I received a lengthy and interesting reply today to my post about the Fantasy Channel. I reproduce the substantive portions of it here for readers:

I have been studying various Mesopotamian texts for around 30 years, and there is nothing to indicate that Nibiru is a planet. Furthermore there are some very fundamental considerations that show that Nibiru could not be a planet. Here are just 3 of them:

1) The Egyptians (In The Book of the Dead) reported that: “Nibiru, The Sky Boat of Ra, could be seen passing overhead as many times as 9. Always passing from the West to the East.”
Assuming that 1 of those 9 passages occurred during twilight, we may assume the 9 passages occurred during a 13 or 14 hour period. This would indicate a total of ~16 passages per 24 hour period. Which indicates the object Nibiru was in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), probably at an altitude of roughly 300 to 400 miles above the surface.

This is well within the Roche Limit, the distance that two orbiting bodies will tear themselves apart due to their mutual gravitational tugs. Even a small object, such as Earth’s Moon, would raise life destroying tides on the planet Earth.

Item one alone indicates the Nibiru could not possibly have been a planet.

2) The Egyptians further reported that: “When Nibiru, the Sky Boat of Ra, passed in front of the Moon, its wingspan was twice that of the full Moon.”
Simple geometry shows that an object at ~300 miles altitude would appear to an Earth observer as being twice the diameter of the Moon, if it were about 4 miles across.
4 mile diameter objects of typical densities can safely orbit within the Roche Limit with no problem, tidal or otherwise.

Thus, the two Egyptian observations are not in contradiction, and we can safely assume that Nibiru was a 4 mile wide object in low Earth orbit when it was sighted by them.

3) All of the depictions of Nibiru that I have seen clearly appear to be of some sort of technical manufactured object, not a natural object.

Thus it appears very obvious that Nibiru, in today’s jargon, would be called “A Starship”, not a planet.

Remember, our word “Planet” came from the Greek, meaning “anything observed in the night sky that MOVED against the background of ‘fixed’ stars.”

I am not sure if that is where the confusion of calling Nibiru a planet originated in the translations, but the Ancient Greeks would have most certainly have called Nibiru “A Planet”, but only because it was moving, not because it is what we mean when we say ‘Planet’ today.

Finally, the very word Nibiru does not apply very well to a large natural body (like say the Earth), but applies perfectly to any type of ship, ocean going or Starship.
“Nibiru = The abode/home of the pleasant crossing.”

We don’t think of a planet as crossing anything, but we do think of ships as crossing oceans, and of Starships as crossing the great empty oceans of space between the stars.

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it?  Obviously, I don’t believe for a minute that nibiru is a starship, nor do I believe any ancient texts say so.  How can I say that in view of this response?  Here’s how.

First, I’ve asked the responder to give me the specific citations in these Egyptian texts where nibiru is mentioned. Frankly, I don’t believe they exist.  I say that because I doubt that the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the most exhaustive lexicon of ancient Mesopotamian language, would have missed these.  The CAD includes references to words found in other texts outside Mesopotamia (as any competent lexicon would), but it never claims to be exhaustive in that regard.  CAD is the product of nearly 60 years of research.  Yet I don’t see any reference to the Book of the Dead in the entry for neberu (the Akkadian pronunciation). I have the entire CAD in PDF, so I have reproduced the entry on neberu here so you can check for yourself (note: the entry starts on the bottom of p. 145 in CAD, so the first page of the PDF is a half page).  I had to chop the pages in half with a screen-capture tool since the PDF would not allow page extraction (it still looks okay).  Maybe I’ve missed something tucked away in here, or maybe the texts the responder is thinking of came to light after this volume was produced. Possible, but I think there is a better explanation …

Now for the better explanation.  If you read the response carefully, you’ll note that the writer refers to the Sky Boat of Ra as though it were nibiru.  THIS is what’s going on.  “Nibiru” isn’t going to actually be in these Egyptian texts, but the Sky Boat of Ra will be (naturally).  The responder is linkng the two . . . on the basis of . . . what?  Do the EGYPTIANS (perish the thought) actually tell us THEY made such an identification?  If so, where?  We want primary source data, not guesses.  After all, I want to know what the Egyptians thought and saw, not what someone today might wish or assume they saw after reading Sitchin.  Anyway, this connection pure assumption, and has nothing to do with the “real” nibiru – the one the Mesopotamians wrote about.  How do I know the responder is relying on assumption and imagination here? Because of the response says emphatically that nibiru could not be a planet.  The responder also wonders where the “translation confusion” occurred. There is no confusion, since Mesopotamian astrolabes associate Jupiter (and once Mercury) with the term nibiru.  For the citations, see the third page of the PDF, #3 on the lefthand side.  We at least know the Mesopotamians were describing Jupiter in this association with nibiru since their astrolabes can be correlated with those of the Egyptians and Greeks.  A glaring miscue like not knowing what Jupiter was would be quite obvious.

But let’s be fair (really).  If the responder can produce these citations with the multiple crossings of the SKy Boat of Ra in a single day (as he describes), I will absolutely (public promise!) post them.  I don’t believe nibiru will be in any of the texts (I’ll check, since I’ve had several years of Egyptian grammar and I have the hieroglyphic texts of the Book of the Dead). But even if the word isn’t there, the citations may prove very interesting, since multiple crossings within a day’s time would be odd for the sun!  Something else would be behind such references, and so we may have something of note there.  Hope we get to see.