The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago: New Scientific Evidence for Alien Contact 5, 000 Years Ago [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

BUT!

Then he goes off into a diatribe against plants (drugs) and how he abhores anyone who uses them. There is much more than ample evidence to show that the Dogon have an extensive pharmacopoeia (herb usage) history and their indiginous Shamanistic traditions are well known. So how in the world can Temple justify this abhorrent rejection of the Dogon spiritual beliefs (and plant usage) in this unresearched and completely dogmatic and biased blanket statement? He acts as if he has no knowledge of indigenous spiritual traditions as they relate to Entheogenic Sacramental substances (not only as pertaining to the Dogon but the world over), yet he condemns the scientific study (Entheobotany) and all the thousands of Theological and Botanical researchers in these fields before he ever even gives it a look. Either that or he is simply pushing dogmatic propaganda (which is a scary thought).

It is one thing to condemn a single researcher or scientist and quite another to condemn an entire field of research or science! And this is done here by one researcher (Temple) who asks us to give his research a fair chance and study his findings before condemning his work.

His statements against drugs and plant usage are profoundly ignorant and uninformed. Either that or as I said: "He is pushing propaganda (dis-information).

Temple has done an incredible amount of work digging-up obscure, but very significant, anthropological source data which compounds and reinforces, for him, a theory introduced to the West earlier this century about the origins of contemporary life as we know it.

Temple's meticulous attention to detail, and cross-referencing style build very convincing arguments, which prompt a finer re-reading of the material, generating a deeper interest in, and education of, a fascinating subject-area.

Some of the connections presented in the Sirius Mystery are tenuous, but not at all impossible.

If approached with a willingness to accept radically new ideas, even for a moment, then you will very much enjoy the richly textured tapestry of stories Temple weaves.

I approached The Sirius Mystery skeptically, and was suprised to find myself compelled to seriously consider the presented thesis. What impressed me was his obvious distaste for some of the more fanatical elements surrounding the concept of life other then that of Earth's. Temple is interested only in a serious consideration of the origins of Human Civilasation.

In all, a very refreshing, and extremely stimulating, professional work.

In evaluating Temple's claims, we can begin with the Dogon. Other anthropologists have consistently failed to verify Griaule and Dieterlen's claims, but let us assume that they were privy to otherwise privileged (gnostic) wisdom of the tribe. Even then, it is notable that the supposed antiquity of Dogon lore regarding Sirius B is not established, and in fact it has been demonstrated that relatively recent introductions, such as the Christ story, can be incorporated into the fundamental tribal wisdom within a generation's time. Carl Sagan and others have suggested that knowledge of Sirius B was brought to the Dogon by prior explorers. Since Sirius, as the brightest star in the sky, can be expected to be extremely important in such a society, knowledge of an invisible companion would be deemed very important indeed. Sagan's idea stands without a shred of evidence for it (there is no knowledge of such prior explorers), but compared to visitation by amphibious aliens, it would seem to have the greater weight. This, of course, is dependent on one's need to believe in wild things.

In any case, the extensive discussion of myth and language in disparate cultures seems weighty if only by virtue of length, and I have little doubt that at least some of the connections Temple draws are real. Others are more questionable, and it would be informative to hear from someone who actually studies ancient languages for a living as to how much of the word-play Temple deduces is just crankery. Temple's scholarship is certainly open to question. For example, the Dogon also believe in a third member of the Sirius system, and this most recent edition of "The Sirius Mystery" makes much of the discovery of a faint star near Sirius that confirms Dogon lore. If one checks the facts, one quickly finds that this star, though located near Sirius in the sky, is in fact several hundred light years away, and is no more a "member" of the Sirius system than our own sun. Mistakes like this one, assuming that they are mistakes, do not inspire confidence.

Neither do Temple's occasional references to his supposed persecution by the CIA, in which he strongly implies that the American government is working to undermine his work. In fact, even notwithstanding the conspiracy theories, "The Sirius Mystery" is rife with the hallmarks of crank science. The book is not especially well-written, and I imagine even the most enthusiastic believers in ancient extraterrestrial visitations will have some trouble getting through it. Others with less of an emotional attachment to such notions are advised simply to steer clear. There is nothing here to justify claims of "earth-shattering" knowledge.