Unpacking Heather Lynn's Bizarre Zecharia Sitchin and Jefferey Epstein Conspiracy

​For the past few days, I’ve been thinking about a piece by H Files creator and occasional Ancient Aliens talking head Heather Lynn, and I confess to finding it difficult to find a way to discuss this without running headlong into deeply uncomfortable territory. Lynn asserts that Zecharia Sitchin’s claim that the Anunnaki are space aliens is actually part of an Israeli propaganda campaign to support the state of Israel and combat Western intelligence agencies’ antisemitic efforts to control ancient history and deny the legitimacy of the Jewish god. Along the way, Lynn buts up against antisemitic stereotypes in positing a vast Jewish conspiracy to perform a hostile takeover of ancient history that somehow involves control of academic and Jeffrey Epstein, and the interpretations she places on the facts tend to spin increasingly far from the evidence. 

​The core of her argument surrounds a fact that I will admit that I did not know. More than a decade before he became an ancient astronaut theorist, Zecharia Sitchin was the chairman of the American-Israel Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, a position he achieved because he had served as a director of the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Industry and was a committed Zionist. In this capacity, he visited former President Harry S Truman prior to the Fair in search of artifacts and memorabilia related to the U.S. recognition of the State of Israel in 1948 to display at the pavilion, and Truman autographed for him a photostat copy of the 1948 press release announcing the recognition. This document, which was shown at the Fair, stayed with Sitchin after the Fair and went to auction in 2019, nine years after Sitchin’s death. As best I am aware, it was only with the auction’s catalog outlining the facts above that Sitchin’s role became generally known, and Lynn draws her account entirely from this catalog entry (and, to be fair, a newspaper article describing the catalog entry).
 
I was unable to find any other accounts of Sitchin’s involvement that were not dependent on the story given in the Raab Collection catalog. I was able to confirm some of the details with contemporary documents. Sitchin appears in a 1951 US Department of Commerce publication as a Tel-Aviv and Jaffa Chamber of Commerce official visiting the US to support Israeli-American trade (Sitchin was born in Azerbaijan in 1920 and lived in what became Israel until 1951). At age 34, a Jewish Post report referred to him as “Dr. Sitchin” (though I could find no evidence of a doctorate, and he never claimed one in later life), and he also published academic work on Israeli finances in the 1950s. I found listings for his American-Israel Chamber of Commerce work in various Who’s Who and other directories of the 1960s. 

Sitchin (second from left) at the 1964 World's Fair groundbreaking.

​He was indeed reported to be the “president” of the American-Israeli Pavilion in the dedication delivered at the groundbreaking for the pavilion published by the Fair. “The American-Israel World's Fair Corporation was therefore formed, and the most important thing in a significant venture such as this, is to get proper management for it. We released Mr. Sitchin from his position as executive director of the Chamber to become full-time president of this corporation,” Nathan Strauss, the chairman of the advisory board to the American-Israeli World’s Fair Corporation said at the groundbreaking.
 
In contemporary news accounts, we also read that Sitchin was called upon to comment on a fight that occurred between a Jewish man and an Arab man at the Fair after his staff was accused of picketing the Kingdom of Jordan’s pavilion. “He deplored the fairground's being turned into a battleground” and denied the picketing, a news report said.
 
It is rather interesting to learn about the apparently rich and varied life Sitchin led before he turned to the ancient astronaut theory in 1976, at the age of 56. By that point, Sitchin was independently wealthy and a corporate executive heading a group of eleven companies. He even bought a page in the New York Times in 1973 to run an essay he wrote about his corporate prowess and advertise his firm’s line of credit cards (!). (To be far, another ad featured an essay by one of his fellow executives.) Sitchin himself had minimized his connections to Israel and eventually his financial background, omitting it from the biographies included in his books and on his website, perhaps because he understood the conspiracy theories that would have emerged had his advocacy for Israel been widely known at the time he published The 12th Planet. Much of this information would never have been accessible until digitization of records in recent years, so it makes sense that he would have assumed he could essentially start a new life as a, well, crazy person speculating wildly about aliens.

Detail from a 1973 credit card ad featuring Zecharia Sitchin.

​Lynn, for all her academic-sounding prose, doesn’t go into these details and does not stray from the auction house catalog version of events, a version approved by Sitchin’s family. Instead, she links Sitchin’s efforts on behalf of Israel—which, as far as I can tell from all the available evidence were a genuine expression of his support for the Israeli state—to a nefarious conspiracy tied to Jeffrey Epstein and the Jewish elite to control the narrative of ancient history.
 
Her argument is convoluted, and I’m not sure I fully followed all of the parts. In her telling, the decipherment of cuneiform was a “Protestant project” aimed at dethroning the Jewish god, even though Yahweh is the Protestant god, too. Her warrant for this is Friedrich Delitzsch, the early German Assyriologist who argued that the Hebrew Bible was largely stolen from Babylonian myths, was filled with immorality, and should be divorced from Christianity and replaced with German mythology (!); his student Paul Haupt added to this an Aryan Jesus. As should be obvious, his proposal failed and is today considered a classic example of a scholar outracing the evidence. In reality, there was no single project to use cuneiform for religious purposes. Other prominent early Assyriologists had very different ideas. Heinrich Zimmern, for instance, believed Jesus was a fictional character, while George Aaron Barton was an Episcopal clergyman who though Babylonian texts imitated biblical originals.
 
For Lynn, however, the supposed Protestant project was merely an opening salvo. After T. E. Lawrence (don’t ask) proved that being a gatekeeper could control what the public thought of the past, British media mogul Robert Maxwell had an opening to use his control over academic publishing to corrupt the system through the institution of the dreaded peer review, turning academic publishing into a commercial venture. Lynn asserts—falsely, as best I can tell from the available evidence, that his daughter Ghislaine Maxwell, was deeply involved in what she sees as an academic publishing racket and therefore the younger Maxwell is part of the conspiracy to control history. Maxwell, however, was not an active participant in the academic publishing arm of her father’s business (which at any rate began before she was even born) and her biggest contribution seems to be involvement in his purchase of the New York Daily News in 1991. Maxwell was 30 and living in London when her father died that same year, and she then left his company to become a full-time socialite and child sex trafficker in New York.
 
Lynn implies that the elder Maxwell had ties to “powerful people” that connected the younger Maxwell to the nexus of academic publishing, ancient astronaut theory, child sex crimes, and Israel. “The legacy of Robert Maxwell is a cautionary tale about the concentration of power in any form, whether over scientific discourse or over human lives,” she writes.
 
But there is no real connection between these parts of her story other than the fact that Robert Maxwell happened to own an academic publisher. What academic publishing has to do with 12th Planet, a popular book never intended for an academic publisher and written by a man with no academic credentials in its subject, I cannot imagine. The real connection, which Lynn chooses to leave implicit, is that Maxwell was enmeshed with the Israeli political and economic elite, and Sitchin was a member of that same Israeli caste. She does not even bother to mention that Sitchin, a wealthy corporate executive running an international import-export firm, was part of the same elite business world as the Maxwells, nor does she attempt to find any connection between them. (I don’t believe there is one.) It’s clear Lynn does not know much about Sitchin other than what the auction house website told her.

There is however a connection between Jeffrey Epstein and Zecharia Sitchin that Lynn overlooks. Epstein sought to meet with Sitchin in 2010, shortly before the latter died, according to the Epstein files released earlier this year. Maxwell was not involved with this meeting, which was set up by Epstein’s secretary at the suggestion of documentary producer Bill Siegel. It is unclear whether the two met, but the correspondence makes plain that the planned 2010 meeting would have been their first. Epstein and his circle had an apparent interest in the paranormal and occult science, according to the files.
 
However, Lynn does not take this any further and instead, after the break where paid access to her post begins, she jumps wildly into a completely different topic. “Control of translation is control of the past, and control of the past has always been a quiet way of holding the present,” she wrote. In her view, the key issue is whether anti-Jewish academics, Israeli-aligned academic publishers, Jewish ancient astronaut theorists, or artificial intelligence gets to step in an mediate between ancient texts and modern readers.
 
She feels that elite (for which I suppose we are to read “Jewish”) institutions are making choices about how to translate cuneiform and therefore controlling how cuneiform translations produced by machine translation services render documents: “The system now being trained to read its books is its direct heir: a modern intelligence infrastructure funded by states, held by a few institutions, standing between people and knowledge exactly as the temple once stood between people and grain.” But, maddeningly, she is also opposed to fringe history types like Sitchin who create their own “translations” and the ancient astronaut profiteers who sell products based on those translations, writing that “these offerings recycle well-worn snake oil, adding little that is new or substantive while trading on the allure of the mysterious.”
 
If “alternative” researchers are equally bad, then what exactly is she rallying against? Well, she said that she discovered that the world of ancient astronautics had been “infiltrated by the very groups it positioned itself to oppose.” And who are they? Well, her very next line begins with “the Rothschild banking dynasty,” so I think that answer is pretty clear. It’s also a ridiculous claim since ancient astronauts have always been the province of major media. Book publishers enabled its writers to gain fame. Television gave them platforms. Magazines treated them as stars. Erich von Däniken was interviewed by both Playboy and Johnny Carson in the 1970s—something no professional Assyriologist can even claim.
 
Lynn finishes her article with no real ending, just a promotional message for her next article, which will supposedly expose why the Book of Enoch and its fallen angels are big in fringe world right now. (It always has been, going back to Erich von Däniken, so this is nothing new.) But she frames her promo around the question of Judaism, leaving for next time the answer to whether the fringe theories she calls “Anunnaki, Inc.” are a Jewish plot to seize control of history from Christians or a Christian plot to write the Jews out of history.
 
It's all too much, though. The subtext is barely concealed, and her superficial research—her sources rarely run deeper than the most obvious popular works, despite a lengthy, if at times irrelevant bibliography (Crick and Wastson’s DNA paper is particularly pointless here)—gives the appearance of deep scholarship when many of her assertions are without evidence and do not appear in her sources. The connections between what she calls her “threads” are sketched with the thinnest of gossamer and nothing to establish any true cause-and-effect relationship beyond a shared Jewish cultural identity.
 
And I hate to defend anyone who fabricates history, but the idea that there are elites of any kind who exert control over the “official” translation of historical documents is ridiculous. Not only do Sitchin’s eccentric translations give the lie to this, but so too do the controversies over the many recent translations of Greek texts, specifically the online battles over which Odyssey translation belongs to which political ideology. That is only possible if there are multiple, competing ideas about translation. I myself have produced hundreds of pages of translations, which I have made available for free and are freely indexed by search engines, and no one has attempted to exert control over them. Certainly, cuneiform is harder to learn than French, but no one is stopping you from learning it, not even the Rothschild banking family.
 
In reality, Sitchin’s ideas were laughable even in his own day, but fooled non-specialists with a false show of erudition. Indeed, Sitchin’s book received glowing reviews, with the publishing trade press praising what one reporter called his “heavyweight scholarship,” mistaking convoluted and complex arguments for factual accuracy. UPI described him as a “scholar,” though he held no degree in history or linguistics, had published nothing of note on the subjects before his popular book, and could not distinguish Sumerians from Babylonians. Far from reinforcing some elite scholarly view of history, the book publishing industry and its media partners went all-in on Zecharia Sitchin in 1976.
 
Had Lynn done some real research, she could have spun a much better conspiracy theory. One of the early positive trade press reviews of 12th Planet was published in the Library Journal, urging libraries to buy the book. The writer, who called the book “exciting, even credible,” was the librarian at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where the crashed UFOs are rumored to be stored!