American-British author, best known for The Sirius Mystery (1976), and later for The Sphinx Mystery (2009), the moat and jackal theories that appendix eight of Origins of the Sphinx answers.
The Dogon claim
The Sirius Mystery argues that the Dogon of Mali possessed knowledge of Sirius B, a white dwarf invisible to the naked eye, along with its roughly fifty-year orbital period, and that this knowledge was transmitted in the deep past by amphibious beings from that system, whom Temple links to the Mesopotamian Apkallu and to Oannes. His source is the ethnography published by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen from fieldwork beginning in the 1930s.
Where the claim stands
The anthropologist Walter van Beek restudied the Dogon over a decade and reported in 1991 that he could find no such astronomical knowledge among them and no informant who recognised it, and argued that Griaule’s interviewing method had shaped what came back. Sirius B was described in the scientific press before Griaule’s fieldwork and European visitors had reached the region, so a transmission route exists in the ordinary direction. The claim remains the best-known single item of ancient-astronaut evidence and has no surviving independent support.
Connections
Apkallu · Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis · Origins of the Sphinx · Great Sphinx · Erich von Daniken · Zecharia Sitchin · The Anunnaki Connection · Heather Lynn