UAP
Disclosure
& Beyond

In Sitchin's chronology, the Anunnaki came from Nibiru, a planet he places on a long elliptical orbit that brings it through the inner solar system roughly every 3,600 years. He dates their first landing on Earth to around 450,000 years ago, splashing down in the Persian Gulf and establishing Eridu, said to be the first Anunnaki settlement in Mesopotamia, before expanding into a wider network of cities and outposts.

The motive Sitchin assigns them is planetary survival: Nibiru's atmosphere was failing, and gold dust — suspended in the upper atmosphere — was the proposed fix. The Anunnaki first tried extracting gold from Persian Gulf seawater, then, when that proved too slow, opened mining operations, which Sitchin places largely in southeast Africa. The mining itself fell to the Igigi, a junior tier of Anunnaki workers, under conditions Sitchin describes as brutal.

When the Igigi miners eventually rebelled, refusing to keep working the mines, Sitchin's narrative has the chief scientist Enki propose a solution: genetically combine Anunnaki DNA with an existing Earth hominid (Homo erectus) to engineer a new worker species — Homo sapiens — built specifically for labor. Ninhursag, described as the Anunnaki's chief medical officer, is credited with the hands-on genetic work in this retelling.

The two half-brothers, both sons of the ruler Anu, sit at the center of the whole saga. Enki — associated with water, wisdom, and craftsmanship — is generally the sympathetic figure, repeatedly shown teaching or protecting humanity. Enlil — associated with command and authority, and holder of Earth's rulership — favors tighter control, and in the flood episode (drawn from the genuine Mesopotamian Atrahasis epic) wants humanity destroyed for growing too numerous and too noisy, only for Enki to secretly warn a chosen follower to build a boat and survive. This tension between the two brothers runs through the entire series as its central ongoing conflict.

Discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS sky survey (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) at its Río Hurtado station in Chile, initially catalogued as C/2025 N1. It is only the third confirmed interstellar object ever observed passing through the Solar System, after 1I/'Oumuamua (2017) and 2I/Borisov (2019). Its orbit is the most extreme of the three — and of any object yet recorded — with an eccentricity of roughly 6.1 and a hyperbolic excess velocity near 58–60 km/s, confirming it is not gravitationally bound to the Sun and is simply passing through. It reached perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) on October 29, 2025; per NASA, it came no closer to Earth than about 1.8 AU (170 million miles), posing no danger to the planet.

Unlike 'Oumuamua, which showed no detectable activity at all, 3I/ATLAS behaves like a genuine comet — developing a coma and tail as it neared the Sun, with outgassing dominated by carbon dioxide at greater distances and shifting to water-driven sublimation closer in. Spectroscopy has found hydroxyl (OH) emissions consistent with ordinary cometary water loss. Its estimated nuclear radius is under about 10 km, and its measured kinematic age suggests it may be one of the oldest comets ever observed — plausibly billions of years older than the Solar System itself, having drifted through interstellar space since long before the Sun and planets formed.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb (profiled elsewhere on this site) proposed shortly after discovery that 3I/ATLAS could be an artificial object rather than a natural comet, and has continued to argue the case since — pointing to its extreme trajectory and a roughly 5-degree tilt from the ecliptic plane, an unusually high nickel-to-iron ratio in some spectral readings, a claimed measurable non-gravitational acceleration, a symmetric arrangement of small jets he suggests could be thrusters rather than natural outgassing, and a periodic ~16-hour brightness variation he has publicly called a "heartbeat." Loeb maintains a running personal classification system (informally called the "Loeb Scale") and has placed 3I/ATLAS at a mid-level tier reserved for objects meeting some technosignature criteria, while stating plainly that "the simplest hypothesis is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet."

NASA's lead scientist for small bodies, Tom Statler, has responded directly: "It looks like a comet. It does comet things." Dedicated radio technosignature searches — including the Allen Telescope Array shortly after discovery and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope near closest approach, run by the SETI Institute's Breakthrough Listen initiative specifically because a real interstellar probe would be a legitimate, worth-checking possibility — found no artificial radio emissions of any kind. The broader astronomical community's consensus, based on the spectroscopy, imaging, and orbital dynamics gathered so far, is that 3I/ATLAS is behaving exactly as a natural, ancient interstellar comet would be expected to. The dispute remains empirical and, in principle, resolvable with further data — which is precisely why observation of it has continued.

The geography is real and uncontested. The 509th Composite Group at Roswell — the only nuclear-armed military unit in the world at the time — sat beside the site of the 1947 incident. Trinity, Los Alamos, Hanford and the early ICBM fields were among the most closely monitored airspace on Earth, which is also why they generated unusually detailed reporting of anything unexplained. What follows from that proximity is exactly what is contested.

Researcher Robert Hastings has interviewed more than 150 military veterans over four decades, published as "UFOs and Nukes" (2008). In September 2010 he convened a National Press Club briefing in Washington, covered live by CNN and reported by CBS, at which former Air Force officers described missiles malfunctioning near observed craft. The central case is Malmstrom AFB, Montana, March 1967, where Captain Robert Salas reported that ten Minuteman ICBMs dropped to "No-Go" status within moments of a security report of an object above the silos. Targeting officer Bob Jamison testified that simultaneous failure of ten missiles had no plausible mechanical precedent. Hastings also holds a recorded conversation in which Col. Walter Figel, deputy commander at Echo Flight, describes receiving a radio call about a large round object hovering over a site.

James Carlson, son of Echo Flight commander Capt. Eric Carlson, has published a 357-page rebuttal arguing no UFO was involved in any Malmstrom shutdown, and states that both his father and Col. Figel denied seeing anything. Figel has separately been quoted saying he does not believe UFOs were associated with Echo Flight or any other equipment failure there, that both books contain inaccuracies, and that Salas was not present at the flights in question. Skeptic Brian Dunning notes that 341st Strategic Missile Wing records show nothing unusual reported that night, and that Echo Flight was restarted after an ordinary commercial power failure. Robert Sheaffer has suggested the observed object was Mars, unusually bright at the time. AARO has separately floated electromagnetic-pulse testing as a candidate explanation, though the dating of that programme is itself disputed.

Note that Col. Figel appears on both sides of this: Hastings has him on tape describing a radio report of an object, while Carlson has correspondence in which he rejects any UFO involvement. That conflict has never been cleanly resolved and is a fair summary of the whole dispute. Officially, AARO's Historical Record Report — listed in the Timeline on this site — reviewed the record from 1945 onward and found no verifiable evidence of extraterrestrial technology or recoveries. What remains is a substantial body of sincere military testimony that has not been independently corroborated, and a substantial body of documentary rebuttal that has not fully accounted for every witness. Readers should weigh both.