Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin was a man who could not stop asking where we came from, and who answered with a cosmology entirely his own. Trained in economics at the University of London and working the practical world of shipping, he taught himself Sumerian cuneiform on the side and used it to build a sweeping mythology of ancient astronauts: the Anunnaki, he claimed, a race from a hidden planet called Nibiru swinging through a 3,600-year orbit beyond Neptune, who seeded human civilisation in Sumer. Scholars rejected all of it, yet his books sold in the millions and were translated into more than twenty-five languages.