Who are the Anunnaki? Ancient astronauts who visited earth in the past.

The Anunnaki appear in over a hundred Mesopotamian texts as a class of gods, ranked differently depending on era and city: sometimes a high-ranking council, sometimes consigned to the underworld. Zecharia Sitchin popularized the idea that the name itself means "those who from heaven came," making them extraterrestrials later remembered as gods by early humans. The Pennsylvania Sumerian Dictionary project, the standard academic reference for the language, says otherwise: the term means "princely seed" or "high born," a title also applied to human royalty in the same texts. Sitchin had no formal training in Akkadian or Sumerian, and no Assyriologist or Sumerologist has upheld his reading of the word.

Michael S. Heiser, who held a PhD in Hebrew Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, published a line-by-line "Open Letter to Zecharia Sitchin" (hosted at sitchiniswrong.com) itemizing Sitchin's individual mistranslations, including his claim that a Sumerian term for "sky/heaven" secretly meant "rocket," which has no support in any Sumerian lexicon ever compiled, ancient or modern. Heiser's central challenge, echoed since by mainstream Assyriologists, has never been met: produce one Sumerian or Akkadian text that says the Anunnaki came from a planet called Nibiru. None exists.