Did L. Ron Hubbard rip-off Zecharia Sitchin when he wrote BATTLEFIELD EARTH?
Sitchinâs 12TH Planet is at the heart of the premise of BATTLEFIELD EARTH,
the second $100 million sci-fi movie to bomb in two months
by Paul Davids - 06/02/2000
Last week, on a particularly idyllic spring day, I drove up the California
coast north of Malibu to Paradise Cove, just south of Zuma Beach, hoping to
hide out where spectacular cliffs tower above surferâs heaven. Expecting to
find it nearly deserted, as it often is on weekdays, I found that Twentieth
Century Fox had taken over the hideaway to film X-MEN. There were over a
dozen huge movie trucks in a small parking lot, and about a hundred
crewmembers enjoyed lunch beneath a huge tent. Though they were pretty
tight-lipped about what they were up to, and in spite of the fact that a
production manager warned me that no one would talk to "the press" (the
category this Internet site falls under), I did learn that the movie was
basically finished and that this vast army descended upon paradise to do "a
couple of pickup shots." They employed a couple dozen extras on the beach as
they filmed an intimate shot involving a mutant.
Here it is the year 2000, and I could still remember my conversations with
X-MEN creator, Stan Lee, back in 1986, when he was hoping that X-MEN would
FINALLY get off the ground that year. Now it is fourteen years later, and the
big lesson of those conversations with Stan Lee have sunk in. Big movies take
lots of years before cameras roll. I first met Stan Lee when I worked for
Marvel Productions as production coordinator of THE TRANSFORMERS television
series - I was aboard for about 90 episodes, some of which I also wrote!
("Autobots, Transform!" commanded Optimus Prime.)
X-MEN isnât the only contemporary movie that took forever to make. I remember
another conversation in early 1980s with a friend who had been a fellow
student at the American Film Institute. He just optioned the rights to what
he said would be a fabulous family fantasy story called Stuart Little. He
then estimated that the picture would be out by 1983 or 1984. Those of you
who may have seen STUART LITTLE last year know that his estimate was wrong â
and he lost the option way before it ever got made.
And then we come to the film BATTLEFIELD EARTH, the $80 million dream-child
of John Travolta that took 15 years to be made. When he began his quest to
make the science-fiction film, he was going to play the fair-haired hero,
Jonnie Goodboy Tyler, who almost single-handedly liberates Earth from the
vile alien Psychlos. By the time the film was made, he no longer was the
lithe disco dancer of youth, and he ended up playing the stocky head of the
Psychlo security force, Terl, who supervises the human slaves that the aliens
enlisted for their gold mine operation on Earth.
For those astute AlienZoo fans who have read the brilliant, scholarly works
of the great expert in ancient Sumerian history, Zecharia Sitchin, the
connections between Sitchinâs theories of human origin and the premise of
BATTLEFIELD EARTH may be obvious. Unfortunately, though the movie is dead and
buried for a week now, and hundreds of reviews have been written that damn
the movie from the first frame to the last, I believe Iâm the first
commentator to make this essential point. Scratch beneath the surface and
youâll discover that there are more theories of Zecharia Sitchin in
BATTLEFIELD EARTH than any hint of the Scientology religion founded by its
author, L. Ron Hubbard. As John Travolta always claimed, it was a
science-fiction yarn, not promotion for the Church of Scientology. But
perhaps, like with so much science fiction, there is a whole lot of fact
intermingled with the fiction. I predict that Sitchin would be the first to
agree.
Sitchen first published The Twelfth Planet in 1978, two years before the 1980
copyright date on Battlefield Earth. For those who are rusty on Sitchenâs
theories and his magnificent books (which include Stairway to Heaven, The War
of Gods and Men, The Lost Realms, When Time Began and several others),
Sitchen is first and foremost a scholar on the ancient Sumerians, Hittites,
Assyrians, and Babylonians. Gifted in being able to translate the ancient
Sumerian and Akkadian texts, Sitchen made quite a number of profound
discoveries about ancient Sumerian beliefs about humankindâs origin. The
first of his scholarly findings, that the Sumerians believed there is an
undiscovered planet in our solar system with an orbit far beyond Pluto, has
found serious scientific support in the last year.
The Sumerians believed that planet, called Nibiru, to be populated by the
human-like beings called the Nefilim (the ancient "gods," if you will). They
believed the Nefilim created humankind for a specific purpose. Sumerians, who
understood that the planets of the solar system revolve around the sun,
thought that Nibiru makes an approach from beyond Pluto into the inner
regions near the sun
