dogon sirius debunked

seem curious. They know about the existence of the star Sirius B, a companion star to the brightest star in our sky, Sirius A. The good news is that two of the first five entries were from skeptical websites (CSICOP and Bob Carrolls Skeptics Dictionary). ", Investigating Worse still, hundreds of thousands of years ago, Sirius B was a dying red giant. Giants appear in cultures around the world: Biblical tales of giants more than ten feet tall; Roman and Greek stories of titans and heroes; European stories of giants of mountain and hill. Here is an example of how hard it can be to critically examine the claims in the book. We need more reliable evidence -- especially theories that can be tested. In that case the Dogon (and everyone else) would have had little trouble seeing both stars then. Because Sirius B moves from 8 to 31 AU distance from Sirius A, it is unlikely that planets orbiting Sirius A would have stable orbits. This is a complicated issue, because several special interest groups each claim the Dogon for their own. The Dogon are a people of about 100,000 who dwell in western Africa. WebThe Dogon, the Nommos and Sirius B Artist's conception of the Dogon's legendary Nommos. Liam McDaid is Astronomy Coordinator and Professor of Astronomy at Sacramento City College. ), many debunked issues keep rising from the dead like vampires springing from their tombs. As the brightest star in the sky it was known and worshiped by ancient civilizations. from black Egyptians who had telescopes. Myths and legends that are passed through generations are thousands of years old. 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? The Dogon. The proof is supplied by (the Odyssey), where Helios is said to possess 7 herds of 50 cows each and 7 herds of 50 sheep, a transparent allegory of the days and nights of the year.") Temple claims that bas-reliefs of the Sumerian demigod Oannes, which depict a "fish man," prove Nommo, whom the author identifies as the ancestor of the Dogon Nommo myths, was an amphibious extraterrestrial. Mysteries (Ballantine Books, 1999). The Dogon also knew Sirius B was about the size of Earth and spun on its axis. amphibious aliens or telescopic vision due to melanin. 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. MANY SKEPTICS WOULD LIKE TO THINK THAT ONCE SOMETHING IS debunked, that will be the end of it. Our mysteries may be different but our questions are the same and we are no wiser. Bullard, Thomas. But the extraterrestrial hypothesis will not fade away so easily. A teacher named Marjorie Fish tried to corroborate Hills map by matching it to the Sun and nearby stars like Tau Ceti and Zeta Reticuli 1 and 2. The expedition, led by Henri Deslandres, stayed in the field for five weeks, and it is reasonable that during this time many contacts with the locals took place, and that relatively modern astronomical knowledge was then transferred. Griaule did not attempt to explain how the Dogon could know Knowledge of the stars is not important The legend of the Dogons astronomical precociousness first appeared on the radar in the 1970s. WebRe: Dogon Sirius claim debunked - Graham Hancock Official Website Mysteries Taken from [ library.thinkquest.org] According to the Dogon priests, Sirius is orbited by a tiny secret star that they refer to as 'po', which traces an elliptical path around Sirius taking 50 years to "Legends of the Dogon: belief in a long-solved WebThe claims about the Dogons' astronomical knowledge have also been challenged. "Perhaps (Oberg) is unaware," Temple went on, "that the differential curvature of the earth variously distorts distances shown on maps. Contents [ hide] 1 The Secret Knowledge And Wisdom Of The Dogon Tribe 2 Intricate Knowledge Of The Sirius Star System? Beware of mood swings. 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. Young was a fervent believer in the Council of Nine, a mysterious group of channelled entities that claim to be the nine creator gods of ancient Egypt. No other anthropologist supports their opinions. As an example, Sagan believes that because the Dogon seem to have no knowledge of another planet beyond Saturn which has rings, their knowledge is therefore more likely to have come from European, and not extraterrestrial, sources.[11]. 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. WebThe star Sirius is certainly no stranger to mysteries. Perhaps so -- it does seem like a trivial point, arguing over how different two meaningless geographical distances really are. Investigating I have never completely understood Temple's complaint to "Astronomy" about my critiques: "I could not object to a review of a book which was fair, honest, or intelligent, no matter how critical or damning it might be of the opinions expressed in the book or the quality of work behind the book. The Sirius mystery, though, remains of great interest to many researchers today. Legends of the Dogon Belief in a Long-Solved Mystery Resurfaces. due to quantities of melanin (Welsing, F. C. 1987. 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. 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. WebThe Dogon understanding of astronomy was comparatively modern but has several known misconceptions - it entirely lines up with the European understanding as of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, before the discovery of relativity. When Walter van Beek studied the Dogon, he They observe that information about the odd invisible companion of Sirius had been widely published in Europe years before Europeans recorded the Dogon myths. Second, while it is difficult to obtain precise locations of many archeological sites referred to in The Sirius Mystery, Temple himself shows a map that gives the location of Behdet (31.23 degE, 31.50 degN) and Thebes (32.63 degE, 25.70 degN). The brightest star in the sky is Sirius, now called Sirius A. 7 0 obj ;p7D) Europeans too talked about the discovery of a third star in the Sirius system; later investigations, however, ruled out that possibility. Skeptic. Such criteria suggest that these periodic festivals have been going on for at least 600 years and possibly much longer. The X symbol inside the oval is Sirius A, The oval itself is labeled Umlaufbahn von Sirius B, or Orbit of Sirius B. Pretty convincing. Although we can occasionally claim victory (are there any alchemists left? At least three are farther and at least one of them has rings too. It was very unlikely that the Dogon had learned of this stars existence from Westerners prior to the visit by Griaule and Dieterlen. The book's advertising blurb quotes prolific science writer Isaac Asimov, who says, "I couldn't find any mistakes in this book. It's fascinating. Paranormal, ed. This would have wreaked havoc on the climate of any planets orbiting Sirius A. Sirius figures prominently in the Dogon myths. The oldest traces of life on Earth go back to about that time. Whew! Is Sirius a Triple Star?, Adams, H. H. 1983. of their culture, came from Sirius -- which is at the crux of Temple's reconstruction? To penetrate this supposed disguise (which might not be a disguise at all, other classical scholars maintain), Temple resorts to ancient puns, to hidden meanings, to "garbled versions" which he must amend to fit the theory, to the exchange of consonants in innocent-looking words, to similar-sounding words from of earth and transmitted in conversation. some 8.6 light years from earth. Unfortunately he neglects to mention other bas-reliefs which show "fish-deer" and "fish-lions" and which consequently suggest that the fish motif was symbolic, not descriptive. A substantial bulk of The Sirius Mystery consists of comparative linguistic and mythological scholarship, pointing out resemblances among Dogon, Yoruba, Egyptian and Sumerian beliefs and symbols. Some pseudosciences such as homeopathy and free energy never die. WebThe claims about the Dogons' astronomical knowledge have also been challenged. Broca's Brain (New York: Random House, 1979), Hmm, The Cardiff Giant, one of the most celebrated hoaxes in American history, on display at the Farmers Museum in Cooperstown, NY. The bad news is that the pseudoscience websites were in seventeen different languages. Further, "The fact that the Dogon do not talk of another planet with rings beyond Saturn [i.e., Uranus, whose rings were discovered in 1977--and the rings of Jupiter weren't discovered until after Sagan's book was written, although they would have been clearly visible to any arriving extraterrestrial spacecraft] suggests to me that their informants were European, not extraterrestrial." WebThe population numbers between 400,000 and 800,000.. . The interval between ceremonies may be forty, fifty or sixty years. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. The alleged visitors from outer space Some surviving informants of Griaule who spoke to van Beek made it clear that the Dogon learned about Sirius B from him!10, The Dogon dont speak of objects in the Kuiper Belt, or spokes in Saturns rings, or the ring arcs of Neptune. The position of the 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?. this about a star that cannot be seen without telescopes, and he made no The stars in this group are too young only a few tens of millions of years for planets with life and civilization to have developed. In 1952, Young was one of nine people present during the first contact with the Council, an event initiated by Andrija Puharich, the man who brought Israeli spoonbender Uri Geller to America. 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