For years I have puzzled over the many anomalous and often intractable problems presented by Zecharia Sitchin's Nibiru. A planet that behaves like a comet did not seem to me likely to support life forms similar, if not identical, to us. In 1999 I proposed that the only way that sufficient warmth could be generated among the comets would be if such life existed on a planet orbiting a Dark Star that was itself orbiting the Sun.
For various reasons I suggested that the Dark Star was itself Nibiru, passing directly through the planetary solar system during perihelion with its own retinue of planets. This was a bold claim, given the size of the brown dwarf required.
But I now realise that I was wrong, for a number of technical reasons.
I remain absolutely convinced that the Dark Star exists, and that it is a binary 'star' orbiting the Sun that approaches the planetary zone of the Sun every several thousand years. But I now believe that this Dark Star is not itself Nibiru. It is simply Nibiru's own parent 'star'.
The solution I am proposing on this page brings me back towards Zecharia Sitchin's own previous work. I still add the Dark Star system to his paradigm, and I still require life to exist on a planet/moon closely orbiting that brown dwarf which I have written so much about. But neither the Dark Star nor the Homeworld are ever seen from Earth.
Their closest approach is way beyond Pluto, through the so-called Kuiper Gap, in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune. The planet that is seen is Nibiru; the OUTERMOST planet of the Dark Star system. And apart from it being unable to maintain life, Nibiru is essentially how Sitchin describes it; a reddish terrestrial planet that brightens with a cometary aura when moving amongst our Sun's family of familiar planets.
However, Nibiru is also inextricably linked to the Dark Star and, furthermore, DOES NOT APPEAR TO ORBIT THE SUN when viewed from Earth!
This is a remarkably bizarre claim, I know. Now I realise that this anomaly was actually part of the puzzle...Sitchin's whacky orbit was right all along!
In fact, everything seems to fall in to place beautifully. I have created some detailed diagrams, the first of which shows how Nibiru is seen to enter the planetary solar system moving backwards through the sky (the so-called 'retrograde motion of Nibiru):
There are seven planets in the binary Dark Star system according to the myth. I suggest that one of the inner planets is a habitable world similar to Earth. It is warmed by its proximity to the brown dwarf, and is bathed in its very dim, reddish light. The planets orbit the dark star in a pro-grade movement, in keeping with the initial formation of the binary star system 4.6 billion years ago. They also orbit the Dark Star in much less time than it takes for it to transit perihelion around the Sun. Even the outermost planet shown, which is seen cutting through the outer planetary solar system, is moving faster than the Dark Star. The result is that, although the Dark Star and its outermost planet are actually moving pro-grade, from the point of view of an observer on Earth the outermost planet is seen to move retrograde across the sky. This explains a long-standing anomaly.
That outermost planet is Nibiru. It is seen from Earth as a planetary comet. I think it unlikely that it comes as close to us as the inner solar system; it would be perturbed by the Sun's gravity. But it would be visible even beyond Jupiter because of the shedding of some of its volatile surface ices; it would act as a massive comet even at a tremendous distance from the Sun.
Another important detail is the fact that Nibiru is not seen to swing around the Sun. It seems to come towards the Sun and then quickly recedes without traversing a large portion of the sky. This explains the weird set of constellations moved through (which probably vary between different transits anyway), and also the short period of time that Nibiru can be seen.
The idea that one of the Dark Star's planets is our 'Planet X' has been suggested to me by a couple of people before, most notably Rajasun. At the time I was mildly sceptical because it seemed unlikely to me that a small brown dwarf would be able to maintain a planetary system at such a distance; I am suggesting here that Nibiru may be orbiting at about 60AU from the Dark Star (and this may vary as well if its own orbit is elliptical around the binary parent).
But a recent precedent was discovered in the form of a large planet imaged at a similar distance from a free-floating brown dwarf known to astronomers as '1207'. The Hubble image here shows the planet (in pink) near to the parent 'star' (centre). So it's not difficult to extrapolate a similar situation for our binary Dark Star, with Nibiru as the accompanying planet.
This finding has turned my thinking around. It presents us with the potential for a 3-body solution to the orbital configuration. Also, instead of one Planet X body we now essentially have 3 notables; the Dark Star and two major planets orbiting it (the other 5 appear to be minor bodies). Those two notables are Nibiru at ~60AU distance and the Homeworld much closer to the Dark Star itself. Add these bodies to the 9 known planets to the solar system brings us to 12 planets, which seems closer to the Sumerian 12th Planet scenario than Sitchin himself!
The 'Planet of the Crossing' is thus a ferry of sorts. This has made little sense up until now because the implication is that Nibiru takes travellers onto another place. That place was never defined by Sitchin who insisted that Nibiru was the homeworld of the Anunnaki itself. Yet, with our new insight the meaning behind the name 'ferry' becomes crystal clear.
The transit of the Dark Star around the Sun at perihelion is still a very remote event. At its closest the Dark Star is still twice as far away as Pluto. To rendezvous with the Dark Star would take many years of space travel with the risk of missing an object too remote to observe.
Yet Nibiru acts as an intermediary. It swoops into the planetary Solar System and then returns to the comet clouds. It would provide space travellers with the ideal stepping stone to the Dark Star. It literally acts as a ferry.
There may be other symbolic overtones to this. If the Anunnaki are physical gods, then their Homeworld is mythological Heaven. It is very similar to Earth ('as in Heaven, so on Earth', 'As Above, so Below' etc).
Another vexing issue with Sitchin's model is the fact that Nibiru is said to move through the heavens at a 30 degree angle to the ecliptic, nearly twice that of Pluto. Yet, a sizeable planet moving through the planetary Solar System at such an extreme angle to the plane of the other planets would cause chaos over time to their orbits. This is called the Kozai effect, which has become a huge headache for me in recent years. Again, this new hypothesis allows us to circumvent this problem in that the Dark Star does not actually move through the planetary solar system at all. However, Nibiru, its outlying planet, does, and Sitchin seems reasonably clear about its angle of inclination from the texts he has studied. How do we explain this?
I tend to think that the Dark Star lies close to the ecliptic, and still favour the area around Sagittarius as its current location (near to aphelion). This is because the actual 'line-of-sight' perihelion is the Duat region, around Sirius and Orion. Sagittarius is opposite this region on the ecliptic.
Brant McLaughlin writes:
"I have come across something in my research that I feel can contribute to corroboration of your most recent and best-refined orbital mapping of the Nibiru System, in the mythological section of your website.
""Enlil, an Anunnaki and Enki's [brother], appears to have had a star gate of his own at E.KUR in Nippur, called the DUR.ANKI, the heaven-earth bond, which lead to the Courtyard of "An" in "heaven", who was the premiere Anunnaki. Both of these "star gates" have seven gates between Earth and their final "mentioned" destinations."
"Since the Sumerians dubbed Earth "Planet Seven", let us assume logically that there exists some form of a "star gate" stationed in orbit around each of the seven planets beginning with Pluto and proceeding inward of the solar system to Earth, which is therefore why there are seven gates in between Nibiru and Earth. Then, after travelling to or through each one of these way-station gates, one then makes the celestial leap to Nibiru/the Home World. Thus, just as you have determined, Nibiru/the Home World never truly crosses into the solar system proper."
Reproduced with permission from Brant David McLaughlin.