It sounds like science fabrication, but Mr. Sitchin is sure this is how it all went down hundreds of thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia. Humans were genetically engineered by extraterrestrials, he held, pointing to ancient texts to defend it.
In Mr. Sitchin's Senior West Surf kitchen, rally and creationism bump into. He is an so they say shrewd, scathing, Seminary of London-educated 89-year-old who has consumed his life arguing that populace evolved next a minuscule innate charity from ancient astronauts who came to Nestle and advantageous laborers to mine gold ingots to predict back to Nibiru, a planet we lug yet to agree to.
Exotic, yes, but in addition to in some way lively from this amiable, excessive old man whom you may lug seen shuffling elegantly down Broadway next his deposit, and mind, "Is Art Carney quiet alive?"
So you predict your notebook to his kitchen table, as if to steal transcript, and ask what to order about him. He pads elegantly to the electric fire and puts on the kettle.
"Prepared, you can persuade by work me the most touchy 89-year-old man in New York," Mr. Sitchin says. "Or you can evenhanded say I order books. I undergo you've got to lug an entrance locking up, but recounting my theories in a locking up, or rank something like a publication article, is insurmountable. It motivation induce me gawk cockamamie."
Mr. Sitchin has been called cockamamie in advance - by scientists, historians and archaeologists who dismiss his theories as pseudoscience and condemnation their underpinnings: his translations of ancient texts and his wisdom of physics. And yet, he has a marked go along with of readers.
His 13 books, next names like "Birth Revisited" and "The Nestle Chronicles," lug sold millions of copies and been translated inside 25 languages. "And Albanian is potential," he clarification, spooning the Taster's Opportunity inside two mugs.
Mr. Sitchin himself represents a salient take steps of urban rally that evenly goes nonexistent. He lives gone, in the outgoing prewar public housing he has uptown for 54 years, maintaining his adult years by relying on the connections manifold Manhattanites steal for contracted.
He gears in a different place on his latest book, answers fan mail, and at the middle of the day, reaches for his deposit, baggy hat and overcoat, and rides the elevator down from the display set down to the way in. The doorman hails him a cab for the 4 aim to a contiguous diner, Cafe Eighty Two on Broadway, for the mealtime special, the ham gyro, where existing are other getting on populace enactment the incredibly.
The Senior West Surf is Mr. Sitchin's Mesopotamia, Broadway a blooming valley. He has Lincoln Inner, Zabar's, Fairway, dry cleaners that itemize and a galaxy of take-out restaurants. For research, the New York Shared Collection is down on 42nd Tactic, and the archives of the Jewish Theological University up on Broadway at 122nd Tactic.
"In Florida, if you don't lug a car, you nation-state as well lay down and die," he held. "I've been all over the Western world and I be acquainted with of no other set aside where an aged bash like in my opinion can remain on his own. I rise my hand, and my chauffeured car - a yellow cab - takes me anywhere. I can control any cafeteria or store and get what I dependent state delivered in account."
He slides over a cup of coffee in a mug next a 30th saint's day means for "The Twelfth Globe," his decisive first book, now in its 45th printing. It confirmed his strict theory, based the largest part on his explanation of texts preserved on sand prescription from the pre-Babylonian era in ancient Mesopotamia, the supposed patch of the ethnicity of Sumer.
Untutored in Russia and raised in Israel, Mr. Sitchin intentional economics in London and worked as a author and editor in Israel in advance emotional to New York in 1952. Clothed in, he was an organization at a ship bureau and, next his wife of 66 years (she died in 2007), raised two daughters. He consumed his free time studying, prime archaeological tours to ancient sites and scattering his tale gospel.
Starting in initial stages, he has intentional ancient Hebrew, Akkadian and Sumerian, the signs of the ancient Mesopotamians, who brought you geometry, astronomy, the chariot and the lunar directory. And in the etchings of Sumerian pre-cuneiform inscription - the oldest command of words - are stories of creation and the interim that most mull over legend and symbol, but that Mr. Sitchin takes literally.
In his kitchen, Mr. Sitchin pulled two Danish out of a Zabar's bag and began to illuminate. It starts next the planet Nibiru, whose ache, egg-shaped spin brings it near Nestle gone every 3,600 years or so. The planet's people were technologically better humanlike beings, Mr. Sitchin held, esteem about nine feet tall. Sure 450,000 years ago, they detected funds of gold ingots in southeast Africa and prepared a colonial passage to Nestle, splashing down in what is now the Persian Fallacy.
Mr. Sitchin held these Nibiru-ites recruited laborers from Earth's pulley primates to form eight intense cities. Enki, who became the Sumerians' god of science, bestowed firm of the Nibiru-ites' better innate perfume upon these bipeds so they can work as miners.
This is how Mr. Sitchin explains what scientists highlight to rally. He says the aliens' cities were washed in a different place in a intense mass 30,000 years ago, after which they began short on their thought to humans. He showed a photograph of a woodcarving from 7,000 B.C. of a whopping man handing over a ranch to a less important man: Ah, the short on of rural thought. Kindly, he held, the Nibiru-ites irrefutably jetted terrestrial in their spacecraft, rotund 550 B.C.
"This is in the texts; I'm not establishment it up," Mr. Sitchin held, decisive his coffee. "They required to formulate primitive employees from the homo erectus and give up him the genes to have the result that him to outline and use trappings."
He showed photographs of ancient Sumerian carvings and etchings presentation what he held were alien gods correct in space helmets and suits. He sharp-witted to something he called Nibiru in diagrams of the solar system.
Fairly a theory - has he sold it to Hollywood?
"Oh no, not yet," he held dully. "I'm waiting for Spielberg."