THE VISITORS OF THE DOGON
Sirius, one of the closest stars to earth, beaming across space from 8.7 light years away, has a companion star, Sirius B. But Sirius B is so faint, invisible to the naked eye and could only be seen with a very powerful telescope.
It was in the middle of the 19th century that astronomers in Europe and America suspected the existence of another star close to Sirius and finally in 1970, after the dawn of the space age, sophisticated telescope lenses and highly sensitive cameras finally captured the first images of Sirius B. It was a major triumph for the precise calculations of the modern scientific astronomers.
However, for the Dogon, a tribe in a secluded part of Africa, all this was just old news. It only confirmed what they had known all along. They knew Sirius B was out there in space and they had known it from the beginning of their unwritten history. They even named it To Polo. They knew it was composed of super dense cosmic material and they knew it orbited around Sirius in an elliptical path every 50 years.
For many centuries, they have paid reverence not just to the vivid light of Sirius but also to its white dwarf companion star Sirius B. The ancestors of the Dogon tribe had known with certainty, of the position of Sirius B without the use of any powerful or precise astronomical instruments. It was because of the strange amphibious creatures who visited them from the Sirius star system along time ago. According to their Elders, these creatures, whom they called the Nommo, had landed in a spaceship ‘ark’ in the north-east of their country early in the tribe’s history. These visitors gave the Dogon the birth of their unique culture.
Even eminent evolution experts agree that back in the mists of the dawn of time, all human life evolved from amphibious creatures who first crawled on to dry land out of the primeval oceans. But only the Dogon insist that these creatures who gave their mysterious scientific knowledge came from outer space. They even pinpoint the precise location of an unknown red dwarf star in the cluster around Sirius in which according to them is the dwelling place of their visitors.
To this day, no one has yet to identify the red dwarf star the Dogon tribe has spoken of. Does it really exist? Could powerful orbiting space telescopes trained on the Sirius cluster discover this mystifying star and its unfamiliar planets within the next few years? And how would the cynical scientists respond to the primitive Dogon tribespeople, who would merely smile and say: ‘We told you so, didn’t we?’
