It is amazing what you get when you listen to late night talk radio.

On Saturday, I returned from my trip to Washington, DC. I stopped off in New Britain, CT, to see the New Britain Rock Cats loose to the Trenton Thunder in a AA game. It was a good way to break up the nine hour drive. When I got back on the road, I tuned the radio to a local station out of Hartford.

I only caught a bit of the show, but the topic at hand was the idea that ancient Sumerians were bioengineered by aliens. The person being interviewed - who was referred to as doctor throughout the show - was putting forth the idea that the Sumerians had originally been created by aliens to mine earth’s resources. They were later given an upgrade to raise them to the level of homo sapiens. Zecharia Sitchin seems to be one of the primary proponents of this idea, although I don’t think it was him I heard interviewed.

The idea for this comes from a creative misreading of the Enuma elish, which states that the lesser gods created humanity to do their work. Those who hold this theory view the Anunnaki (the gods mentioned in the text) as aliens. There is nothing in the text, however, to suggest that these were aliens, unless one reads the text with that already in mind. It is eisegesis at its finest.

I did find some sites on the Internet that discuss the idea that the Sumerians were created by aliens. I even found one that says the US invaded Iraq because a UFO had crashed near Baghdad and Bush wanted the alien technology. The Internet is proof that combining technology with poor critical reasoning skills is a bad idea.

On the other hand, anything that can make Sumerology interesting can’t be all bad.

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