In "The Enuma Elish Secrets NASA Won't Tell You!", Billy Carson argues that the Enuma Elish, the Babylonian Seven Tablets of Creation, records how our solar system formed, and that modern astronomy, NASA included, keeps arriving at the same story. Following Zecharia Sitchin, he reads Tiamat as a water-bearing planet, Nibiru as the intruder whose moons struck it, the Earth as a fragment of the collision and the asteroid belt as the wreckage. The stream centres on an edited cut of a keynote he gave in Blackpool, England.
How to read the Enuma Elish is a live argument: for Assyriologists it is a Babylonian hymn to Marduk, for ancient astronaut readers a coded cosmology. Carson claims the ancients held knowledge astronomy has only recently confirmed, so it is worth setting out what he says and where astronomers and historians disagree.
What the video covers
The opening claims (from about 1:06)
Carson opens with three propositions: that NASA and the European, Indian and Chinese space agencies ultimately took their picture of how the solar system formed from the Enuma Elish; that a parallel version of the text entered religious scripture; and that "we are living on a fragment of what was formerly a much larger planet."
What the Enuma Elish is (from about 4:20)
He describes a Babylonian text on fragments of seven tablets that, in his reading, details the solar system's formation: collisions between planets and moons, scattered debris and captured orbits. He stresses that it names Nibiru, and summarises (from about 7:07) that the moons orbiting Nibiru, rather than Nibiru itself, struck Tiamat, and a huge chunk swung away and became the Earth.
The tablets, Genesis and Atrahasis (from about 11:48)
In the keynote, Carson says much of Genesis comes from these tablets: separating the waters from the waters, the making of man in the gods' image, the creation of the earth and the later putting of humanity to work. He pairs the Enuma Elish with the Atrahasis epic, another account he reads as beings arriving from elsewhere and engaging humankind. His case for reading the tablets literally is that scribes wrote what they were told or witnessed, not science fiction: "people didn't have time to become George Lucas."
Uranus and a visitor from outside (from about 13:22)
His first astronomical support is Uranus, which spins tipped on its side. Carson attributes the tilt to a massive object captured by the solar system that tugged on Uranus over several passes, and says the Enuma Elish and Atrahasis describe exactly such an intruder disturbing planetary orbits. When the tablets agree with what science is now finding, he concludes, they are probably as close to the truth as we can get.
The Sagittarius dwarf galaxy (from about 15:05)
Carson reads from an article on a University of Massachusetts-led study that used the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) to map the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy being absorbed by the Milky Way. He argues that the band of stars we call the Milky Way is Sagittarius debris, that the Sun sits where the two galaxies meet, and that our solar system came from outside the Milky Way. He adds that textbooks describe rogue planets in the early solar system, as the tablets do.
Tiamat, the asteroid belt and Earth (from about 17:54)
This is the core of the reading. Tiamat, in Carson's account, was a water-bearing planet four to six times larger than Earth, with land and most likely life. It collided with a moon of another planet that orbited a brown dwarf star, and broke apart. "The asteroid belt is an exploded planet," he says. A large chunk swung away with Tiamat's water and re-formed as the Earth, which he links to the dividing of the waters. He asks how the text could describe Tiamat's glow rivalling the sun's if Earth did not yet exist. The belt, he says, is the "hammered bracelet" of the Bible and other texts.
He then offers a hypothesis he presents as his own: anomalous objects reported from deep rock layers, such as a vase and a hammer said to be hundreds of millions of years old, are artifacts of Tiamat carried inside the fragment that became Earth.
Planet Nine and a binary Sun (from about 20:57)
Showing an image he credits to NASA.gov, Carson describes Planet Nine as a brown dwarf star labelled a planet, orbiting the Sun every 4,200 years with six small planets of its own, and concludes that we live in a binary system. He says computer simulations rewinding the planets' orbits show outer planets switching places and Mercury's spin slowing because something massive passed by. The evidence is in the science books, he argues: "They hide everything in plain sight."
Thoth after the flood (from about 22:53)
The keynote ends with Thoth, whom Carson calls an Atlantean priest-king. Drawing on the Emerald Tablets of Thoth and his book Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, he retells Thoth's mission after a great flood: arriving in the land of Khem by ship from the sky, halting attackers with a vibration from his staff, which Carson compares to the US military's Active Denial System, and serving as master architect of the Great Pyramid before sending his crew to repeat the work worldwide, which Carson offers as the reason similar structures appear worldwide.
After the lecture (from about 27:29)
Back live, Carson says the clip came from a two-hour keynote in Blackpool before roughly 2,800 people, and announces a weekly YouTube series on the Anunnaki leading up to season two of Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed, whose first season is on 4BK TV.
Key takeaways
- Carson reads the Enuma Elish as a record of the solar system's formation, written by scribes recording what they were told or witnessed.
- Following Sitchin, he identifies Tiamat as a former water-bearing planet, Nibiru as the intruder whose moons struck it, Earth as a surviving fragment and the asteroid belt as the debris.
- He supports the reading with Uranus's tilt, the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, the early solar system's rogue bodies and Planet Nine.
- His own addition is that out-of-place artifacts in deep rock layers are relics of Tiamat.
- Astronomers explain each observation without a shattered planet, and Assyriologists read the text as a Babylonian theological work exalting Marduk.
Billy Carson's reading
Carson's position is that the ancients knew of events older than humanity and pressed that knowledge into clay as a time capsule; when astronomy speaks of giant impacts, migrating planets and distant objects, he treats each finding as confirmation. His framework is Sitchin's: the gods of the Enuma Elish are celestial bodies, Marduk's battle with Tiamat is a collision, and its outcome is the Earth and the asteroid belt. Sitchin's argument and its reception are covered in [Who Was Zecharia Sitchin?](/who-was-zecharia-sitchin-the-12th-planet-his-claims-and-what-the-critics-say), the case for and against a wandering planet in [Nibiru and Planet X Explained](/nibiru-and-planet-x-explained-sitchin-the-tablets-and-the-astronomy), and the poem tablet by tablet in [The Enuma Elish Explained](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation).
Carson goes beyond Sitchin in placing Nibiru around a brown dwarf companion of the Sun that he equates with Planet Nine, and in treating anomalous artifacts as Tiamat's remains. He ties the Thoth material to his Compendium of the Emerald Tablets and to his wider view of the Anunnaki as beings who shaped early civilization, set out in [Who Were the Anunnaki?](/who-were-the-anunnaki-sumerian-texts-vs-ancient-astronaut-theory)
What mainstream scholarship says
Assyriologists read the Enuma Elish as a Babylonian theological and political composition, not a description of planets. Named after its opening words, "When on high", it tells how Marduk defeats Tiamat, the primordial salt-water sea, splits her body to make sky and earth, has humans made from the blood of her ally Kingu to relieve the gods of labour, and is proclaimed king of the gods with fifty names. W. G. Lambert, whose Babylonian Creation Myths (2013) is the standard edition, dated it to around the reign of Nebuchadnezzar I, in the late second millennium BCE. Nibiru (Akkadian Nēberu, "crossing") appears as a station in the sky and one of Marduk's names, usually identified with Jupiter. Lambert also argued that Genesis 1 shares Mesopotamian themes without borrowing directly from the Enuma Elish.
On the astronomy, the Planet Nine hypothesis, proposed by Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown in 2016 to explain the clustered orbits of distant objects beyond Neptune, describes a possible planet of roughly five to ten Earth masses far outside the planetary region. It has not been observed and is unrelated to Nibiru; NASA, which has stated publicly that Nibiru does not exist, treats Planet Nine as a separate, unconfirmed idea. Kevin Luhman's 2014 analysis of WISE data found no Saturn-sized or larger companion of the Sun out to 10,000 astronomical units, which rules out the brown dwarf Carson describes. The asteroid belt is understood as leftover planetesimals that Jupiter's gravity kept from forming a planet; its combined mass is about 3 percent of the Moon's, far too little to be the remains of a world larger than Earth, and Ceres orbits inside it. Uranus's tilt is usually attributed to giant impacts early in the solar system's history, and migration models such as the Nice model allow Uranus and Neptune to have swapped places without any later intruder.
The 2003 2MASS study led by Steven Majewski did map Sagittarius debris wrapping around the Milky Way, but the band in the night sky is our own galaxy's disk, and the Sun is an ordinary disk star. Geologists note that reports of tools in ancient rock lack documented context, and historians trace the Emerald Tablets of Thoth to Maurice Doreal, who published them in the 1930s.
Watch, read and go deeper
For the poem on its own terms, start with [The Enuma Elish Explained](/the-enuma-elish-explained-seven-tablets-of-creation), then the Nibiru and Sitchin articles above. [The Anunnaki topic hub](/topics/anunnaki) gathers the rest of the Sumerian material. The audio of this stream is on the podcast episode page, and the first season of Anunnaki: Ancient Secrets Revealed streams on 4BK TV.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Enuma Elish about?
The Enuma Elish is the Babylonian creation epic, written on seven tablets. It tells how Marduk defeats Tiamat, forms the sky and earth from her body, has humanity created to serve the gods and is crowned king of the pantheon. It was recited in Babylon during the Akitu New Year festival.
Does the Enuma Elish mention Nibiru?
Yes. Nēberu appears as a celestial station Marduk sets up and as one of his fifty names, and Babylonian astronomy usually links the term to Jupiter. Zecharia Sitchin read it as a hidden twelfth planet; Assyriologists do not, and no such planet has been detected.
Is Planet Nine the same as Nibiru?
No. Planet Nine is a hypothetical planet of several Earth masses proposed in 2016 to explain the orbits of distant objects beyond Neptune, and it would never approach the inner solar system. Nibiru as a planet comes from Sitchin's books, and NASA has stated that it does not exist.
Was the asteroid belt once a planet?
Heinrich Olbers suggested in 1802 that asteroids were fragments of a destroyed planet, but astronomers abandoned the idea: the belt's total mass is about 3 percent of the Moon's, and its members vary widely in composition. The modern view is that Jupiter's gravity kept the material from forming a planet. Carson, following Sitchin, holds that the belt is Tiamat's remains.
Sources mentioned
Carson draws on the Enuma Elish (the Seven Tablets of Creation), the Atrahasis epic, the Book of Genesis, the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, his own Compendium of the Emerald Tablets, an article on the Two Micron All Sky Survey study of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy published in The Astrophysical Journal, an image from NASA.gov and the Planet Nine hypothesis. His cosmological reading follows Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet (1976). Standard references: W. G. Lambert, Babylonian Creation Myths (2013); Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia (1989, revised 2000); Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown's Planet Nine paper in The Astronomical Journal (2016); Kevin Luhman's WISE companion search in The Astrophysical Journal (2014).
