Noah Brosch explained in his book Sirius Matters that cultural transfer could have taken place between 19th century French astronomers and Dogon tribe members during the observations of the solar eclipse on 16 April 1893. Seriously: The Dogon and Sirius? As Picknett and Prince have been able to show, Temples arguments are often based on erroneous readings of encyclopdia entries and misrepresentations of ancient Egyptian mythology. If a European had visited the Dogon in the 1920's and 1930's, conversation would likely have turned to astronomical matters, including Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and the center of Dogon mythology. Its second, 1998, edition is called The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago. seem to have done little else than give the earthlings some useless It seems that Temples ideas are still popular among practitioners of pseudoarcheology, as well as with the general public. That in itself is extraordinary.". The mystery of the ancient "red" Sirius also remains baffling. Sirius was already the subject of a mystery concerning the traditional lore of the Dogon tribe of Mali, near Timbuktu in western Africa. For instance, the anthropologist Walter Van Beek, who studied the Dogon after Griaule and Dieterlen, found no evidence that the Dogon considered Sirius to be a double star and/or that astronomy was particularly important in their belief system. The Dogon myths may or may not be related to these other putties (or even to Kepler's supernova, which has been seriously suggested.) by Liam McDaid. No such nebula is seen. September 1976 saw "Legends of the Dogon: belief in a long-solved based his account on an interview with one person, Ambara, and an Swift appears to have taken the idea of two close (although not necessarily small) moons of Mars from Voltaire's novel Micromegos in which an They dont have telescopes or other A dynamical study published in 1995, based on anomalous perturbations of Sirius B (suggestive of the star being gravitationally influenced by another body) concluded that the presence of a third star orbiting Sirius could not be ruled out. If a European had visited the Dogon in the 1920's and 1930's, conversation would likely have turned to astronomical matters, including Sirius, the brightest star in the sky and the center of Dogon mythology. -- in other words, no disproof would follow the failure of his prediction.). There is, But that isn't the only parallel. I wonder. Temple's theory is heavily based on his interpretation of the work of ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. Furthermore, most Dogon symbology already has multiple levels of meaning; the sketches used to illustrate the Sirius secrets are also used in puberty ceremonies. ;p7D) The line that Temple labeled Orbit of Sirius B is actually a figure the Dogon think of as a cosmic egg. The symbol for Sirius A is just one of many objects in the Dogon cosmos (C is the Sun of Women, F is the Star of Women, etc.). Temples E. "Ancient Astronauts," in, McDaid, Liam. sources for Temple's story. Indeed, in view of the Dogon fixation with Sirius it would surely be more surprising if they had not grafted on to their existing legend some new astronomical information gained from Europeans. The Skeptics Society is a non-profit, Sagan, Carl 1980. astronomical information. [15] An apparent "third star" observed in the 1920s is now confirmed as a background object,[16] something previously suggested by Holberg in 2007: Benest and Duvent found that stable orbits with a period of up to six years exist around Sirius A. The position of the This sounds significant and convincing until one measures the distance on a map and discovers an "immensely accurate equality" of a twenty percent difference! of course, no evidence for this special eyesight, nor for other equally MANY SKEPTICS WOULD LIKE TO THINK THAT ONCE SOMETHING IS debunked, that will be the end of it. One of the problems the UFO crowd has is providing an answer to the question of where the aliens who visit us come from. History Debunked then goes on to demonstrate the type of pseudo-scientific nonsense this has lead to by providing a link to an Ethnomathematics paper and reading out its conclusion. Sirius B was known to exist then. For instance, the anthropologist Walter Van Beek, who studied the Dogon after Griaule and Dieterlen, found no evidence that the Dogon considered Sirius to be a double star and/or that astronomy was particularly important in their belief system. Readers of Skeptic are not so sanguine. In other words, the Dogon tribe would not only need the knowledge but also a telescope in order for them to have the information they already seemed to possess. Sirius B without the need of a telescope because of their special eyesight Temple has made very few verifiable assertions about mythology (and The Sirius Mystery is overwhelmingly about ancient myths, not about the Dogons or modern astronomy). Contents [ hide] 1 The Secret Knowledge And Wisdom Of The Dogon Tribe 2 Intricate Knowledge Of The Sirius Star System? A Search for Faint Companions to Nearby Stars Using the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2,. the Sirius "Mystery" by Ian Ridpath, Skeptical Inquirer, Fall terrestrial rather than extraterrestrial. Journalist and skeptic James Oberg collected claims concerning Dogon mythology in his 1982 book UFOs and Outer Space Mysteries. He has written of Temples belief that present-day authorities are unwilling to set aside the blinkers of orthodoxy, unable to admit the validity of anything that lies outside their field or that offers a challenge to the status quo. For example, he claims that the Dogon have a drawing like the one in Figure 1. [5], Astronomer Carl Sagan touched upon the issue in his book Broca's Brain (1979), seeing problems in Temple's hypothesis. Webplanet earth. The obviously advanced astronomical knowledge must have come from somewhere, but is it an ancient bequest or a modern graft? The inspiration for this claim was a star map produced by Betty Hill while under hypnosis. Except that this isnt the original Dogon drawing. Below: The Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy (discovered in 2003) is the nearest known galaxy to the centre of the Milky Way. Griaule and Dieterlen first described their findings in an article published in French in 1950, but they included no comment about how extraordinary the Dogon knowledge of the invisible companions was. Griaule," Current Anthropology 32, 1992, pp. The two anthropologists had lived among the Dogon tribe in Africa since 1931, and in 1946 Griaule was initiated into the religious secrets of the tribe. Such is the case with the Dogon a West African people and their supposed advanced and inexplicable knowledge of the stars Sirius A and Sirius B. Sirius A is the brightest star in our sky. Nor does he establish a connection between the Dogon creator Nommo and the star Sirius. Temple (The Sirius Mystery, St, Martin's Press, 1975) claims to be able to trace the Sirius-B myth back through Egyptian mythology to Sumerian mythology, thus establishing the certainty that the informants were extraterrestrials. civilization. 1978. It seems likely that we will never know for sure. WebAlso there is the fact that they described the Nommo as fish people and you find all kinds of half man/half fish - serpent imagery all over the Mediterranean. stream Create an account to follow your favorite communities and start taking part in conversations. characteristics. Since Sirius B is a very dense white dwarf star about the size of Earth, it can only be seen in dark skies with medium-sized telescopes. by Philip Coppens. Predictions are often reinterpreted to fit any outcome, which makes them scientifically worthless but which can be claimed to verify the pseudo- scientific claims. Credulous scholars, like Young and Temple, were taken in and through them a whole generation has swallowed the false mythology of aliens from the Dark Sirius Companion. This article appeared in Fortean Times. I published, showed the distances to be nowhere close, in error by tens of miles, at least ten percent -- hardly "immense accuracy. The Pleiades are sometimes mentioned, but this is not possible. WebThe population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000.. . The other five are still seen as red but from the time of Arab astronomers to the present day Sirius has been blue-white. But from whom? The difference in brightness between Sirius A and B is a factor of 10,000! Van Beek actually spoke to some of Griaules original informants; he noted that though they do speak about sigu tolo [interpreted by Griaule as their name for Sirius itself], they disagree completely with each other as to which star is meant; for some, it is an invisible star that should rise to announce the sigu [festival], for another it is Venus that, through a different position, appears as sigu tolo. Webplanet earth. Its appearance in the dawn sky over Egypt warned of the impending Nile floods and the summer's heat and marked the beginning of the Egyptian calendar. The alleged visitors from outer space %PDF-1.4 The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. It is a type of fuel that can lead to what Clay Farris Naff cleverly calls the neuron bomb. In this post, Michael Shermer asks, Is there a moral standard that stands above all the worlds religions that is based on some transcendent source?. Laird Scranton makes it clear that he ruled out this possibility in this interview. But the extraterrestrial hypothesis will not fade away so easily. He certainly did not have permission to use that statement as part of the promotion, I'11 just have to be even more careful hereafter.". Instead, he closed his response to my own article in 1979 with a brushoff: "In my view it is pointless to attack someone in print unless you can substantiate what you are saying. WebAlso there is the fact that they described the Nommo as fish people and you find all kinds of half man/half fish - serpent imagery all over the Mediterranean. Bullard, Thomas. Legends of the Dogon Belief in a Long-Solved Mystery Resurfaces. Another claim: that in Egypt the oasis of Siwa and the ancient Nile City of Thebes are both equidistant from the shrine city of Behdet, in the delta -- and the same exact distance, too. Of those websites, over 400 had been updated within the last three months. The Nine also claim to be extraterrestrial beings from the star Sirius. In 1967, Temple began work on the thesis that became The Sirius Mystery. Ideas originally published in 1948, reprint (Oxford University Press 1997). due to quantities of melanin (Welsing, F. C. 1987. African Observers of the Universe: The Sirius Question. In, Ortiz de Montellano, Bernard R. 1996. Griaule and Dieterlen's claims, to fit his fantastic story. The antiquity of the Dogon astronomy is not so obvious as ancient astronaut enthusiasts claim but neither has it been disproved. "We have in the Dogon information a predictive mechanism which it is our duty to test, regardless of our preconceptions." Also it would take a very good set of lenses to see Sirius B, which has an apparent magnitude of 8.44 and a separation from Sirius A of 10 arcseconds (0.3% of a 1 angle) under the best conditions. technological societies located on planet earth. They point out that the ancient Egyptians and Sumerians used spherical lenses6 (even though they are a bad choice to use in telescopes try seeing an image through a glass bead). Could Sirius B have been a red giant a few thousand years ago? Am I getting too picky here? Sirius. According to Robert Temple (The Sirius Mystery), the Dogon had But now, in another recent publication Ancient Mysteries by Peter James and Nick Thorpe this mystery is also uncloaked as a hoax or a lie perpetrated by Griaule. All rights reserved. But that doesn't stop Temple. have turned to astronomical matters, including Sirius, the brightest star in Y%gbsPFur[%X7Sz Also if it was seeded by westerners how is the Dogon and surrounding tribes have a fully developed culture and religion structure centered around Sirius going back for hundreds of years? Griaule, Marcel. WebNew evidence deals a devastating blow to what was considered to be the best case for extraterrestrial visitation. Flim-Flam! The Dogon have a traditional interest in the sky and astronomical phenomena. Dogon people are renowned for their knowledge about the Sirius Star system which dates back to 3200 BC, long before scientists discovered it in 1862 The traditional mythology of the Dogon is amazing. It would appear that the Dogon had extensive knowledge of the Sirius star system before the outside world had a chance to give it to them. This is a complicated issue, because several special interest groups each claim the Dogon for their own. Several possibilities exist. 2Q9-mV5F W4g?`Su#q6a]sdaGr*_70 ! ;`~RS)Hm@FGI.m3gcW|PF.(`VypT!]WM6'b//^FX[P\9:H37)DH,y|F(&Da]w o9-K?MR+z.R}7.ubqUIXVy~frF@". some 8.6 light years from earth. had visited the Dogon in the 1920's and 1930's, conversation would likely Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. <> Temple's book and the debates that followed its release publicized the existence of the Dogon tribe among many New Age followers and proponents of ancient astronaut theories. History Debunked then goes on to demonstrate the type of pseudo-scientific nonsense this has lead to by providing a link to an Ethnomathematics paper and reading out its conclusion. Many served in the French army in World War I and some of them could have returned years later with colorful embellishments for their native legends. 2000. Temple considers alternative possibilities other than alien contact, such as a very ancient, advanced, and lost civilization that was behind the sudden appearance of advanced civilization in both Egypt and Sumer. Ancient Press J to jump to the feed. answer is that they got this information from amphibious aliens from outer The assyrians called Sirius Kal-bu-sa mas (the Dog of the Sun) and in Chaldea, it was known as Kak-shisha (The Dog Star That Leads) Known History of the Dogon According to Dogon mythology, Nommo was the first living being created by Amma, the sky god and creator of the universe. Nigel Appleby whose book Hall of the Gods was withdrawn from publication has admitted to being tremendously influenced by Temples Sirius Mystery. Read Skeptic on Apple or Android devices, or on PC or Mac via PocketMags.com. Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. One of the pieces of evidence Temple cites is a sand picture made by the Myths and legends that are passed through generations are thousands of years old. sun and the phases of the moon are more pertinent for Dogon reckoning. This would have wreaked havoc on the climate of any planets orbiting Sirius A. The tribe has a periodic Sirius festival called the "Segui" ceremony; each celebration lasts several years (the last was in 1968-72.) Dwarfs and Little Green Men". The Dogon legend connected with Sirius, wrote Ridpath, "is riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors, at least if we try to interpret it literally." To Temple, this proved that "geodetic surveys of immense accuracy were thus practiced in ancient Egypt with a knowledge of the e issued monthly by the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles. 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