fully admit that this explanation of being a parking place is simply ridiculous.” But while the book has gone through numerous printings, the error was never corrected.
THE CASE OF THE DOGON
A somewhat more sophisticated and specific ancient astronaut claim has been proposed by Robert Temple in his 1976 book
There is apparently nothing in Dogon legend to indicate that the Nomno were amphibious in nature. Temple (1976) assumes they were because Sirius is a very hot star, so a watery environment would be needed to keep any inhabitants of a planet near the star cool. Ridpath (1978–79) has pointed out, however, that astronomical observations have shown that the environment of the Sirius system is not compatible with life-supporting planets. For example, Sirius B is a source of soft X rays. The part of the system where water would be found in liquid form is constantly changing due to unstable orbits.
Both Ridpath (1978–79) and Story (1976, chap. 12) have examined Temple’s claims in detail and found them to be unsubstantiated. At some points Temple gets his facts wrong. The Dogon were the subject of intense anthropological investigation during the 1940s, and our knowledge of their culture comes from the work of these investigators (Griaule and Dieterlen 1954). Temple says that Dogon legend tells of an “ark” that comes from the sky, presumably a spaceship. But in fact Dogon legend tells of the Nomno coming on an “arch” or bridge from the heavens (Griaule and Dieterlen 1954), which carries a different meaning, not consistent with an extraterrestrial interpretation. Nor are such legends unique to the Dogon; they are found rather frequently in Africa (Ridpath 1978–79).
Another problem with the evidence used by Temple to support his theory is that much of it comes from literal interpretations of Dogon legends. Further, only those bits of legend that seem to support the theory are described. Temple does not inform his readers that Dogon legend is rich and complex and that it includes other elements that are inconsistent with his views.
The Dogon picture the Sirius system as shown in figure 19. According to Dogon legend, there are nine objects in the system, including Sirius A, and two (not one, as Temple says) invisible companion stars. In fact, there is only one invisible star in the Sirius system, so on this vital point of astronomical knowledge the Dogon legend is wrong.
It is still a puzzle that the Dogon do seem to know something about Sirius B—that it exists, for example, and that it is made of very dense matter. It’s one thing to shoot down Temple’s ancient astronaut explanation, which doesn’t hold water on close examination, but skeptics should be able to provide at least a reasonable alternative explanation. It turns out that what the Dogon say about Sirius B corresponds very well to what astronomers thought about the star in the 1920s. At that time it was thought to be made up of the densest matter in the galaxy, just as Dogon legend says it is. It is now known that much denser matter is found, for instance, in neutron stars so this aspect of the Dogon legend is also incorrect. The error suggests that the Dogon obtained their knowledge of Sirius B not from space travelers, but from contact with Westerners during the 1920s or later. Their legendary views about Sirius and its twin companions can be attributed to the great importance of Sirius itself in their religion and of “twinness” in their culture. This would lead the Dogon to the natural conclusion that any object as important as Sirius would have twin companions. If they couldn’t be seen, they must still be there, but invisible. When Westerners in the early twentieth century learned of the Dogon’s interest in Sirius, they told them of Sirius B and that information was incorporated into the legends.
Is it reasonable to think that such contact took place? Yes—as Ridpath (1978–79) points out, the Dogon have had considerable contact with Western culture since the early part of the twentieth century. There were French schools in the area as early as 1907, and missionaries visited the tribe in the 1920s and thereafter. The tribe is settled in an area near a trade route and the Niger River and has been in contact with Europeans since at least the late 1800s. There has been ample opportunity for them to acquire their knowledge of Sirius B.
Ridpath (1978–79) recounts an amusing story that demonstrates how quickly modern knowledge can become part of legend and folklore. A member of a primitive tribe in New Guinea astonished a physician by explaining that a particular disease was caused by invisible spirits that got into the body through the skin and made the victim sick. The native then drew in the sand and described verbally a picture that corresponded almost exactly to the view of germs through a microscope. Temple and von Daniken would no doubt have concluded that this knowledge had been obtained from extraterrestrial sources. How else could one explain this advanced medical knowledge on the part of so primitive a tribe? Happily, the story was told by the physician Arleton Gajdusek, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1976 for his work on the New Guinea disease kuru. It turned out that Gajdusek had shown members of the tribe a view of germs through a microscope while he was doing field work in the area. The natives had remembered the explanation and incorporated it into their own worldview, with a few changes.
The weaknesses and inconsistencies in Temple’s (1976) extraterrestrial hypothesis for the Dogon’s knowledge of Sirius B and the demonstration of contact between Europeans and the Dogon since the late 1800s add up to a convincing argument that there was never any contact between the Dogon and amphibious visitors from the Sirius system.
I will not spend the time or space to refute the hundreds of false claims, evasions of the truth, and deceptions perpetrated by von Daniken and his imitators. That has been ably done by several other authors. The interested reader is referred to the references cited above as well as to Stienbing (1984), Krupp (1981), Omohundro (1976–77), Story (1977–78), and Loftin (1980–81). Krupp (1978) has edited an excellent book on the true astronomical abilities of ancient peoples.
THE BERMUDA TRIANGLE
Von Daniken’s ancient astronaut theory was created in the 1970s. Another modern myth was also fabricated in the 1970s: the Bermuda Triangle, where ships and planes allegedly disappear under the most mysterious of circumstances.
Stories of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle area are alleged to date back to the 1800s. For years they appeared in books of miscellaneous “mysterious” events, such as Frank Edwards’s
The Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery from start to finish. The numerous articles and books touting the “mystery” are inaccurate, misleading, and often wilfully deceptive in their descriptions of the alleged mysterious happenings in the triangle. Kusche (1981, p. 297) accurately characterizes the triangle mystery as “the epitome of false reporting; deletion of pertinent information; twisted values among writers, publishers and the
