Genetic traits add substance to case for 'engineered' humans

The education system when I was in secondary school necessitated a compromise when selecting O-level subjects which meant I opted to miss out on biology despite wanting to choose it. I had no desire to study French but was “advised” to do so by everyone I consulted, including the parents, who didn’t share my enthusiasm for the only viable alternative: tech drawing. Had it been an option it would certainly have been biology... but the way the subjects were grouped ruled out that possibility.

As it was my reservations about French proved well founded. I failed it... the only subject I did fail, languages never being one of my strengths at school. I did pass English but it took years of perseverance for my understanding of it to take me into a career in journalism, so when it comes to articles about genetics, medicine and reproduction I have to confess I have to resort to layman’s terms as that’s about as far as my schooling took me.

But like William Shatner - you know, captain of the Enterprise, presenter of a Discovery channel documentary series about strange phenomena - I’m aware the world is full of “things that amaze and confound me, every single day incredible mysteries that keep me awake at night, some I can answer, others just defy logic”.

And many of the topics that perplex me fall within the biological spectrum, things that could definitely be described by Shatner as “weird or what”. Concepts such as CRISPR, cloning, human evolution and genetics being some of those subjects... generally speaking all the mysteries that define who we are, how we’ve developed as a species and how we came to be living on this planet in 2025.

I have a very small expectation of getting to the bottom of any of them in the remaining time I’ll get to occupy the body I find myself in but it would be nice to think that eventually the entity that has occupied it for the best part of 70 years will someday get satisfactory answers... and while I’m still on this Earth I’ll attempt to work towards that goal!

When I was in primary school I remember there being a pupil in a year below me who’d been severely impacted by the thalidomide scandal, then later I discovered my wife’s youngest brother had been born with a cleft palate (as had one of her close friends) and helping my daughter on a school project on the rainforests of South America led me to learn about vestigial tails... another birth “defect” found within the human genome.

Why is all that relevant to where I might be going with this article? Well, they’re all conditions that impact on how we’ve developed as a species, not that thalidomide was a natural development but then you have to wonder to what extent other aspects of our physiology have resulted from similar interventions, specifically through the modification of our DNA. The rhesus factor in our blood for example, why is this protein absent in such a small percentage of the Earth’s population?

Cleft palates seem to be a far more common occurrence in parts of Asia than they are in the United Kingdom and are relatively simple to correct but you have to wonder why so many children in that part of the world are born that way? In fact every time I watch the film Predator the question crosses my mind. Was the condition a normal physiological characteristic of the genome mankind has developed from? Something that has been edited out through genetic engineering and hybridisation? The same with vestigial tails... can’t watch Alien Vs Predator without wondering about that.

The absence of the rhesus protein - identified in only about 15 per cent of the global population - is more common in parts of Europe and people of European descent, with the highest frequency occurring in Basques, historically from the western Pyrenees between Spain and France.

But it is also absent from a sizeable percentage of people from some denominations of the Jewish faith and Europeans of royal lineage or Celtic ancestry, although for all practical purposes the cultural group with perhaps the highest rate being the Berbers of Morocco, who may have originated from today’s border between Syria and Iraq. Could it perhaps be a characteristic not edited out of these groups for some ancient historical reason?

The advent of CRISPR is definitely one of the most revolutionary scientific breakthroughs this century, now giving biologists the technology to edit gene strands to repair or enhance the physical characteristics of virtually any living species.

One widely documented product of the technology, which appeared in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology, has been “buffed-up” beagles, with researchers in China having genetically engineered a pair of beagles to be more muscular.

The researchers mutated a muscle gene in the beagles to test the effects of CRISPR, having identified that “myostatin” gave bully whippets and Belgian Blue cattle bulky muscles without impacting on their health.

Lai Liangxue and her colleagues at the South China Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in Guangzhou injected the gene editor into 35 beagle embryos and, of 27 puppies born, two exhibited the edited genes.

A female puppy named Tiangou had both copies of the myostatin gene mutated in all of her cells and at four months old showed more muscular thighs than her unedited sister. A male puppy, Hercules, who carried double mutations in most, but not all, of his cells, wasn’t more muscular than other four-month-old puppies. But both dogs packed on more muscle as they matured.

But bulking up beagles is one thing, using gene-editing techniques to remove a cleft palate or vestigial tail in a hybrid creation is quite another thing. But if you’re familiar with the work of Russian-American author Zecharia Sitchin you’ll be aware of his theory that humanity on Earth is the product of a genetic-engineering programme carried out by an extraterrestrial race known as the Anunnaki, who created mankind as a labour force to extract gold they came here to mine in order to repair the atmosphere of their home planet, Nibiru.

An as-yet undiscovered distant member of our solar system beyond the Kuiper Belt, Sitchin maintained Nibiru orbited the sun every 3,600 years in an elliptical path that took it in the opposite direction to Neptune and the other seven planets. And, in about 300,000 BC, a mutiny hit their mining operation resulting in them engineering a primitive and more docile labour force from their own DNA and the genetic coding from a female ape. Although originally unable to procreate, increased demand for the workforce resulted in further experimentation that enabled them to produce offspring and multiply.

From 200,000 BC until about 100,000 BC the Earth underwent a cataclysmic glacial period and by the time the climate warmed once again, the Anunnaki had started breeding with their genetically-engineered labour force, the offspring of whom eventually became the dynastic rulers of ancient Egypt who, perhaps, were also characterised by the rhesus negative factor?

According to Sitchin the last vestiges of the Anunnaki fled Earth after the fall of Babylon in about 539 BC following what he described as a devastating nuclear war between rival factions. Sitchin writes that following the destruction of their Sinai “spaceport” the Anunnaki overlords used other operational bases in Meso-America from which to leave the planet... first for Mars and then Nibiru.

So a nuclear war right here on Earth more than 3,000 years ago? Ridiculous, you’d think, but incredibly there is evidence to back up this notion in the form of “Libyan Desert Glass” that can be found in a remote area of western Egypt and eastern Libya that covers more than a million square kilometres, known as the Great Sand Sea.

The origin of these silica glass deposits remains a mystery although the general consensus suggests they result from the sand being fused by intense heat... but the six million dollar question is what caused it? The Kebira Crater not far from the site suggests it may have been the result of a large meteor strike but the immense size of the alleged impact zone compared to the specific area where the green glass deposits, resembling trinitite, are found makes a nuclear explanation more compelling.

Trinitite gets its name from the glassy residue, primarily derived from melted sand composed of quartz grains and feldspar, left on the desert floor near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16 July 1945 following the United States’ plutonium-based Trinity nuclear bomb test.

But another site where trinitite-like deposits can be found is at Mohenjo-Daro in Pakistan’s Sindh province, which was constructed by the “Indus Valley Civilisation” credited as being one of the oldest on the planet... existing from about 3,300-1,300 BC.

And if you had a sound grasp of Sanskrit and had taken a look at ancient Vedic texts such as the Mahabharata, you’d be familiar with the mysteries that surround Mohenjo-Daro and the Indus Valley Civilisation. An extensive poem of about 215,000 verses, the Mahabharata details events that occurred there (about 3,100 BC) when gods and mortals are said to have fought out an epic battle.

Interestingly when theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer, the brains behind the US test in New Mexico and “father of the atomic bomb”, gave a lecture at the University of Rochester in the early 1950s he came out with a strange response to a student who asked him if the “first nuclear device that went off was the one at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project”.

Oppenheimer - who’d studied Sanskrit and was familiar with the Bhagavad Gita which forms part of the Mahabharata - responded: “Well... yes, in modern times, yes, of course.” But, what did he mean by that? Well, perhaps, that something similar had happened thousands of years earlier at Mohenjo-Daro?

The ancient Sanskrit Vedas are packed with fantastic stories about gods, their powers and epic battles widely perceived to be mythological but possibly hugely influenced by actual events. They describe tremendous celestial clashes between rival forces piloting craft called vimanas that are equipped with incredible weapons capable of causing immense destruction, with Libyan Desert Glass and trinitite perhaps the evidence to substantiate them?

Sitchin suggested the final vestiges of the Anunnaki’s colonisation of our planet could be found in Meso-America but perhaps the best evidence of their definitive existence here on Earth in our ancient past and their migration away from our planet to Mars, and later back to Nibiru, could be another incredible site, which to my mind stands out as probably the most mind-boggling on our planet.

Tiwanaku, situated high up in the Andes near the southernmost point of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia, provides by far the most unequivocal evidence you could imagine to substantiate the probable presence of extraterrestrials on our planet.

A truly incredible complex, some of the stone blocks found at Puma Punku are seven metres long and weigh more than 130 tonnes. There are some honed from a type of red sandstone which would have had to have been transported up a steep incline to reach the site, which sits well above the tree line in that part of the world. But the most amazing feats of engineering are the andesite H-blocks, supposedly crafted from the volcanic rock named after the Andes mountains themselves.

Usually grey in colour, it consists of feldspar and ferromagnesian minerals, with the H- blocks matching each other with extreme precision and having about 80 faces each. Oral legends in the region claim the first inhabitants were unlike ordinary humans and had supernatural powers that allowed them to transport the megalithic stones there by sound.

A study by Joseph Davidovits, Luis Huaman and Ralph Davidovits (published by the Geopolymer Institute in April 2019) argues that far from being incredible carved rocks the H-blocks are actually forms of ancient geopolymer concrete that contains organic matter, which simply does not appear in naturally-formed volcanic rock. Their conclusion: the blocks are made by artificial means and could be accurately dated using radiocarbon dating.

There’s no doubt Puma Punku is an absolutely amazing complex but the fundamental question left for mankind is will the builders, presumably the Anunnaki, return as Sitchin alleges they vowed to do?

Over the last decade there has been much speculation about the orbital trajectory of their home planet if, indeed, Nibiru actually exists and when its gravitational pull could next exert extreme effects on our planet as it passes through the inner solar system towards the sun before being pulled around it to begin its journey back out beyond the Kuiper Belt.

May 2018 had been put forward as a possible candidate by some theorists but that came and went with no sign of Nibiru nor the red kachina that heralds a “purification time” here on Earth in Hopi prophecy. However on Friday (3 October) what’s thought to be an interstellar intruder hurtling towards the sun will reach its nearest point to Mars and then disappear from telescopic range of our planet until after its passage closest to the sun towards the end of the month on a course that will make it visible from Earth again in early December before coming closest to our planet in the run-up to Christmas.

Before developing a fluorescent green tail as it began to close in on the sun, the comet (named 3I/Atlas) had originally appeared with a reddish hue that brought to mind the Hopi legend, with subsequent analogies also drawn with the arrival of Nibiru in the inner solar system. And, an unprecedented proliferation of comets hurtling through the cosmos this year, just adds to the mystery about what might be unfolding in the cosmos. Could the comet herald the return of the Anunnaki to our world?