What is NASA Looking For?
--First of two articles—
The planet Mars is back in the news. This time, in spite of preceding failures (by Japan, Britain) of Mars missions, manmade Landers and their robotic rovers – NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity -- made it safely and successfully to the Red Planet. A spacecraft launched by the European Space Agency, Mars Express -– a companion to the British failed lander/rover mission -– is safely in orbit around Mars. And the initial indications, and photographs, already suggest that the assumption underlying these missions will be proven true; That Mars was once a planet with water -– rivers, lakes, perhaps even seas; and that some of that water is still there.
Although the current explorations on Mars in search of water (then or even now) have been presented as a new endeavor triggered by photographs of the surface of Mars taken in 1996 (Mars Global Surveyor) and since 2001 (Mars Pathfinder), the fact is that photographs taken two decades and more ago, by the Mariner spacecraft, already showed such evidence. In my book Genesis Revisited, 1990, I reproduced NASA’s own photographs to show evidence of water flows and shorelines, and concluded unequivocally that, at least in the past, Mars was a watery planet.
Searching for “Life”
So what exactly is NASA searching for?
Though only indirectly, with a wink or a Mona Lisa smile, NASA’s leaders say that “where there was water there could be life.” Officially, they are all just searching for evidence of water. If water is still there, it would make it so much more feasible to achieve the vision -– declared by President George W. Bush –- of sending people from Earth to Mars. A dream for the future!
In the midst of such exciting developments, it seems to me appropriate to tell to All Who May Be Concerned: Travel between Earth and Mars by intelligent beings has already been achieved -– tens of thousands of years ago!
The Sumerian Evidence
The evidence for that was recorded –- in words and illustrations -– by the Sumerians, whose civilization blossomed out in Mesopotamia (now mostly Iraq) some six thousand years ago.
They did not claim the achievement of visiting Mars for themselves. Rather, they wrote on their clay tablets about the Anunnaki (“Those who from Heaven to Earth came”) who came to Earth from their planet Nibiru, a twelfth member of our solar system (counting, as they did, the Sun, Moon and ten planets) whose great elliptical orbit around the Sun lasts some 3,600 (Earth-) years. The many ancient texts, unearthed by archeologists, that deal with the Anunnaki, their comings and goings, and the astronomical knowledge (among other sciences) that they bequeathed to Mankind, have been revealed and explained in my series of books, beginning with The 12th Planet.
Moreover, the texts have been accompanied by illustrations found on clay tablets or drawn on cylinder seals. In texts dealing with the actual space travel between the planets, Earth was designated as the seventh planet – which indeed it is but only if one counts from outside-in, where Pluto would be the first, Neptune the second, Uranus and Saturn third and fourth, Jupiter the fifth, Mars the sixth and Earth the seventh. In those texts, Mars was called “The Way Station” – a stopover place between Nibiru and Earth.
And, amazingly but true, a circular tablet that can be seen on display in the British Museum in London, describes in eight segments various aspects of space travel between the Anunnaki’s planet Nibiru and the “Seventh Planet” (Earth) – Fig. 122 in The 12th Planet. One segment in particular, enlarged here for clarity, (Fig. 123 in The 12th Planet) shows (and states) that the route traveled by Enlil (“Lord of the Command”) entailed passage by seven planets; it also called for a route diversion between the planet DILGAN (Jupiter) and APIN (Mars) 
Lees verder: http://sitchin.com/nasa_looking.htm