The story of the Anunnaki is told in Sitchin’s many books and is digested, augmented and speculated about in dozens of websites. But the tale is essentially this: About 450,000 years ago, Alalu, the deposed ruler of the Anunnaki on Nibiru, escaped the planet on a spaceship and found refuge on Earth. He discovered that Earth had plenty of gold, which Nibiru needed to protect its diminishing atmosphere. They began to mine Earth’s gold, and there were a lot of political battles among the Anunnaki for power. Then around 300,000 years or so ago, the Anunnaki decided to create a race of workers by genetically manipulating the primates on the planet. The result was homo sapiens – us. Eventually, rulership of the Earth was handed over to humans and the Anunnaki left, at least for the time being. Sitchin ties all this – and much more – into the stories of the first books of the Bible and the histories of other ancient cultures, especially Egyptian. (Here’s a good time chart of the alleged events.)

It’s an astonishing story, to say the least. Most historians, anthropologists and archeologists consider it all Sumerian myth, of course. But Sitchin’s work has created a diehard cadre of believers and researchers who take the story at face value. And some of them, whose ideas are getting widespread attention thanks to the Internet, contend that the return of Nibiru is close at hand – possibly as soon as somewhere between 2003 and 2013!