Alford, Alan F. (1961-)

Alan Alford, an independent researcher on ancient mysteries, was born and raised in England. He attended the University of Birmingham, where he earned a degree in commerce (1982) and later completed his MBA at Coventry University (1993). Though trained as an accountant, his major interest has been the alternate view of ancient history first proposed by Erich von Däniken and then as developed by Zecharia Sitchin. He focused his own research, which he traces to the mid-1970s when he initially visited Egypt, on the "gods" mentioned so prominently in ancient mythological writings. Both von Däniken and Sitchin had identified these gods as extraterrestrials.

Alford published the fruits of his initial research in 1996, when he self-published his first book, Gods of the New Millennium, that generally supported Sitchin's hypothesis that Earth had been visited in the past by a race of people from a planet (called Nibiru or Marduk) in this solar system as yet undetected by astronomers. These extraterrestrials, the Anunnaki, came to Earth some 445,000 years ago. They enslaved humans, whom they put to work mining gold. They then became the source of human civilization. The year after Gods of the New Millennium appeared, Hodder and Stoughton republished it and gave Alford a three-book contract to write sequels, which they hoped would tap the same support given to Sitchin.

Alford shifted his attention from ancient Sumer and the Holyland, upon which Sitchin had concentrated, to Egypt, hoping to find further evidence of the Anunnaki. However, he concluded that the Egyptian myths did not support Sitchin's thesis; rather, they suggested what he came to call the exploded planet hypothesis. The gods were not extraterrestrial beings, they were meteors that rained down as meteorites. The Egyptian deities were the personifications of celestial powers, such as Ra, the Sun god. The ancient mythological references to the gods descending referred to the coming of fragments of the exploded planet. He also concluded that the Sumerian myths also referred to the exploded planet. This exploded planet hypothesis became the subject of Alford's second book, The Phoenix Solution (1998).

The Phoenix Solution alienated Alford from Sitchin's readers, though he has insisted that he did not depart from his commitment to the idea of the ancient intervention of extraterrestrials in human affairs, only that the gods mentioned in the ancient mythological literature of the Middle East do not provide the support that Sitchin proposed. That alienation was deepened in his third book, When the Gods Came Down (2000), which concentrated upon the Sumerian texts and further expounded upon the exploded-planet theory. Sitchin asked Alford not to criticize him directly, and Alford has followed that request, though the implicit destructive critique of Sitchin's ideas are not lost on anyone who reads Alford's books.

Alford has an extensive Internet site at http://www.eridu.co.uk/ericu.

Sources:

Alford, Alan F. Gods of the New Millennium. 1996. Reprint, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997.

——. The Phoenix Solution. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998.

——. When the Gods Came Down. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2000.