Robert Temple

Robert K. G. Temple is a writer on ancient history and science. His best-known book, The Sirius Mystery, was published in 1976 and revised in 1998.

Temple started from reports by the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen that the Dogon people of Mali knew that the star Sirius has an invisible companion, the white dwarf Sirius B. He argued that this knowledge came from amphibious beings from the Sirius system, the Dogon Nommo, and that the same visitors are remembered in the Babylonian Oannes, the fish-bodied teacher from the sea described by Berossus, and in Egyptian and Greek myths.

Critics answered on several fronts. Carl Sagan and the astronomy writer Ian Ridpath argued that the Dogon could have learned about Sirius B from Europeans, since it had been described by astronomers by the 1920s, and that the Dogon material included errors. The anthropologist Walter van Beek, who restudied the Dogon, found no evidence that they regarded Sirius as a double star. Scholars treat the hypothesis as unsupported; it remains a classic of ancient-astronaut literature.