Anunnaki

The Anunnaki are a supposed humanoid alien species. For the Assyrians, Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians, they were a group of deities. Descriptions of how many Anunnaki there were and what role they fulfilled are inconsistent and often contradictory. In the earliest Sumerian writings about them, which come from the Post-Akkadian period, the Anunnaki are the most powerful deities in the pantheon, descendants of An, the god of the heavens, and their primary function is to decree the fates of humanity.

In his 1976 book The Twelfth Planet, Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were actually a race of extraterrestrial beings from the undiscovered planet Nibiru, who came to Earth around 500,000 years ago in order to mine gold. According to Sitchin, the Anunnaki genetically engineered Homo erectus to create modern humans to work as their slaves. Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were forced to leave Earth when Antarctic glaciers melted, causing the Flood of Noah, which also destroyed the Anunnaki's bases on Earth. These had to be rebuilt and the Nephilim, needing more humans to help in this massive effort, taught them agriculture. Ronald H. Fritze writes that, according to Sitchin, "the Annunaki built the pyramids and all the other monumental structures from around the world that ancient astronaut theorists consider so impossible to build without highly advanced technologies." Sitchin also claimed that the Anunnaki had left behind human-alien hybrids, some of whom may still be alive today, unaware of their alien ancestry. Sitchin expanded on this mythology in later works, including The Stairway to Heaven (1980) and The Wars of Gods and Men (1985). In The End of Days: Armageddon and the Prophecy of the Return (2007), Sitchin predicted that the Anunnaki would return to earth, possibly as soon as 2012, corresponding to the end of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar.

Sitchin's writings have been universally rejected by mainstream historians, who have labelled his books as pseudohistory, pointing out that Sitchin seemingly deliberately misrepresents Sumerian texts by quoting them out of context, truncating quotations, and mistranslating Sumerian words to give them radically different meanings from their accepted definitions. Nonetheless, because Sitchin worked in the shadow of Erich von Däniken's more widely publicized Chariots of the Gods?, he managed to escape the notice of debunkers, allowing his theories to become more influential. Although Sitchin himself described the Anunnaki as humanoids, in a book published in 1994, the conspiracy theorist Arthur Horn proposed that they were actually reptilians. British conspiracy theorist David Icke further expanded on this thesis by claiming that the surviving alien bloodlines mentioned by Sitchin were the "Brotherhood of Babylon", a race of shape-shifting, reptilian aliens who secretly control all the governments of the world and keep humans enslaved, using the Illuminati as one of their figurative chess pieces.