Camp Gagnon - The Ancient Aliens that Created Humanity

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Today, we dive deep into the world of ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, and the enduring mythos of the Anunnaki. From the Igigi rebellion and ancient flood narratives to the Book of Enoch, Nephilim, and the mysteries of the Sumerian King List, we explore how ancient mythology intersects with the Book of Genesis, modern human evolution, and Zecharia Sitchin’s controversial claims about Planet Nibiru. We separate myth from reality to examine what these ancient texts actually say versus modern fringe theories. Welcome to Camp! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: ULTRA and Morgan & Morgan -Don’t sleep on ULTRA Pouches. New customers get 15% Off with code CAMP at takeultra.com! #UltraPouches #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon 👕🧢 Shop CAMP Merch: https://camp-rd.com/collections/ufo 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets: https://markgagnonlive.com 🎩👽 Daily Dose Of History: https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 02:50 - Christos YAPPIN 04:48 - The Sumerians 08:00 - The Anunnaki Story 11:57 - The Igigi Rebellion 15:12 - Garden of Eden Connection 16:50 - Mesopotamian Mythology 21:46 - Nephilim + The Book of Enoch 28:32 - Sumerian Kings List 30:44 - Anunnaki Flood Story 38:13 - What Sitchin Got Wrong 40:25 - Planet Nibiru 43:28 - Evolution of Humans + Neanderthal DNA 46:13 - Real vs Myth 51:45 - Joshua Tree Camp Retreat 52:19 - Drop Your Thoughts #anunnaki Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Around 4,000 years ago, someone in ancient Iraq pressed a reed into wet clay, and they wrote down an entire story about where human beings came from. And it's not what you heard in Genesis. The story goes like this. The gods were tired of working. So they made us human beings do it for them. And these gods that did this had a name, the Anunaki. And then in 1976, one man re-read those tablets, and he came away with a completely different story.

According to him, the Anunaki were not gods at all. They were aliens. Yeah, they came from a hidden planet called Nibiru, and their world was dying, and the only thing that could save them was gold. So they came here to mine this gold, and when the manual labor got to be too much, they took a primitive ape, already living here,

and they thought, oh, we'll just genetically engineer this ape to be a worker. And that worker is us. And here's the part that keeps the story alive 50 years later. When you go back and actually read the ancient texts, it feels pretty real. There really are gods creating human beings out of clay, and there really is a great flood with a man told to build a boat. And there really are strange giants that are born from gods or angels and mixing with human women.

And there are really pieces of modern science like planets we can't find, genes that rewire the human brain that keep landing a little too close to this ancient story for comfort. Well, this is the story of the Anunnaki. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single week we explore the most interesting, fascinating controversial stories from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this tent, is I go on crazy rabbit holes, I find Wikipedia articles, I find little posts on Reddit or Instagram, and I get obsessed with them, and I deep dive for hours, and then I tell you about it. Yeah, that's kind of

what I see the shows. This is kind of like the Sports Center for Conspiracy theories. I don't believe all of them, but I do believe all of them are interesting. And today we have a fascinating one. We're talking about the Anunnaki. Yeah, maybe you've heard the word before. Maybe you've seen people on ancient aliens talking about them. Well, I'm going to tell you why it

matters and why people are talking about this ancient religion from 4,000 years ago and how it got kicked back up in the modern day and why people to this day still believe that the Ananaki were responsible for creating human beings. Whether you believe it or don't believe it, I believe it's fascinating.

Now, before we jump in, I want to say a few things. First, thank you so much for, you know, being here. Every time you click on an episode, or you comment, or you like, or interact with our content at all, you help my dreams come true, you help the show grow, you help keep the lights on in the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I also want to say thanks to my palpitus. How are you, friend?

What's up, Christos, we don't have time because we're talking about the Adenaki, all right? All right. All this jibber jibber is driving me nuts. We got the biggest mystery of all time right before us, and we're not going to divert, all right? Now, this episode, we were initially going to do all of this and fully present all the research that me and some of my buddies did in Joshua Tree. Yeah, we're actually taking the whole team to Joshua Tree this October. And if you're interested in joining us, this is not like an official thing.

All right, this is just like the team going out for like a fun little weekend outing with the camp folk. And if you're in the area and you want to pull up, you can go to the Patreon, patreon.com slash campgagnon. And we can give you the information. There's still rooms available where we're staying. You're more than welcome to join us and see what we get into. It's probably going to be a lot of storytelling and hanging out. And just, I mean, maybe we go to a music festival. Who knows really what's going to happen?

It's going to be a lot of fun. So if you're interested in coming, Patreon.com slash Camp Gagnon, you can get all the information there. Now, how did we get to think of the Anunnaki today? Right. How does this story of like, okay, these ancient gods came down. They created human beings. There's like a flood involved. They made them from clay, which kind of sounds like Christianity or Islam or even Judaism.

Like, why is there all this, like, weird intermixing? And why are people now being like, no, no, no, this is not a mythology about gods. It's actually aliens. Well, in order to understand this, we got to go all the way back. 4,000 BC. And I never say BCE. I don't like when people do that, before the common era or literally it'll be like BCE or BCE before the common era. And then they'll say CE, common era.

What does BC mean to you, Mark? BC is before Christ, dude. Okay. Come on now. Like, what happened? I want to talk to one of these, these. scientists that always use BCE and CE. And I'm like, what happened right around zero that made everything switch?

And they're like, oh, stuff just got super common around that. Like, no, dude. We're talking about Jesus. You're trying to take the Christ out of Christmas. Anyway, that's just a personal little hill that I'll down. Anyway, around 4,000 BC, in the marshlands between the Tigris River and the Euphrates river, something crazy starts to happen. Over the span of like 800 years, you get this, you know, small little farming settlement

that turns into kind of like the first city on earth. around like 3,500 BC, the city of Uruk becomes like a massive urban center. And by 3,300 BC, people there created the earliest known writing system that we can identify. And it's called Cuneiform. It's an actual writing system of like pushing like kind of like reads into like this wet clay. And then it hardens into like these tablets. And we can still read them. And just 100 years after that in 3200 BC, you have government and like irrigation networks and like wheeled transport.

and temples and accountants and merchants and like a real sophisticated society and a lot of record keeping. This is an ancient Sumer. Yeah, you've heard of Sumer, like the Sumerians, like that whole thing. It's partly the reason that Mesopotamia gets called the cradle of civilization.

Because in this little region of Mesopotamia, now modern day Iraq, it is kind of where we see the first prince that we can still identify of civilization as we know it now. A lot of the world that we live in today traces back to these people. They're literally the reason that we have 60 minutes in an hour,

turn to 60 degrees in a circle. Like, they figured this stuff out, and they counted in a base 60, and we've just continued it ever since. And this very intelligent ancient civilization also had a mythology. They believed that their world was run by gods. And it was kind of animistic in the way that they did it, right? They saw, like, the sky and storms, and they saw war,

and they were like, oh, there's gods for all these things, and there's gods for every little facet of our life. There's gods of those mountains. and among them was a very important group of gods called the Anuna, or in later Acadian language, they called them the Anunaki. Now, that name matters a lot because An, like literally A-N, was the Sumerian god of the sky. That's what they would kind of pray to, and they looked up at the sky, and they were like, hey, what is the governor of this domain?

And they gave it the name, Anne. And then later, the Anu by the Acadians. And it's one of the oldest, highest-ranking gods in all of this mess. Mesopotamian religion. And the Anuna were understood as the great gods associated with Anne's divine family. So you basically think of it's like the descendants or like the offspring of the sky god. They create the anuna. So right from the beginning, their name is connected to the sky, which is important for our story because when you're looking up at the celestial bodies and you're looking at the magnitude of the sky above you, that is all the domain of the anuna. And that becomes

extremely important thousands of years later because fast forward to 1976 there's a writer named zecheriah sitchen and he publishes a book titled the 12th planet and gives the name a completely different interpretation literally calls it those who from heaven to earth came now from that translation he builds an entire story of an extraterrestrial civilization coming to ancient earth and that is essentially what the entire Anunaki story that we know of today is based on. So let's get into all of it. So forget everything academic for a minute, okay? This is the modern Anunaki story, start to finish,

as the actual believers of this philosophy understand it, okay? Now, for them, it doesn't begin 6,000 years ago in ancient Sumer with these cuneiform tablets. According to Sitchin's timeline, it begins roughly like 445,000 years ago. Yeah, all the way back, like farther back than we really even have record of in, you know, the Anthropocene. And it doesn't start on Earth. It starts on a planet called Nibiru. Now, Nibiru isn't in a normal orbit. It's supposedly on this massive stretched out ellipse, causing it to reach the outer edges of the solar system before returning roughly once every 3,600 years.

But the Anunnaki that are living there have a problem. They believe that Nibiru's atmosphere is failing. It's like starting to thin and the planet is losing heat and eventually their world is going to become uninhabitable. But they figure out a way to fix it. They figure that if they can get enough gold and they can grind it into microscopic particles, they can suspend it into the upper atmosphere. And then they can create a reflective shield around the planet and retain all the heat and their planet can continue to exist.

But there is an issue with this. They need an enormous amount of gold. And so they look around the entire solar system. that they can perceive as aliens, and there's only one planet that has enough, and that's Earth, or as the Sumerians would have called it, key. So around this time, 445,000 years ago, the first Anunaki supposedly arrive on Earth. Now, Sitchin, the author of the 12th planet, places their early settlement in Mesopotamia, but the major gold mining operation was thousands of miles away in southeastern Africa. And in his story, they don't come to teach us or to

you know, help the humans. They don't come to save us. They don't come to show the, you know, show human beings like, hey, aliens are real and like bring us into their galactic federation. They come to mine gold. And according to Cichin's own timeline, they do this for roughly 145,000 years before modern humans ever even enter into this story. Now, every wild claim that follows hangs on that one idea. Advanced beings arrive on Earth almost half a million years ago because they needed our gold to save their own planet. Now, I know this is kind of like a bizarre science fiction story, but this is where the lore comes from. Now, gold is a good choice for the story, and here's why, because gold actually does have bizarrely useful properties. I mean,

it barely corrodes, right? You can find ancient gold, and it kind of just looks like the same gold that we can mine now. And it's an excellent electrical conductor. So it can actually, it's used and obviously all sorts of different technology. And then most interestingly, it reflects infrared radiation so well that we still use microscopic layers of gold on spacecraft and astronaut visors to this day. So in this theory, it kind of asked this, why were ancient humans obsessed with gold? Thousands of years before electronics or spaceflight exists. By around like 2,600 BC Sumerian elites in the city of Ure were already being buried covered in gold,

jewelry and headdresses and ornaments. So a believer of this theory would say it's because the gods wanted the gold first and they came down and showed us how important gold is. I mean, you get all sorts of ancient explanations for gold where it has a very bizarre property. It looks mystical. It glistens in a way that no other rock really does. It's able to be transformed and melted down and stretched. And it has all sorts of bizarre properties that would have been interesting to someone way, way back, you know, 4,000 years ago, or 4,000 BC even. But, again, believers of this story say, no, no, no, our desire for gold got injected into us by this higher intelligence.

So according to the story, the Anunaki eventually gets sick of doing all of this brutal gold mining themselves. So they force a lower ranking group of gods slash aliens called the Igigi to basically take over the labor. And they do this for 3,600 years. And then eventually they snap. The Igigi basically burn out all their tools. They surround the compound of the ruling gods in the middle of the night.

And they refuse to work anymore. They say, hey, we're done. And so now the Anunaki have a crisis. They still need Earth's gold because their planet supposedly depends on it. But the workforce that's actually going to get all this gold just quit. So Enki, one of the Anunaki's leaders, comes up with a solution that changes everything. He says, hey, don't bring any more workers. need any, you know, lower level gods or aliens or whatever you want to call them.

But we should just make new workers out of something that's already there. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to tell you about energy. I'm someone who loves coffee, but there's a point where I'm on like my fourth or my fifth or my 10th cup and it stops helping. Instead of feeling more focused, I'm jittery and distracted and like exhausted but also unable to relax. It's kind of funny because I'll go to the gym. I try to watch what I eat.

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at take ultra.com. That is take ultra.com for 50% off with the code camp. And after you purchase, they're going to ask where you heard about them. Tell them Mark and Christos sent you from the campsite. Let's get back to the show. So according to Sitchin's timeline, We are now around like 300,000 years ago. And at this time, primitive hominids are already walking around. And they can stand upright. They can use basic tools. But in this theory, they're not intelligent enough to actually run this mining operation for the Anunaki.

So the Anunaki upgrade them. So Anki and the mother goddess figure known as Ninhorsag supposedly take an existing hominid, possibly a homo erectus. and they combine its biology with their own. And out of these experiments, they eventually come to create the first successfully engineered human. And they name the human Adamu. And they create a female counterpart named Tiamat. And this is essentially like Sitchin's version of Adam and Eve.

And this allowed the new species to eventually reproduce without the gods having to manufacture every single human being themselves. And if this story is sounding familiar, it should because it starts to weirdly kind of look like the story of Genesis. I mean, in the story of Genesis, a, you know, God being creates man in his image. Man is made from something earthly combined with something divine, literally made of clay or of mud. And man is basically set out on this quest to tame the earth. And there's also a real Sumerian term called Eden. meaning something like step or plain, which has often been compared to the biblical term,

Garden of Eden. And then, of course, there's Adamu. If you ever went to Bible study, you probably know that Adam is the first human created on earth in the Bible. And according to the Bible, he was created from the soil of earth, like I just mentioned. So now there's also a Hebrew word in the Bible called Adama, which is spelled differently from the Anunnaki version, but it literally means like of the earth or of the land or of the soil.

So to believers, the Mesopotamian creation story in Genesis aren't separate. stories. Their memories of the same event passed down for thousands of years and then eventually are retold in different languages and different religious interpretations. Now, the skeptic or maybe a scholar out there is saying, well, perhaps these stories just blend into each other naturally and it's just a way to explain how we gain consciousness. But if we go back to the Anunnaki theory, what do the tablets actually say? Because somehow the ancient version is kind of less alien, but also way we're weirder. So, at this point

we've gone through Sitchin's version from the 12th planet and why the mythology persists and kind of how it got blasted into the mainstream. But let's go through the actual ancient Mesopotamian mythology. So here's the thing. Believers of this sort of philosophy in the modern era actually gets some of it

right. Ancient Mesopotamian mythology really does contain a story where gods create humans because they're tired of working themselves. And that's not something that Cichin made up that's actually in the original versions. The clearest surviving version come from the Atrahasus epic. This is an Acadian text that's preserved in old Babylonian copies from around 1700 BC. This is roughly 3,700 years ago. And the opening is like shockingly close to the

modern version. And basically it says this, before humans exist, the Ananaki are the higher gods, while the Igigi are stuck doing all the physical labor. But they're actually not mining gold in the original. They're digging canals. The text specifically says that they dig the channels of the Tigris and the Euphrates and they haul dirt night and day in order to make the land like habitable. And here's a crazy detail. The text says that they do this for 3,600 years. That is the exact same number that later becomes the supposed length of Nibiru's orbit in Sitchin's theory. But after 3,600 years, the Iggi are done and they set fire to their tools. And they march to the home of Lil in the middle of the night, they surround it, and they basically go on strike.

So again, in the versions that we can actually recover from the old Babylonian sort of text, the higher gods call a meeting. And Anki proposes a solution. And that solution is basically what we said, to create a new creature to carry the workload instead, and these creatures become known as humans. So it's basically the same, except this story actually is darker. The mother goddess is told to take clay and mix it with the flesh and the blood of a god who will be slaughtered specifically for this purpose. Now, the god that is called to be sacrificed is named Ilawella, sometimes called Weaela or Geshtui, and the text describes him as a god who possesses intelligence. But according to the story, they kill him, and his blood and flesh go into the clay, and from that mixture, humanity is created. So according to a real story that is written down roughly like 3,700 years ago,

humans literally contain earth plus the blood of a god. There may even be like an ancient wordplay that's hidden inside the story that's absolutely fascinating. So in ancient Acadian, they have a term, a word, literally, a willum, which means man or person. And some modern scholars think that the sacrificed God's name, literally being Ila or Wei Ila, deliberately kind of imitates the words for God and man, almost as like a pun. In other words, humans don't just get Ilaue's blood, but they even get a part of their name from this god. So that's the real origin of the Anunaki, according to the Acadian text that survived to this day.

But watch what the modern alien theory does. Clay plus divine blood becomes Earth's biology plus alien DNA. The Agigi digging canals becomes the Agigi mining. gold. And creating humans from clay becomes genetic engineering. Now, that makes the theory extremely effective, is that it doesn't just create this entire thing out of thin air. It takes a real story that is discovered from these actual cuneiform tablets. And a story that has been told for, I mean, the entirety of the Sumerian empire, I mean, even into the Acadian, into the Babylonian. And for, you know, basically 4,000 years ago, this thing gets put down. And the modern theory

keeps the skeleton and just kind of changes some of the words. So, okay, let's swap out God or gods for extraterrestrials. Let's swap out divine blood of the gods for DNA or consciousness. And we'll swap out clay for primitive hominid. And then suddenly the ancient creation myth starts to sound like a genetics experiment and it maps really, really well. But there's one part of the story that shows up in almost every single religion for centuries around the entire world, and that is the flood. Now, before we get too deep into the flood and the flood stories and how they sort of show up across cultures, across religions around the world, we have to look at another ancient tradition, one where gods don't just create humans in the way that it happens with the Anunaki story,

but they actually start having children with them. So now we're going to widen the story beyond just Mesopotamia, because centuries after these ancient Mesopotamese, Batamian stories were being told, an oddly similar idea appears in the book of Genesis, and it happens right before the flood. Genesis chapter 6 says that the sons of God look down at the daughters of men and saw that they were beautiful, took them as wives, and then had children with them. And those children become connected to one of the Bible's biggest mysteries. They're called the Nephilim.

Now, Genesis describes the Nephilim as the mighty men who were of old men of renown. it's only a few verses long. And then the Bible just kind of brushes it away, moves past it immediately into the story of Noah and the flood. But if you want a much stranger, much more detailed version of what supposedly happened right there in Genesis 6, you actually have to go outside of the modern Bible

to the book of Enoch. Now, it's interesting because some Bibles still actually contain this, specifically the Ethiopian Bible. But this story is absolutely fascinating. This is where things start sounding really close to the modern understanding of the Anunaki story. Because if you go to First Enoch, the sons of God become a group of 200 heavenly beings called The Watchers.

Now, according to this ancient text, the Book of Enoch, the story goes like this. The Watchers descend to Earth, and they take human women as wives. And then they have hybrid children who grow into these massive, enormous, like, violent giants. And the Book of Enoch calls them the Nephilim. It's the same term.

term that's used in Genesis, but again, that's not even the weirdest part, because the washers don't just come down to reproduce with human beings or take human women as wives. They teach humanity things. Now, according to Enoch, one of the most important watchers is called Azazel. Now, Azizel doesn't teach humanity something like wisdom or how to live a noble life. Azizel teaches humanity how to make swords and knives and shields and armor and shows them how to find and like work medals and create, you know, basically do like medaller. and how to make jewelry and how to use like, you know, like antimony as eye makeup and all sorts of stuff. Now, other watchers go on to teach humans other things like astrology and the movement

of the stars and like spells and enchantment and like how to use roots. Like this is probably referring to like magic or even like herbal sort of like homeopathic like root practices like medicine. So think about that. According to the book of Enoch, you get metalworking and weapons and astronomy and cosmetics and knowledge of enchantment, all being brought down from these watchers, these kind of like sort of weird angels. Now, these heavenly beings descend to Earth, they give human beings all this knowledge

they're not supposed to have, and that's where the connection to the modern Anunnaki story becomes kind of obvious, right? According to Sitchin, the guy who wrote the original book, the 12th Planet book that came out in 1976, his argument is also built around advanced beings coming down to Earth and then drastically changing the development of humanity. So to a believer, Enoch starts sounding less like a story about angels and a myth about

how human beings like created war, but it seems more like another ancient account of the same thing. That you have beings that come down from above, from the sky, they interact or mix with humans in some way, and they give us forbidden knowledge. But according to Enoch, it goes horribly wrong. The Nephilim begin to get so violent that they consume all of humanity's food. They start attacking, human beings and animals, and then eventually they start attacking each other. And the text even says that they began devouring flesh and drinking blood. So God sends down the archangels to basically clean up this mess that the watchers created. So Raphael is ordered to blind as a zeal and imprison him beneath the earth. The archangel Gabriel is sent against the giants, turning them

against one another until they destroy themselves. And then the archangel Uriel is sent to warn Noah that a flood is coming. Now, once again, there are more. similarities that are just showing up, right? Heavenly beings descend. They breed with humans. You get these hybrid giants known as the Nephilim. Forbidden knowledge starts to spread. Humanity's corrupted. And then the archangels come down to try to fix it. And then, of course, a flood comes to reset everything. And that's why the book of Enoch is so important to people that are fascinated with this theory. It becomes really important to, like, this kind of like ancient kind of aliens world. It's not literally an Anunaki story. But once you kind of swap

these angels or these watchers for extraterrestrials, all of a sudden, the similarities are so obvious. And Enoch itself has one of the strangest histories of any ancient religious texts. You see, the book of Enoch isn't a part of the modern Christian canon or even the modern Jewish canon, but it's actually quoted in the New Testament. So in the Epistle of Jude, the author actually names Enoch,

the seventh from Adam, and says his name. Like, yeah, you know Enoch, he's the seventh from Adam, and gives a prophecy. So whoever wrote the epistle of Jude basically says this, Behold, the Lord cometh with 10,000 of his saints to execute judgment upon all. And that same exact prophecy comes from First Enoch. Literally if you go to First Enoch chapter 1, verse 6, it says, He cometh with 10,000s of his holy ones to execute judgment upon all.

So by the time Christianity appears stories about heavenly beings descending and corrupting humanity and producing giants, they were already around, and these stories were already circulating amongst the people that were living in, you know, around Jerusalem and around really the entire region. But interestingly, scholars have noticed that the watcher story itself may even just have the same roots that go all the way back to Mesopotamia. So long before first, Enoch, Mesopotamian stories talked about beings called the Apkalu. These Apkalu are said to be connected with divine wisdom and with bringing really important knowledge to human civilization. There's even a scholar named Amar Anus who argued that the

Jewish Watchers tradition that's actually found in the book of First Enoch may actually just be a reworking of these older Mesopotamian Apcalo traditions, except there is a difference. The Mesopotamian sages bring civilization and wisdom to humanity, but in Enoch, the watchers, these kind of celestial beings bring knowledge that humanity is not supposed to have. and ultimately this knowledge is what destroys the world and calls for a big reset. So it's the same basic idea. You have supernatural beings coming from the sky or far off worlds or whatever, and they interact with humanity and they bring secret knowledge.

But the knowledge has become forbidden. And then there's one final connection that is almost too perfect. So remember in the book of Genesis, the author calls Enoch the seventh from Adam. And then later the author of Jude repeats that same phrase. And Enoch is very important to the Bible. If you remember, Enoch is one of two people who never dies. He kind of goes with God, as they say. It's Enoch and Elijah, and they're kind of assumed into heaven, meaning that Enoch is very important and close to God for some reason that's not really specified. Well, in Mesopotamian, there's a thing called the Sumerian Kings List, and that has the names of the kings who basically ruled the world before the flood. And the seventh king is named Nmendoronki. A legendary king associated with the sun god Shamash and with basically receiving secret divine knowledge from the heavens, including divination and kind of knowledge of the cosmos. And if you know the story of Enoch, then once again, it's kind of super familiar, right? Because in the book of Enoch, Enoch is taken on this insane journey through the heavens and given divine knowledge that no other human being possesses.

And scholars have debated for decades, whether the similarities between the biblical, version of Enoch and the version of Enoch that we find in first, second and third Enoch, again, these non-canonical books, they're trying to figure out, was this story influenced by traditions surrounding N. Med Duronki, like the actual seventh king that came from the land of Sumeria, or if there may be just the same person. Now, the connection here isn't proven, but the parallels are super hard to miss, right? The book of Enoch isn't just some random story that I'm throwing in because it's cool. I mean, it is cool, but that's not why I'm putting it in there. It's because it was created in a world already filled with older Mesopotamian ideas around

divine beings and forbidden knowledge and ancient sages and giants and Nephilim and a civilization that basically existed on earth before the flood came and wiped everything out. So you have Mesopotamia telling one version. You have Genesis that is giving us like kind of little glimpses to another kind of weird version. And then you have the books of Enoch that basically blow those verses into an entire mythology of watchers and giants. And then thousands of years later, you have Zechariah Sitchin who's basically looking back at all of it and saying, hey, maybe they weren't talking about gods or angels or, you know, maybe these stories actually aren't so different. Maybe they're all talking about the same thing. They're talking about visitors that come from the

skies. And in almost every version of the story, what happens next is the exact same, and that's the flood. So going back to the official Sumerian version, the ancient one, the Atrahasis epic, the gods try to reduce the human population with plague, and they try with drought, and they try with famine, but none of it works. And so they finally decide to wipe out all of humanity with an enormous flood. But Sitchin actually adds something to his version of the story. Remember the planet Nibiru? Well, in this version, it's coming back around. And the Anunaki knows that as Nuburu passes through the solar system, its gravitational effects will destabilize the ice sheet that's covering Antarctica. But rather

than warn humanity, the Anunaki decide to escape Earth and go back to Nibiru when it gets close enough to Earth's orbit that they can actually travel back and forth between planets. And then eventually, when Nibiru gets close enough, part of the Antarctic ice sheet literally breaks off. Now, to be clear, the Nibiru version comes from Sitchin's sort of story or theory. And it's kind of his explanation for the biblical flood. He claims that this massive ice sheet falling off of Antarctica causes a giant tidal wave around 13,000 years ago triggered by the collapse of the ice walls. And this is a very similar kind of crossover to the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, which again, we did an entire episode on with Randall Carlson

that you should absolutely check out. But not all of the Anunaki basically agreed to just let humanity suffer and get wiped out. There was one that decided to help, and that is Enki. Now, Anki secretly warns a man named Atrahasus. This is basically the Mesopotamian version of Noah. And Anki comes down and tells him that the flood is coming and that he needs to build a giant boat and he needs to seal it and he needs to bring his family on board and try to preserve all the living things that he can.

And here's where we have to separate the different versions, because this same flood survivor appears across thousands of years of Mesopotamian storytelling under all sorts of different names. So in this version, he's Atrahasus. In the old Sumerian version, he's Ziasudra. And then in the epic of Gilgamesh, a story that you probably have read before. In the epic of Gilgamesh, he's known as Utna Pishdam. But in every single story, that exact character is the same. He has the same exact purpose. He is the man who builds a boat and survives the flood. I mean, in this epic of Gilgamesh, the gods decide to destroy mankind, and then the god Ia, which is literally the Acadian name for Anki, goes to warn this man. So he builds a boat, brings his family on board,

you know, brings a bunch of animals, survives a storm, and then eventually sends out birds to see whether the waters have gone down. Now, if that story sounds familiar, that's because it's literally the biblical story of Noah. Except here's the part that shocked people when these Acadian tablets were rediscovered, the Mesopotamian flood story is actually older than the biblical one. So the clay tablets containing the Atrahasus flood story is dated to be roughly like 1635 BC, which is actually a few centuries before we believe that Genesis was really written down. And the modern world didn't realize any of this until 1872. So a largely self-taught a serialologist named George Smith was working at the British Museum, basically piecing to

broken tablets excavated from the ancient city of Nineveh. But as he was reading one, he started to notice things, this huge flood, a boat, a mountain birds being released to basically search for land. And suddenly Smith realized that he was not just staring at old tablets. He's staring at this ancient Mesopotamian version of Noah's Flood. And apparently he kind of loses his mind. According to the story, Smith is jumping around. He's panicked and he runs around the room in excitement.

and literally starts taking his clothes off. He cannot believe what he's reading. And in November of that year, he publicly announced that an ancient Assyrian tablet containing a flood story that is strikingly similar to Genesis. But here's the thing. Mesopotamia isn't the only civilization

with a flood tradition. I mean, in India, they have the story of Manu. The Greeks literally have a story of DeKalion. Flood stories appear across cultures in Asia and the Pacific and the Americas. And again, not every story. is identical, and that doesn't prove that they're all necessarily remembering one global event. But it does raise a question. Why does a flood keep showing up at the end of the old world?

Well, it's crazy, but we might actually have an answer. At the end of the last ice age, the map of Earth changed. Like roughly 20,000 years ago, global sea levels were roughly 400 feet lower than they are today. And when ice sheets started to melt, the ocean rose. and according to some, it rose incredibly fast. There's actually one event called Meltwater Pulse 1A. And it began around 14,650 years ago. And according to the actual researchers that study this, it caused global sea levels to rise roughly 65 feet in 500 years.

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I mean, it's kind of just like observable kind of archaeology. But what is wild is Sitchin's explanation. So again, Sitchin looked at those ancient flood traditions and the real geological evidence of a dramatically changing world and said that the missing piece is Nibiru. Not that ancient people are remembering a world that is, you know, transformed by melting ice sheets, by something that they saw coming from the sky. So everything that we talked about with Nibiru and the gold and the Igigi revolt and the engineer humans and all that stuff, that has been Sitchin's version the whole way through. But what separates him from everyone else who ever wrote about these tablets is how he interpreted

them. He didn't treat them as mythology or human beings trying to grapple with where we came from. He treated them as a factual record. And if you read them in that way, the gods stop being gods and they become a technologically advanced species, and every weird detail in sort of the myth narrative turns into a jumbled up memory that human beings are collectively remembering about something that really happened. Now, another big thing to kind of keep in mind when evaluating all of this, it's to remember that Sitchin is not a classically trained sumerologist. He's not

an archaeologist or a professional translator of ancient languages. His background is in economics and in journalism. And the scholars who do read these languages, and there are many of them, they overwhelmingly reject his translation. They don't simply disagree on the conclusions or the interpretation. They actually just reject the entire premise of what his theory is based off of. So I only bring that up in the interest of trying to, you know, paint the entire picture here, not to disparage his idea or people that believe them, just more so to shed light on why people disagree.

So, for example, in Sitchin's version, he really popularized the idea that Anunaki literally means those who from heaven came. But according to the modern scholars that actually read this language, that's not what it means. As we covered earlier, it ties back to Anne and Anu. This is the sky god, as the Mesopotamians and the ancient Sumerians kind of understood it. And it reads something like the offspring or the princes of An. But Sitchin took a word about being a god's descendant and turned it into a word about arriving intelligence. And honestly, it just gets going from there. There is no Sumerian tablet that says that the Anunaki came from another planet or even

that they came here to mine gold. And according to scholars, there's no tablet that we've found that lays out a 3,600-year orbit for a hidden world called Nibiru, and there's no text describing genetic engineering of hominids. Those aren't translations. They are Sitchin's interpretation kind of layered over the actual story. Now, here's a twist that is actually pretty fascinating. Nibiru is a real word.

It shows up in Babylonian astronomical text, but it doesn't describe a hidden planet on a doomsday orbit. The term relates to crossing. Literally a crossing point in the sky. And in some texts, it's linked to a specific bright object often associated with Jupiter or with Marduk as the Babylonian chief god and how they would interpret it. And what's crazy is that astronomers are really hunting for

hidden planet out in space. So in 2016, two astronomers from Caltech, Constantin Battingen, and Mike Brown, they announced that something strange might actually be hiding on the edge of our solar system that we haven't really discovered yet. They had been studying a handful of distant objects past Neptune, and they noticed something really weird. Their orbits seem to be clustering together. Now, instead of these distant objects kind of pointing randomly in every different direction, several of these objects had long stretched out orbits arranged in a suspiciously similar way. And one possible explanation for why this is is that there's something massive out there pulling them in. So Badigan and Brown called the hypothetical object Planet 9.

And they estimate that it's roughly the size of Earth six times over. And they say that it's potentially traveling on an extremely distant orbit hundreds of times farther from the sun than Earth. Now, nobody involved in this research is claiming that it has aliens or that it's Nibiru or anything like that. They don't even say that it swings past Earth every 3,600 years or that it causes floods

or, you know, ice sheets to fall off or anything like that. If it exists, it's probably an incredibly cold world sitting hundreds of times farther from the sun than Earth, taking thousands of years to complete a single orbit. and the other important part is that we still haven't found it. Astronomers have searched huge portions of the sky without directly detecting planet 9, and by 2024, surveys had already ruled out roughly like 78% of the region

where one of the leading models predicted that it would be hiding. So Batigan and his team tried something completely different. Instead of looking at the famous cluster of objects that kind of were pointing and moving in this orbit and really started the Planet 9 theory, they looked at 17 distant objects. whose enormous orbits actually cross inside Neptune's orbit. And then they simulated the solar system for four billion years, once with Planet Nine and once without. And the difference is actually really interesting,

because without Planet Nine, their models struggled to reproduce what astronomers actually see in our skies today. The objects tended to bunch up near Neptune, but with this planet nine, the simulated objects spread inward, almost exactly the way that the real ones do. Now, nobody has photographed this planet, but as of 2026, astronomers are still looking into whether this infamous planet 9 is still out there.

So planet 9 is a real scientific mystery that astrophysicists and astronomers are actually trying to figure out. And is it this ancient sort of world of Nibiru that Sitchin is talking about? I mean, that part is a bit of a stretch. But the idea that another ninth planet that's out there is a real theory. Now, let's leave the tablets entirely because one of these strongest parts of this entire sort of modern Anunaki theory might not be about Sumer at all and might just be about us. So our species, you and I, Homo sapiens, have been around roughly like 300,000 years. That's what anthropologists will kind of put as the starting point for human beings as we

know them. But almost everything we think of as civilization arrives really late. So agriculture starts around like 12,000 years. years ago. The first cities start to pop up several thousand years later. Writing shows up around like 5,000 years ago. And then technological growth is like absurd. In the 1500s armies are still fighting with swords and spears and like really kind of primitive firearms. And then barely 500 years later, we're splitting the atom and then going to the moon. So ancient astronaut type people and theorists, they ask a pretty simple question, hey, what happened here? We have, you know,

kind of the Anthropocene. We have humanity and technology kind of going on a flat line, and then randomly it just goes up like a hockey stick. And so modern geneticists are starting to make that question way more interesting. In 2022, researchers published a study on a gene called TKTL1, comparing the modern human version and the version reconstructed from Neanderthal genomes. And the difference between basically us and the Neanderthal is one amino acid. Modern humans have Arginine at one position where the Neanderthals have a version called lysine. But in experiments, the tiny change caused the modern human version to produce more of the cells responsible for generating neurons in the developing neocortex, particularly in the frontal region of the brain,

which is essentially like the decision-making part and what a lot of people say kind of like makes us human as like this big sort of, you know, neocortex. And so in simple terms, one tiny genetic change, one little amino acid. can meaningfully alter how our brains develop and potentially is the reason why human beings like you and I are different from Neanderthals. And that's where, again, people of this sort of Anunaki theory make the connection because in Sitchin's story, the Anunaki didn't create human beings from nothing. In his version, they found an existing hominid and they modified what was already there. Modern genetics obviously doesn't tell us that anybody engineered humanity or that there was an obvious

switch in our amino acid, but it does show that you wouldn't necessarily need to completely redesign an organism to dramatically change it. And sometimes incredibly small genetic changes have enormous consequences. So this theory asks one final question, were all of those changes accidental? Because if you wanted to turn an existing hominid into something different, you wouldn't have to build it from scratch, you would just have to know what to change in the brain. So after everything that we've just gone through, and I know it's a lot, here's what actually holds Okay? Here's what's like actually factual. The Anunnaki were real gods that were worshipped in ancient Mesopotamia. The ancient texts really do describe gods revolting from their labor, creating human beings from clay,

mixed with the blood and flesh of a sacrificed god that was known to be intelligent in order to replace their work. There really is an ancient Mesopotamian flood story that is really, really similar to the story of Noah and Manu and India and all the other kind of ancient flood traditions. and ancient traditions really do describe divine beings coming down, mixing with humans and passing knowledge to mankind, whether it's one small little excerpt found in Genesis 6, or it's the totality of the first book of Enoch. And right now, astronomers really are searching for a massive hidden planet somewhere beyond Neptune to try to explain

why our solar system and our galaxy behaves the way that it does. Those are the facts that make this story so compelling. And then, of course, you have Sitchin, and his version talking about the 12th planet, which has the gold mining operation and the 3,600-year orbit and the genetic engineering program, and, of course, the planet Nibiru causing the flood. That's where the ancient Mesopotamia story ends, and Sitchin's interpretation of the story begins. And maybe that's why the Anunaki story has survived for so long, because underneath all the aliens and the planets and the genetic engineering are real questions that humans have been asking for

thousands of years. Like, where did we come from? Why do some of our oldest stories describe beings descending from the heavens, and why do civilizations separated by enormous distances always remember a flood with very, very similar versions of the story? And that, my friends, is the story of the Anunnaki. I mean, it's a fascinating sort of tale, right? It's kind of combining, like, actual known sort of geology. with actual known ancient texts coming from Sumeria and our understanding of genetics and like questions that every religion is trying to answer.

And Sitchin kind of just pulls it all together into one sort of semi-coherent thesis that at least people can wrap their heads around. You know, it combines all sorts of stuff. And I think that the best stories ultimately do this. They take real genuine facts that we either know intrinsically or we discover through archaeology,

and then it combines them into a story. I mean, I think about Indiana Jones, right? Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they're, like, looking for the Ark of the Covenant, like the Nazis are taking it. It's like they take all these different stories and, like, versions of history that are technically true, right? Like, if you're a Christian or you're Jewish, you believe in the Ark of the Covenant and you believe that Nazis existed. And then you combine those stories together, throw Indiana Jones in there, a young Harrison Ford,

and all of a sudden you're like, dude, this is the greatest story ever. Who are the Raiders in this story? In which story? And the example that you're giving. Well, the Raiders are, that's the new part. That's what makes it fun. Is that Sitchin? Oh, I see what you're doing here.

I think the Raiders are kind of all of us, right, trying to understand knowledge and truth to the highest level that we can. It's just fascinating. You look at like the official, like actual, like the actual version from ancient Sumeria and you're like, oh, this is an interesting story. Like the gods, all their mythology, yada, yada. And then also, if you're a Christian, you read the Bible and you're like, Enoch was important. And technically, Nephilim did exist. If you believe that the Bible is holy true, you kind of have to be like, yeah, Nephilim did exist. And then, of course, you know, the flood came and wiped them all out.

And according to some Christians, that's where, like, demons come from, is that their souls are sort of inhabiting the Nephilim. And they're these kind of, like, devouring beasts that are kind of bastardizations. And then, you know, God wipes away their flesh. But then their souls sort of, you know, remain on earth. And those are demons. That's, like, one story that Christians have held on to. I think Catholics are kind of the ones to popularize that. You don't find it weird that the only difference between us and Neanderthals are one amino acid?

That's an interesting one. And when I was even like coming across in the research, I was like, that seems crazy. But it's also one of those things where it's like, is that the only thing? Like, we don't know really everything about Neanderthals. So I'm like, I wonder if there's other things and that's just the one we know about. Like, I need to, we should do a whole episode where like we really break that down because that's like a fascinating little detail. But if you think about it from his perspective, he's like, no, no, no, all these stories are saying the same thing. They're all factual, basically factual.

They're just mythologized versions of actual events. And that one little moment where we're now different than Neanderthals and we have that one amino acid that comes online, that is the moment where God or aliens or some other type of force instilled us with the ability to create conscious thought and basically become human beings and separate us from animals. I mean, it's fascinating. It's one of those things that even if you're like a creationist and you believe that God kind of like created all things and put things in emotion, you can kind of be like, well, maybe that's when God did it. Maybe that's when God came down and was like,

all right, you're no longer going to be animals. You're no longer going to be primitive. You're going to be human beings. Kind of crazy. Now the Anunaki's insistence on finding gold, that's what I'm doing at Joshua Tree. Basically, yeah, you're going to start digging canals. You got to go the old ancient Sumerian version.

Don't go for gold. Go for the canals. Try to make it inhabitable. My little sifting net. Yeah, exactly. That's the point. I think that's what it's all about. You got to go to Joshua Tree, dig canals, make it inhabitable. And the only way to do that with us is Patreon.com slash Camp Gagdon. You're going to get all the information if you want to join us in Joshua Tree. That is where you're going to find the information to do it. Basically, we're just putting it there because it's like the screening process.

It's like, okay, we can't just blast this out to the entire world. So if you're an actual human being that's actually interested, You can reach out. We'll give you the information if you seem like you're normal in the area. Even if you're not in the area, you want to travel. I mean, Joshua Tree is beautiful if you want to come on out. It also feels like you're on Mars. It's very camp, right? It's very camp-gignon, if I will say. Absolutely. Now, if you guys are if you guys are scholars on the Anunnaki, if you're a sumerologist, if you've studied this stuff, if you're a geneticist, maybe you're an astronomer looking for the, you know, ninth planet, what are your thoughts on this? Do you think that this is just kind of human beings, all kind of telling stories, trying to understand the world, and different human beings kind of heard stories, and then reinterpreted them into their own religious sort of creation stories? And then they just sort of proliferated just as stories. Or do you think that there's a factual nature to this? Do you think that perhaps this is an actual sort of codified collective memory that we have that we're trying to put down into words and we don't really have the language or the understanding, specifically in the ancient world, to officially really understand where we came from and why. I'm curious what your thoughts are. And I guess most importantly,

do you think the Anunaki thing is kind of like a myth from HMSopotamia? Or is it aliens and other intelligence that came down, created humanity, and we happen to call them gods? Love to know your thoughts. Please let me know. Drop a comment below. I read all of them. Even if I don't get back to all of them, it's going to be helpful for the conversation for someone. So please comment here, Spotify. It will be read and it will be valuable to the group. So I appreciate you being a part of it. Now, if you're interested in history content. I know we went through a little bit of history today, but like we've done episodes on the epic of Gilgamesh and Anki and Lil and all those folks, if you want to read about that or learn about it or just understand really what that whole epic is saying and

the crossover with kind of other religions, you should check out history camp. We drop episodes there every single Wednesday. Now, if you're interested in kind of the religious aspect, I mean, we've done episodes covering all the great floods and all the flood stories that come from around the world and all the connections and the parts where they diverge, you can check that out on Religion Camp. And if you just like to rock with, you know, the craziest stories and theories and controversial ideas from around the internet, well, you're in the right place. This is the Sports Center of Conspiracy theories here at Camp Gagnon. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I appreciate you all dearly. Check out patreon.com slash camp Gagnon if you want to become a member

of the Inner Sanctum. Appreciate you all and I'll see you next time. Peace.