another, we should not attribute remarkable prescience to the pre-Socratic philosopher who made the proposal. One of them was bound to be right on statistical grounds alone. In the same way, if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced.
But, according to Temple, the Dogon go further. They hold that Jupiter has four satellites and that Saturn is encircled by a ring. It is perhaps possible that individuals of extraordinary eyesight under superb seeing conditions could, in the absence of a telescope, have observed the Galilean satellites of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. But this is at the bare edge of plausibility. Unlike every astronomer before Kepler, the Dogon are said to depict the planets moving correctly in elliptical, not circular, orbits.
More striking still is the Dogon belief about Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. They contend that it has a dark and invisible companion star which orbits Sirius (and, Temple says, in an elliptical orbit) once every fifty years. They state that the companion star is very small and very heavy, made of a special metal called “Sagala” which is not found on Earth.
The remarkable fact is that the visible star, Sirius A, does have an extraordinary dark companion, Sirius B, which orbits it in an elliptical orbit once each 50.04 ±0.09 years. Sirius B is the first example of a white dwarf star discovered by modern astrophysics. Its matter is in a state called “relativistically degenerate,” which does not exist on Earth, and since the electrons are not bound to the nuclei in such degenerate matter, it can properly be described as metallic. Since Sirius A is called the Dog Star, Sirius B has sometimes been dubbed “The Pup.”
At first glance the Sirius legend of the Dogon seems to be the best candidate evidence available today for past contact with an advanced extraterrestrial civilization. As we begin a closer look at this story, however, let us remember that the Dogon astronomical tradition is purely oral, that it dates with certainty only from the 1930s and that the diagrams are written with sticks in sand. (Incidentally, there is some evidence that the Dogon like to frame pictures with an ellipse, and that Temple may be mistaken about the claim that the planets and Sirius B move in elliptical orbits in Dogon mythology.)
When we examine the full body of Dogon mythology we find a very rich and detailed structure of legend-much richer, as many anthropologists have remarked, than those of their near geographical neighbors. Where there is a rich array of legends there is, of course, a greater chance of an accidental correspondence of one of the myths with a finding of modern science. A very spare mythology is much less likely to make such an accidental concordance. But when we examine the rest of Dogon mythology, do we find other cases hauntingly reminiscent of some unexpected findings in modern science?
The Dogon cosmogony describes how the Creator examined a plaited basket, round at the mouth and square at the bottom. Such baskets are still in use in Mali today. The Creator up-ended the basket and used it as a model for the creation of the world-the square base represents the sky and the round mouth the Sun. I must say that this account does not strike me as a remarkable anticipation of modern cosmological thinking. In the Dogon representation of the creation of the Earth, the Creator implants in an egg two pairs of twins, each pair comprised of a male and a female. The twins are intended to mature within the egg and fuse to become a single and “perfect” androgynous being. The Earth originates when one of the twins breaks from the egg before maturation, whereupon the Creator sacrifices the other twin in order to maintain a certain cosmic harmony. This is a variegated and interesting mythology, but it does not seem to be qualitatively different from many of the other mythologies and religions of humanity.
The hypothesis of a companion star to Sirius might have followed naturally from the Dogon mythology, in which twins play a central role, but there does not seem to be any explanation this simple about the period and density of the companion of Sirius. The Dogon Sirius myth is too close to modern astronomical thinking and too precise quantitatively to be attributed to chance. Yet there it sits, immersed in a body of more or less standard prescientific legend. What can the explanation be? Is there any chance that the Dogon or their cultural ancestors might actually have been able to see Sirius B and observe its period around Sirius A?
White dwarfs such as Sirius B evolve from stars called red giants, which are very luminous and, it will be no surprise to hear, red. Ancient writers of the first few centuries A.D. actually described Sirius as red- certainly not its color today. In a conversation piece by Horace called “Hoc Quoque Tiresia” (How to Get Rich Quickly) there is a quotation from an unspecified earlier work that says: “The red dog star’s heat split the speechless statues.” As a result of these less than compelling ancient sources there has been a slight temptation among astrophysicists to consider the possibility that the white dwarf Sirius B was a red giant in historical times and visible with the naked eye, completely swamping the light of Sirius A. In that case perhaps there was a slightly later time in the evolution of Sirius B when its brightness was comparable to that of Sirius A, and the relative motion of the two stars about each other could be discerned with the unaided eye. But the best recent information from the theory of stellar evolution suggests that there simply is not enough time for Sirius B to have reached its present white dwarf state if it had been a red giant a few centuries before Horace. What is more, it would seem extraordinary that no one except the Dogon noticed these two stars circling each other every fifty years, each alone being one of the brightest stars in the sky. There was an extremely competent school of observational astronomers in Mesopotamia and in Alexandria in the preceding centuries-to say nothing of the Chinese and Korean astronomical schools-and it would be astonishing if they had noticed nothing. [4] Is our only alternative, then, to believe that representatives of an extraterrestrial civilization have visited the Dogon or their ancestors?
The Dogon have knowledge impossible to acquire without the telescope. The straightforward conclusion is that they had contact with an advanced technical civilization. The only question is, which civilization-extraterrestrial or European? Far more credible than an ancient extraterrestrial educational foray among the Dogon might be a comparatively recent contact with scientifically literate Europeans who conveyed to the Dogon the remarkable European myth of Sirius and its white dwarf companion, a myth that has all the superficial earmarks of a splendidly inventive tall story. Perhaps the Western contact came from a European visitor to Africa, or from the local French schools, or perhaps from contacts in Europe by West Africans inducted to fight for the French in World War I.
The likelihood that these stories arise from contact with Europeans rather than extraterrestrials has been increased by a recent astronomical finding: a Cornell University research team led by James Elliot, employing a high-altitude airborne observatory over the Indian Ocean, discovered in 1977 that the planet Uranus is surrounded by rings-a finding never hinted at by ground-based observations. Advanced extraterrestrial beings viewing our solar system upon approach to Earth would have little difficulty discovering the rings of Uranus. But European astronomers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would have had nothing to say in this regard. The fact that the Dogon do not talk of another planet beyond Saturn with rings suggests to me that their informants were European, not extraterrestrial.
In 1844 the German astronomer F. W. Bessel discovered that the long-term motion of Sirius itself (Sirius A) was not straight but, rather, wavy against the background of more distant stars. Bessel proposed that there was a dark companion to Sirius whose gravitational influence was producing the observed sinusoidal motion. Since the period of the wiggle was fifty years, Bessel deduced that the dark companion had a fifty-year period in the joint motion of Sirius A and B about their common center of mass.
Eighteen years later Alvan G. Clark, during the testing of a new 18?-inch refracting telescope, accidentally discovered the companion, Sirius B, by direct visual observation. From the relative motions, Newtonian gravitational theory permits us to estimate the masses of Sirius A and B. The companion turns out to have a mass just about the same as the Sun’s. But Sirius B is almost ten thousand times fainter than Sirius A, even though their masses are about the same and they are just the same distance from the Earth. These facts can be reconciled only if Sirius B has a much smaller radius or a much lower temperature. But in the late nineteenth century it was believed by astronomers that stars of the same mass had approximately the same temperature, and by the turn of the century it was widely held that the temperature of Sirius B was not remarkably low. Spectroscopic observations by Walter S. Adams in 1915 confirmed this contention. Hence, Sirius B must be very small. We know today that it is only as big as the Earth. Because of its size and color it is called a white dwarf. But if Sirius B is much smaller than Sirius A, its density must be very much greater. Accordingly, the concept of Sirius B as an extremely dense star was widely held in the first few decades of this century.
The peculiar nature of the companion of Sirius was extensively reported in books and in the press. For example, in Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s book
