An interview with Zecharia Sitchin on MSNBC.com.

He suggests that Puabi was an ancient demigod, genetically related to the visitors from Nibiru. What if these aliens tinkered with our DNA to enhance our intelligence – the biblical tree of knowledge of good and evil – but held back the genetic fruit from the tree of eternal life? Does the story of Adam and Eve actually refer to the aliens’ tinkering? The way Sitchin sees it, the ancient myths suggest that “whoever created us deliberately held back from us a certain thing – fruit, genes, DNA, whatever – not to give us health, longevity, and the immortality that they had. So what was it?”

“What if these aliens tinkered with our DNA to enhance our intelligence”? Then they’re terrible scientists. Unless they wanted us to be dumb and self-destructive – which, of course, they did.  They bred us to be slaves.

Q: Are there areas where you see that new evidence has come out and the view that you’ve had has changed through the years

A: No, on the contrary, because of the evidence that is coming mostly from other fields. Let me give you an example. … The planet Nibiru is listed in countless astronomical texts from Mesopotamia. The question was debated by scholars already in the 19th century, what planet is it?…So now that we know about so-called extrasolar planets, the verdict is that an elliptical orbit is the norm.

Q: Another thing that people say is that you’re trying to read too much literal, actual history into something that was intended more as a myth, a story about the spiritual world. It would be as if someone was looking back from the future at our different cultures, and saying, “Well, God had to be like this because all these different cultures are telling the same story.” Whereas actually it’s the case that a common theme – for example, the Gilgamesh story or the story of a great flood – made its way into different cultures and doesn’t necessarily reflect historical reality.

A: Well, if that is the criticism, then it’s true. My answer to that is, so what? I take it literally, and others say I shouldn’t, so … I plead guilty.

This is my problem with him too – he takes the Bible literally, though it takes stories from other sources. Then again, there’s something so fundamentally archetypal about these stories (the flood) that ascribing truth to them isn’t entirely far-fetched. And the idea that the God of the Old Testament is the one true God isn’t all that more far-fetched than that God was a lizard from another planet.