Robert Sepehr, Plagiarism and the Nibiru Cataclysm

Before Robert Sepehr got his start peddling recycled and plagiarized ‘research’ (1) to the anti-jewish radical right – despite being a Mizrahi jew himself – (2) he got his start in the fringe ‘Nibiru Cataclysm’ circuit.

The Nibiru Cataclysm was - and is – a weird theory that basically holds that a planet called Nibiru orbited the sun every 3,600 years and that – because of the end of the Mayan long-count occurred in 2012. Therefore in 2012 the planet Nibiru was due to smash into earth and thus human civilization and/or earth would be completely destroyed.

Nola Taylor Tillman writing for ‘Space’ summarizes it thus: (3)

‘Linked to the close of the Mayan calendar, a variety of rumors spread regarding ways the world could end back in 2012. One popular contender was Nibiru, a supposed planet that some claimed would collide with Earth at the end of that year. But despite the buzz, there's no scientific evidence supporting the alleged planet's existence — and, of course, our planet survived 2012 without absorbing a massive impact.

Nibiru has been linked to NASA by various bloggers. Because of this claimed connection, space agency officials put out a statement saying that no big planet was coming to destroy Earth in 2012. What follows below is the true science and history of this supposed rogue planet, with reference to a real object, Comet Elenin, that somehow got mixed up in the whole mess.’

‘The story began in 1976, when Zecharia Sitchin wrote "The Twelfth Planet," a book which used Stitchin's own unique translation of Sumerian cuneiform to identify a planet, Nibiru, orbiting the sun every 3,600 years. Several years later, Nancy Lieder, a self-described psychic, announced that the aliens she claimed to channel had warned her this planet would collide with Earth in 2003. After a collision-free year, the date was moved back to 2012, where it was linked to the close of the Mayan long-count period.

When Comet Elenin appeared in 2011, many were concerned that it was the mysterious planet in disguise, despite the fact that planets and comets appear very different under a telescope. (A comet has a gas atmosphere, called a coma, and a tail, while a planet does not.)

But instead of slamming into the Earth, the comet strayed too close to the sun and broke into pieces. The leftover fragments will continue on their path to the outer solar system for the next 12,000 years, still bits of comet and not a more cohesive planet.’

‘All of the above notwithstanding, there may actually be a big, undiscovered world lurking in the dark, cold depths of the outer solar system. The evidence for this hypothetical "Planet Nine" has been building over the past few years, as astronomers such as Mike Brown, Konstantin Batygin, Scott Sheppard and Chad Trujillo have noticed weird clustering in the orbits of small objects beyond Neptune. The best explanation, these researchers say, is an unseen "perturber" very far from the sun.

Calculations suggest that this Planet Nine may be about 10 times more massive than Earth and orbit perhaps 600 times farther from the sun, on average, than our planet does. Astronomers around the world are scouring the sky with powerful telescopes as we speak, trying to spot Planet Nine directly.

Finally, a note about the name: Brown and Batygin dubbed the putative world "Planet Nine" because, if discovered, it would "replace" Pluto as the solar system's ninth planet. (The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006, you probably recall.) But some researchers (and many laypeople) still regard Pluto as the ninth planet and therefore use the term "Planet X" (or "Planet Next," or "Giant Planet Five") for the undiscovered object instead.

This can get confusing, because "Planet X" was also the term used for a world once thought to be responsible for supposed oddities in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. American astronomer Percival Lowell came up with this theory, and he hunted for Planet X in the early 20th century. (Clyde Tombaugh's 1930 discovery of Pluto did not validate Lowell's hypothesis, however, because Pluto isn't big enough to jostle Uranus and Neptune in the way that Lowell imagined.)

In any event, Planet Nine (or Planet X, if you prefer), may actually exist, and it's not coming to destroy Earth. So, it's very different than the mythical Nibiru.’

In summary then proponents of the Nibiru cataclysm took the basic research from Zechariah Stitchin’s book ‘The 12th Planet’ from 1976 and combined it with ‘psychic visions’ from a woman named Nancy Lieder – who also claims to be the personal emissary to humanity of an alien race called the Zeta Reticuli people – (4) as well as research from the broader scientific community about a hypothetical ‘Planet X’ (or ‘Planet Nine’) which happened to use the same nomenclature for something similar but completely unrelated to back up their theory of the alleged upcoming Nibiru cataclysm of 2012 which obviously never actually happened.

But what of Robert Sepehr’s role in this?

Well Sepehr was an early publicist of these claims with his – apparently best-selling - ‘Planet X’ documentary of 2003 of which some clips still remain online in addition to his old website promoting this documentary: (5)

We can see here that Sepehr’s commentary on the people he interviewed for ‘Planet X’ – some rather innocently and others rather more seriously – shows that for those who are serious proponents of the Nibiru cataclysm theory take their lead from the research in Zechariah Stitchin’s work as well as that of Nancy Lieder, while the more innocent interviewees are more focused on being interviewed about their academic research and don’t actually endorse Sepehr’s Nibiru thesis at all.

This list also reveals something about Sepehr that one very quickly realises about his work which is that Sepehr doesn’t do much - if any - primary research, but rather tries to argue on the authority of general claims about others.

For example, in ‘Planet X’ Sepehr himself uses the plausible theory that life on Earth originated from space – i.e., was seeded on earth by say an asteroid or comet with say bacteria on it impacting with the earth’s crust – and then tries to massively expand its claim to fit his own theories by asserting that humans were ‘genetically engineered’ by the Nibiru.

While also claiming that the Sumerians – the ancient Mesopotamian civilization and often thought of as one of the very first agricultural civilizations – are ‘rarely spoken of in the history books’ which is nonsense given that they are frequently mentioned as the origin of writing but are often lumped together with other Mesopotamian civilizations – such as the Akkadians – into the label of the ‘Mesopotamians’.

Similarly, Sepehr makes a lot of unsourced and unsupported claims in support of his version of the Nibiru cataclysm theory on his own ‘Planet X’ website and makes little to no effort to verify these for his readers and when he does so it also obvious that some of these references are likely plagiarised from other sources (e.g., W. A. Johnston’s ‘Niagara riverbed’ research and the vague reference to ‘Dr. Ted Nield of the Geographical Society of London’ both of which should have been easily and directly citable had Sepehr done the research himself): (6)

It is perfectly acceptable to cite the research of others in support of your own position, but Sepehr doesn’t do that but instead engages in ‘quote mining’ to support his own position without specific references and nor does he explain how these quotes/claims support his thesis beyond blithely claiming that they do. This I would argue is because Sepehr himself does little actual research but merely recycles the research of others as his own, which is where Andy White’s accidental discovery of Sepehr’s systematic plagiarism in his 2015 book ‘Species with Amnesia’ comes from in so far as this isn’t an accident nor a one off, but rather Sepehr’s modus operandi that began in at least 2003 with the website supporting and promoting his documentary ‘Planet X’.

Support for my assertion can be found in an old interview/radio debate Sepehr had after he had researched and produced the 2003 ‘Planet X’ documentary and website which is available online for anyone to listen to. (7)

In the interview/debate Sepehr makes blasé claims about the ‘Sumerians having the same stories as in the Bible’ – which is somewhat true but also hardly a revolutionary assertion - then says ‘there is another planet in our solar system called Nibiru’ – which is not true -  whose inhabitants created humans as a ‘slave race’ (hence his ‘genetically engineered by the Nibiru’ claims in ‘Planet X’) – which is also clearly nonsense - and the ‘Garden of Eden’ was where ‘they are said to have lived’ (either meaning the Nibiru and/or the ‘genetically engineered’ ancestors of humanity’) which was between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (aka the ‘Garden of Eden’ was in fact Mesopotamia which again is a plausible claim to make albeit contentious).

We can see from the above how Sepehr mixes facts (the similarity of the Biblical Genesis narrative and the stories of Mesopotamian mythology as recorded on various different clay tablets from Mesopotamia), arguable theories (that the ‘Garden of Eden’ in the Bible equates Mesopotamia) with his own unsupported and likely completely unverifiable claims (that humans were a ‘genetically engineered’ ‘slave race’ of the Nibiru and that the Nibiru came from Stitchin’s ‘Planet X’).

However, it becomes obvious that Sepehr is merely recycling the work of others and presenting it as his own when he begins dodging answering specific (but friendly) questions about holes in – or supporting evidence for - his theories.

For example, when asked for the specific Sumerian references to the Nibiru populating the ‘Garden of Eden’ he just scoots off to a different topic (aka claim jumping). He references ‘tablets’ but never says which ones. When pressed again Sepehr makes the bold claim that there are ‘5,000 clay tablets’ which allegedly show this but refuses to give examples of the specific tablet references (each tablet is given a unique reference number so it can be referred to easily) and when given examples of possible specific tablets Sepehr immediately gets vague and non-committal.

This is because Sepehr hasn’t done or verified any of this research himself but is actually just regurgitating the research and claims of Zechariah Stitchin’s 1976 book ‘The 12^th Planet’ which appropriately references the ‘Sumerian tablets’ concerned and offers a (highly contested and controversial) translation of them and had Sepehr been honest; he would have simply stated he was making his argument on the basis of Stitchin’s research not seeking to imply it was his own or that he had verified it.

Quite the irony given that the originator of the ‘Nibiru cataclysm’ theory Zechariah Stitchin was himself an Israeli jew who was born in the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in 1920 and that – like Freud stole most of the clinical basis for ‘Psychoanalysis’ from his mentor and fellow jew Josef Breuer – Sepehr appropriated Stitchin’s original research and presented it as his own which is simply… well… plagiarism.

This further indirectly evidences my contention that after the predicted ‘Nibiru cataclysm’ failed to occur in 2012 and thus books, documentaries and speaking engagements about it would have not been very profitable or well received; Sepehr pivoted to try and take advantage of a new audience that would pay him for his ‘research’ in the form the anti-jewish radical right and he began peddling anti-jewish variants of his ‘Nibiru cataclysm’ theories instead.

That is the real Robert Sepehr my friends: a jew, a grifter and a fraud.

References

(1) On this see Andy White’s accidental discovery of a large amount of plagiarism in just one Sepehr book - https://www.andywhiteanthropology.com/blog/robert-sepehrs-species-with-amnesia-sneak-peek-plagiarism-report - which is unlikely to be an aberration.

(2) See my article: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/is-robert-sepehr-jewish

(3) https://www.space.com/15551-nibiru.html

(4) Cf. Nancy Lieder, 1999, [1996], ‘Zeta Talk: Direct Answers from the Zeta Reticuli People’, 1^st Edition, Granite: Mill Spring

(5) https://planetxvideo.wordpress.com/

(6) https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/hercolobus/esp_hercolobus_23.htm

(7) https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4w5vo alternatively http://robertsepehr.awardspace.co.uk/