNA.
Yet the theory persists, not because of evidence, but because it resonates. It offers a grand narrative that makes sense of anomalies, from the Nazca Lines to the precision of Göbekli Tepe. It suggests that humanity's sudden leap from hunter-gatherers to civilisation builders was not gradual evolution, but intervention.
There is something else at work here. The Anunnaki hypothesis taps into a deeper unease about human exceptionalism. If we evolved purely by chance, then we are accidents. But if we were designed, even by aliens rather than a traditional god, then we have purpose. We matter.
What if the ancient texts were more literal than we assumed? What if gods were visitors, not metaphors? The tablets describe beings who ate, argued, travelled and died. They fought wars, formed alliances and made mistakes. These are not the attributes of omnipotent deities. They sound, unsettlingly, like people with advanced technology.
Consider the global parallels. Egyptian myths speak of gods descending from the sky. Hindu texts describe flying vehicles called vimanas. Mayan carvings show figures in what some interpret as helmets and control panels. Indigenous Australian stories tell of sky beings who taught laws and then departed, promising to return.
Today, the debate is less about proving ancient aliens than about what we choose to believe when the past is incomplete and the evidence is ambiguous. The Anunnaki endure because they reflect a fundamental human question: where did we really come from?
Mainstream archaeology offers one answer: slow, incremental progress over millennia. The ancient astronaut theory offers another: contact, intervention, and a hidden history we have only begun to recover. The truth, as with most polarised debates, may lie somewhere in between, or in a place we have not yet thought to look.