by Michael Bara

from LunarAnomalies Website
 

The Sirius Mystery

by Robert Temple

extracted from The Sirius Mystery
Second Edition
Chapter I
August, 1997

How could the ancient and secret traditions of an African tribe contain highly precise astrophysical information about invisible stars in the Sirius star system? Some of it has only been discovered very recently by modern scientists, half a century after it was recorded by anthropologists studying the tribe.

The situation regarding The Sirius Mystery has changed completely since the initial edition of the book was published in 1976.1 At that time the Dogon tribal tradition insisted upon the existence of a third star in the system of Sirius which modern astronomers could not confirm. Some critics said this proved the hypothesis of the book to be false.

If the Earth had been visited by intelligent beings from the system of the star Sirius in the distant past, and they had left behind all this precise information about their star system, the fact that they described the existence of a third star, a Sirius C, whose existence could not be confirmed by modern astronomy rendered the whole account untrustworthy. However, the existence of Sirius C has now been confirmed after all.

The basis of science is that you put forward a hypothesis containing a prediction, and you them seek to verify or refute that prediction. If the prediction is confirmed, the hypothesis is considered to be verified. The hypothesis of The Sirius Mystery has now been verified in a dramatic fashion. In1976 and in the years immediately following I predicted on numerous occasions that the existence of a small red dwarf star would be verified in the Sirius system, to be called Sirius C according to the standard naming schemes of astronomy (there already being an A and a B).

This has now happened. In 1995 the French astronomers Daniel Benest and J. L. Duvent published the results of years of study in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics stating that a small red dwarf star, Sirius C, seems to exist in the system of the star Sirius.2 They have detected a perturbation which cannot be explained by any other means.

This Verification is a highly specific astrophysical prediction which has now been confirmed. It is not as if I had predicted that, say, a comet would approach Earth in 1997. There are many comets, and one might approach Earth at any time. But when one predicts that a star will be discovered in a specific star system and that it will be a specific type of star, and when this indeed happens twenty years later, that is rewarding.

What is the hypothesis, then, which has been so startlingly confirmed in the best traditions of science?

It is that our planet has at some time in the past been visited by intelligent beings from the system of the star Sirius. This suggestion is no longer considered as astounding as it was in 1976. After all, The Sirius Mystery generated enormous discussion around the world, and has done so continuously since its appearance. Many years have passed and public opinion has undergone a sea change.

This book seems to have founded a genre of books, and there are several bearing the names of Sirius or Orion in their titles. In the 1970s it was the 'New Agers' who were the first to adopt the sentiments of The Sirius Mystery, and my phrase 'cosmic trigger' even became the title of one of several books discussing such issues at great length. (See Bibliography for Robert Anton Wilson.)

I was recently surprised to learn that the Internet has many web sites discussing The Sirius Mystery, and there seems to be a whole Sirius Industry out there in cyberspace somewhere. A friend recently asked me: 'Don't you ever use a search engine to look up "Sirius", "Dogon", etc.?'

I have to admit I don't. Although I do use the Internet, I don't have time to consult websites discussing my own work - I leave that to others - but I am glad to learn that the interest is so large, and I just hope that they've got all the information correct.

Many of my pleas in 1976 have been answered: for instance, a young man read the appendix about Proclus and decided to do his Ph.D. about him, and has now published a very extensive book on the subject of Proclus (see Postscript to my Appendix II). Another man read my book in 1977 while traveling in Egypt and decided to undertake his own researches relating to the subject: his name is Robert Bauval, and his articles and his book The Orion Mystery have explored some fascinating possibilities about the Sirius cult and the Egyptian pyramids. He contacted me several times and when we finally met, he urged me strongly to revise and reprint this book.

I took his suggestion seriously, as you can see.

 

In this first portion, Temple defines the nature of the argument and quite rightly takes credit for a successful, specific, prediction. Note how the critics, some of whom found it necessary to attack the book in the reviews section of Amazon.com, have tried to minimize this confirmatory result, just as they did when many of the predictions regarding the Face on Mars were confirmed by Mars Global Surveyor.

 

As you will see, Temple is not only a brother in arms when it comes to the nature of the attacks on his work, but also in the identity of the attackers ...

Since the original publication of The Sirius Mystery was a whole generation ago, few will recall the amazing excitement generated by its appearance. No book quite like that had ever been published before. But I had to apologize constantly for talking about little green men, and some close friends dropped me entirely and never spoke to me again because extraterrestrials at that time were not deemed socially acceptable, not any discussion of them.

For instance, an older woman with whom I had had what I thought was a close friendship for years, turned her back on me completely after publication of The Sirius Mystery, and mutual friends said it was because I had published something about spacemen, which she thought was simply an appalling thing to do. A number of British scholars whom I knew used to ridicule the fact that I had discussed something as lowbrow as spacemen, and I was therefore clearly not a respectable person.

But the critical reception of The Sirius Mystery in the British press in its first year was universally ecstatic. It got favorable lead reviews on the day of publication in The Times and the Telegraph, and then a seemingly endless mass of reviews in nearly every newspaper and magazine in Britain - all favorable. No one was more surprised than my publisher, who had dragged his feet for about three years after delivery of the manuscript before the book came out. (My advance for the book was lb500, if you want to know, and no royalties were due for three or four years after delivery because of publication delays.)

But the book then went on to become a worldwide best seller, even in such unexpected places as the former Yugoslavia. The country where it was most appreciated was Germany, where it was on the bestseller list for more than six months. Soon after initial publication, the book was favorably reviewed in a lead review by a professor of astronomy for Nature magazine. Later it was reviewed in Time Magazine. It was featured on a Horizon program on BBC Television (also a Nova program on PBS in the USA).

The British astronomical community, which is not an arrogant community, seemed relatively unshocked by my book. This was possibly because a number of leading astronomers knew me, and I had 'done the right thing' by first airing the subject matter in The Observatory, published by the Royal Greenwich Observatory.3 This had gained the personal support and backing of Professor William McCrea, who as a President of the Royal Astronomical Society, Gold Medal winner, and one of the nicest people in England, commanded universal respect and affection amongst his colleagues.

So much was I accepted as part of the background radiation, albeit a rather aberrant part of it, that some good-humored joking about me appeared in The Observatory. I was thrilled when a spoof appeared in their joke issue of October, 1977,4 as I enjoy anything of that kind. In Germany some of the cartoons about the Sirius Mystery appeared in the newspapers, and that delighted me too. A newspaper cartoonist in America spoofed the Sirius Mystery, and Faith Hubley, an Oscar-winning film animator, did some charming fey animated films inspired by it (only generally inspired, so no income alas).

I remember going to see her in New York and holding her three Oscars all at once - how many people have three Oscars on view in their sitting rooms?

I certainly met a lot of interesting characters through the Sirius Mystery. But others I avoided. For instance, the late Timothy Leary was very keen for me to join him in California for some joint grooving on the subject of Sirius, after he got out of prison, but the idea of such a thing was so repellant to me that it still makes me shudder. There is nothing I hate quite so much as drugs and the drug-culture.

But the sad part of the aftermath of The Sirius Mystery was the extreme and virulent hostility towards me by certain security agencies, most notably the American ones. Since I am myself an American by origin, I found this insulting and distressing. On several occasions I was targeted in ways so extreme that they seemed hysterical beyond all belief. I am certain that false information was entered into my security files to blacken my reputation. I was blackballed even in some organizations which seem to me so harmless that I still can't understand it.

To give an example, I was co-editing a magazine at one time and decided to join the Foreign Press Association (FPA) in London so that I could have lunch there and get a press pass. I was told I needed two members to recommend me, and was given the names of two American journalists in London who should be happy to do so. So I asked Bonnie Angelo of Time-Life, and she was delighted. (I later wrote for her London bureau for several years and did British science reporting for Discover magazine.)

I then went to another man who was equally friendly and he said he would, and signed my form. That particular man, whom I do not wish to identify, had certain connections in Washington, if you take my meaning.

A few hours later, Catherine Postlethwaite, the Secretary of the FPA, told me she had a hysterical phone call from a man insisting that he wanted to use his blackball against me and stop me from joining the FPA. She was completely astonished and said to him he had just signed my form and now on the same day he was trying to blackball me, and how could he possibly explain that?

He refused to explain, but was relentlessly insistent.

She and the Council took the view in the end that the man was acting unreasonably, for whatever motives, and they overruled his blackball. But I recognized a pattern of behavior which has assailed me on many occasions. There was another time, for instance, when I had commenced what was meant to be a profitable association with a man I knew to make several series of corporate videos, with me as writer and co-producer and his company providing the finance and facilities. We made one video and suddenly everything stopped mysteriously.

After some time he told me:

'I really wanted to do these projects with you, but I can't, and even though I am not supposed to tell you, I felt that I owed you an explanation. The fact is that I have had the CIA from America on the phone to me practically every day for the past three weeks harassing me and telling me I must not work with you, and as much as I like you, my life isn't worth living with this kind of continual pressure and interruption of my work every day by hysterical American officials. So that is the reason, and the only reason, why I am withdrawing from our projects together.'

I thanked him for being so honest with me.

Several other people were as well. Indeed, one old fellow I was friendly with, a retired Brigadier Shelford Bidwell, actually told me that he had been asked to read The Sirius Mystery and write a thorough report on it for the British security services. He had found it rather difficult because it was not his kind of subject!

He hadn't meant to tell me this, but he slipped up when chatting over tea and said by way of being pleasant how interesting The Sirius Mystery was.

When I expressed astonishment that he had read something so far from all his other interests, he first said that he had read every word meticulously, as if that explained everything. When I protested that this was quite unbelievable, he had to explain why he had done so. He was so sheepish and embarrassed that I spared him further questioning so that he wouldn't have to spend the rest of his life with a security breach on his conscience.

Another old friend, whom I had known when he was a policeman in a panda car and who is now a famous police commissioner, said he had been approached by MI5 to do a security report on me. He had found it disturbing that there was such suspicion attached to me, and he couldn't explain it, since he wasn't given an explanation himself. He tried to tell them there was nothing at all suspicious about me and that he knew me well, and he wrote up everything he could find about me trying to demonstrate that I was harmless.

But they didn't seem to want to be told that and were obviously unsatisfied, which disturbed him even more.

This prosecution went on for more than fifteen years. It cost me income, career opportunities, advancements, and friends. I often wonder about it, especially the frenzied aspects of it.

• Why were so many people in high places foaming at the mouth in such an uncontrollable manner?

• Just what was it that I had done?

I have never known.


 

We do.

 

What Temple had done was to violate the inviolate. Just as the infamous "Brookings Report" documented at the dawn of NASA, and as Arthur C. Clarke reiterated 9 years later in "2001 - A Space Odyssey," there must be a period of preparation before certain disturbing truths can be revealed.

 

Obviously, someone at these intelligence agencies was upset that Temple might be jumping the gun and getting a bit too close to the truth. So he was roughed up a bit to keep him from pursuing the Mystery.

This is no idle speculation. The bottom line is that there is no mundane scenario under which research into the beliefs of an ancient tribe of Africans can be of any interest to intelligence agencies concerned with national security. Unless of course the very idea of alien intervention in human affairs or public attention being focused on Sirius itself is in some way a security threat. As you will see, it only gets better ...

There were two employees of NASA who made attacks on me which I thought went far beyond mere critical disagreement. This was all the more distressing to me because I had been friends for some years with a delightful man, Captain Robert Freitag of the US Navy, who was Deputy Director of the Advanced Programs department of NASA's Office of Space Flight.

Bob Freitag and I met through Arthur C. Clarke and when he came to London, Bob and I would often meet for dinner, as we were both very keen on good food and I would try to find something unusual, such as a Hungarian restaurant. On a visit to Washington I called in to see Bob Freitag and he said he had a very bright fellow who worked for him called Jesco von Puttkamer, whom he wanted me to meet. He called him in and I told both of them about The Sirius Mystery.

This man was actually Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, and I believe he was one of the Germans who came to the United States with Werner von Braun. But I was shocked when later von Puttkamer maligned me in an astonishing manner on official NASA writing paper (in German) to my German publishers, a separate arm of which had apparently asked him to review my book for a journal.

The letter said (11 July 1977) of me (my translation) that,

'he acts like a UFO-follower and leaps directly to the most farfetched hypothesis, which requires an assumption of an assumption of an assumption, namely that of extraterrestrial astronauts, because he believes it. This is rather religious than scientific ... Temple's work ... in the scientific sense is worthless; the evidences which he puts forward represent no proofs. The thesis which he put forward to my opinion presents not the slightest evidence, not to mention proof'.

Von Puttkamer went on to say that he was available to give a lecture in Frankfurt if they wanted him to.

I wrote to Bob Freitag on September 3, 1977, and said:

'My German publishers, Umschau Verlag, have sent me a copy of a highly objectionable letter about me and my book The Sirius Mystery written to them by your friend Puttkamer on NASA stationery, signing it from the Advanced Programs Office. As this could be construed as an official expression of NASA sentiments, I must ask you to send both to me and my German publishers a letter disassociating NASA from the sentiments expressed by Puttkamer ... (he) says that I used his name in a television broadcast as supporting my hypothesis. This is entirely untrue.

 

He says that I did this,

"in a completely fabricated performance, which would obviously serve to give the book status".

I am very disturbed at this outpouring of vituperation from your friend ... Puttkamer then goes on to attribute to me ideas which do not appear in my book (such as the story of Gilgamesh records the visit of spacemen, which is I believe an idea of von Daniken's) based on things discussed in parts of the book, namely the second half, which he admits he has not even read.

Bob Freitag was not pleased by von Puttkamer's behavior, and Bob wrote to me on September 16,1977, saying of von Puttkamer:

'I was unaware of the contents of his letter and the problem it has caused you.

'First, I hasten to disassociate the Advanced Programs Office and NASA from the views expressed by Mr. von Puttkamer. These are certainly his private views ... I have instructed him to get in touch with you and the firm to provide quickly the disclaimer that he was speaking privately and not expressing a NASA viewpoint ... I remain interested in your plans for a new book and would be pleased to be kept up to date on your plans and progress. I would like the opportunity of discussing this in London ...'

Von Puttkamer followed with a letter dated October 7,1977, saying of his views:

'It does not represent anything like an "official NASA position". The use of the stationery may have given you that impression (using it was a thoughtlessness which I regret) ... I regret that this caused the appearance of an "official NASA sentiment" to you.'

He also said that he had not meant to attack me personally.

Despite being a NASA scientist he had put forward a very weird hypothesis, astronomically impossible, that Sirius B had once been visible to the naked eye. Such ignorance of astrophysics surprised me; his statement completely ignored the parallax which would prevent Sirius B, whatever kind of star it was earlier in its history, from being differentiated from Sirius A by the naked eye.

So much for Jesco von Puttkamer, who never entered the frey again.


 

For the record, Baron von Puttkamer was brought over in Operation Paperclip, yet another interesting aspect of this story. He also managed to manipulate his way into becoming the science advisor on the first Star Trek film by undermining the close relationship that producer Gene Roddenberry had developed with his first choice to the film's science advisor - a young man named Richard C. Hoagland ...

But it was much more difficult to deal with the behavior of another NASA employee, who was not under Captain Freitag and whose actions could not be so easily rebuked. I do not propose to name this man, but his activities were revealed to me by Arthur Clarke who telephoned me from Sri Lanka telling me that the man, whom he did not previously know, had contacted him in order to criticize me very stridently.

Arthur said he thought I ought to know this because he had the impression that the man was contacting quite a lot of other people in the same way, one of whom was Isaac Asimov (whom I knew only slightly). He believed there were half a dozen other people 'of equal importance and stature' to whom this man was maligning me.

In 1977 the BBC made a 90-minute television documentary special for their series Horizon, entitled 'The Case for Ancient Astronauts'. I was contracted as a Researcher, which was my first television job. I was originally supposed to be the subject of the entire program, but the producer, Graham Massey, became more interested in discrediting Erich von Daniken, so most of the program was devoted to that.

Graham did an incredible demolition job on von Daniken; I did not prepare that material, but worked only on my own subject matter. The last fifteen minutes of the program were devoted to the Sirius Mystery, which Graham treated very fairly indeed, contrasting it as a 'respectable theory' with what he considered the nonsense of von Daniken.

From the script, which I have, I see that the narration of the program states of myself that,

'He is an assiduous, careful, and extremely knowledgeable researcher.'

While the program was being prepared, Graham kept getting phone calls from a stranger in America. Finally Graham told me about them. He said the man was ranting and saying 'you must not let Robert Temple on television'. (Also, it appeared that the man in question was available for an interview himself at anytime!)

Graham told me:

'I told this annoying man that I am the producer of the program and I make my own decisions about who appears in it and who doesn't, and would he please stop calling me all the time.'

The man apparently kept mentioning that he worked for NASA, and Graham was doubly annoyed that there seemed to be the implication that the American authorities did not think I should receive media attention.

The man was the same one who had phoned Arthur Clarke. NASA was never disassociated from this man's activities and attacks against me.


 

So who was this "annoying man" who was so frothingly determined to keep Robert Temple and the Sirius Mystery from getting on television? And who apparently had the full backing of NASA in his efforts?

Well, by agreement with Temple, we are not at liberty to disclose the "annoying man's" name. We are however, not above dropping the subtlest of hints as to his identity ...

So ask yourself, why was this "annoying man," supposedly such a paragon of strict empiricism and logical skepticism, so anxious to keep Temple from being heard? For the same reasons that the intelligence agencies were!

 

Because Temple was not "on the team" and therefore not aware of the information release policy, he had to be kept from obtaining an audience at all costs. Again, is this the behavior of cool rationalists who have nothing to hide? Next, Temple discusses his idea that the Sphinx at Giza is not feline, but canine (an idea we respectfully disagree with). Then he goes on to discuss other intriguing aspects of the Sphinx itself ...

There is another aspect of the Sphinx, about which so much has been said in recent years by other authors, which seems to me a red herring. John Anthony West has become the central figure in this debate, which concerns the water erosion which is so evident at the Sphinx.

As far as I know, I was the first person to publish West's theories on the subject. From 1978 to1980 I was co-editor of an American magazine called Second Look, and my co-editor Randy Fitzgerald and I agreed to publish West's interesting article 'Metaphysics by Design. Harmony and Proportion in Ancient Egypt', in which West first aired the matter of the water erosion. I recently gave a copy of this to West, who had none and had forgotten all about it. The article appeared in the June 1979 issue.7

Later in the same year, West's book Serpent in the Sky: The High Wisdom of Ancient Egypt appeared.8

West's book was very badly edited and constructed, as I have told him personally, and it did not make the impact it should have done with the public. A surprisingly large proportion of the book consisted of disconnected quotations from a variety of books which were not integrated into the text nor subject to any kind of comment; thee were all placed in a very large margin which ran throughout the book.

A large amount of material about the Dogon appeared in this fashion, and two pages of marginalia relating to The Sirius Mystery.9

Though suggestive, all of this material was not marshalled [sic] towards any kind of a thesis. It is best therefore to give West's actual thesis in his own words:

'... the earliest calculation would place the founding of Egypt around 30,000 BC, the latest around 23,000 BC ... "Atlantis" can no longer be ignored by anyone seriously interested in the truth.'10

West therefore suggests that Egyptian civilization cannot be less than 25,000 years old, and may be 32,000 years old.

In his book, West states that the Egyptian civilization did not develop, but was a legacy. I am inclined to agree with him, and that is an elegant way of putting it. I also agree with him so far as to say that an origin could well go back to 4240 BC (the commencement of something called the First Sothic Cycle, connected with the helical rising of Sirius),11 and in any case must go back to approximately 3500 BC.

However, at that point we diverge, because West makes it very plain that he believes the legacy came from a lost 'Atlantis'-type of early civilization native to this planet, and he dismisses people who drag in 'extra-galactic' origins to explain the Egyptian civilization. West and I are in agreement about many things, such as admiration for the Egyptologist Schwaller de Lubicz and enthusiasm for Pythagorean studies. We tend to agree about many aspects of pyramid measurements, and a host of other things.

Also, he is well aware that I always suggested in The Sirius Mystery that an 'Atlantis'-type of explanation was certainly an alternative possibility to the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The trouble is that I do not personally believe in the viability of the 'Atlantis' theory as presently articulated: it implies an absence of extraterrestrial contact. A number of people including West cannot bring themselves to think seriously about extraterrestrials, because their minds do not run that way, I suppose.

This is a kind of natural divide which I believe rests on psychological disposition than intellectual choice. I am friendly with a number of authors who currently advocate the 'Atlantis' hypothesis of a high civilization in the Earth's past where all advanced science was of purely human origin and there was no contact with beings from any other world. I do not support this, and we have had perfectly amicable discussions about our variance of interpretation of origins.

At least one of them sees perfectly clearly the strength of the extraterrestrial hypothesis, and realizes he might one day have to amend his interpretation to accommodate it.

I certainly believe that there is much undiscovered - possibly under the silt and mud of the Nile Delta - concerning the high civilization of Predynastic Egypt. But the 'Atlantis' which is postulated today is too far back, and it leaves several thousand years of 'nothingness' in between it and Egypt and Sumer.

John Anthony West's suggestion leaves a 'blank' of between 22,000 and 27,000 years! I cannot accept such suggestions.

Nor can I accept that the Sphinx is 12,500 years old, even though I believe it and the pyramids were probably built long before the lifetimes of the Pharaoh Cheops and Khephren. But these things are all a matter of degree. In my view, there was an ancient extraterrestrial contact with Earth. And I believe that the period of interaction with extraterrestrials and the founding of Egyptian and Sumerian civilization with their help probably fell between 5000 and 3000 BC. We can call the time of this interaction, whenever it was, the Contact Period.

I believe that the pyramids and the Sphinx were probably built by the extraterrestrials themselves during the Contact Period, and that the Step Pyramid of Saqqara was a later and magnificent attempt by men working unaided under the human architect Imhotep - since the extraterrestrials had long since vanished - to match those mysterious earlier achievements and show that humans could do such things too.

Many of the other Egyptian pyramids then imitated the Step Pyramid, but it can be seen that a lot of them have crumbled into dust and were not very well constructed.

Eventually the Egyptians gave up trying to build large pyramids and the so-called 'Pyramid Age' ended altogether.

Without going into it all here, I must note that several authors have discussed extraordinary artifacts which have survived from antiquity, indicating an advanced scientific knowledge. The ancient tradition of maps depicting an Antarctica before it was covered in ice, represented by the Piri Reis Map for instance, is extremely important. In the 1960s I used to discuss these maps for hours with the late Charles Hapgood, the first man to publish anything about them.

I believe that these ancient maps do preserve such important ancient knowledge, and they are priceless evidence of advanced science in antiquity. But I do not interpret them as evidence of 'Atlantis'; I see them as yet more survivals of knowledge left by visiting extraterrestrials, who were able to map the Earth from space, and who were able to detect the true continental outline of Antarctica through the ice by orbiting space observations in the same way that we can do today.

This knowledge was meant to be part of the legacy left behind when the extraterrestrials departed. The whole point is that some of this evidence from the Contact Period was meant to survive and be recognized by men at such time as we developed enough science and technology to be able to do so. I am convinced that we are meant to piece together the mystery ourselves from the few clues which have survived.

The extraterrestrials do not want to return until we have figured out that they are there. For they are worried about our morale.

They do not want to announce themselves without warning - they want us to detect them. Then they will come. It is all part of the ethics of galactic species interaction.

Now to return to discussing Egypt: West relegated to the end of his book a section entitled 'Egypt: Heir to Atlantis', so that his main point was rather buried, and was easily overlooked by people who did not bother to read his book thoroughly. It was in this section that West emphasized the water erosion at the Sphinx, to which attention had first been called by the late Schwaller de Lubicz. In order to consider the history of how this subject arose, I give the comments made by Schwaller de Lubicz himself in his book Le Roi de la The´ocracie Pharaonique (English title: Sacred Science) in 1961.

In discussing the Sphinx in general, he speaks of 'that Sphinx whose leonine body, except for the head, shows indisputable signs of aquatic erosion'. To this passing remark he appends a footnote which states:

'It is maintained that this erosion was wrought by desert sands, but the entire body of the Sphinx is protected from all desert winds coming from the West, the only winds that could effect erosion. Only the head protrudes from this hollow, and it shows no signs of erosion.'12

These were the remarks which sent the very observant John Anthony West forth on his quest.

West is somewhat at variance with Schwaller de Lubicz about the winds, since the latter stresses that the prevailing desert winds come from the west, but West is more concerned with the seasonal khamsin winds which he says blow from the south ('the fierce desert wind blowing from the South in the month of April').13 In any case, West is at pains to assure us that the Sphinx is entirely sheltered from this wind by the Sphinx Temple,14 so all is well.

Where this subject has gone awry is in what I believe to be the mistaken insistence that the obvious water erosion around the Sphinx can only have been caused by rain at an earlier period of wet weather before Egypt became dry, more than 10,000 years ago - something which is now stated by various authors. This argument is unjustifiably used as evidence for the belief that a high civilization (equivalent to 'Atlantis') existed on Earth about 10,000 BC or thereabouts. I do not propose to go into details of this theory, except to consider the Sphinx erosion.

Other aspects of the theory are a separate discussion into which I have never entered, and I do not intend to start now, apart from what I said about the ancient maps a moment ago. I published discussions of the technology of the Olmecs (the pre-Maya inhabitants of Mexico and Guatemala) in the 1970s, and in the 1960s I was corresponding with the widow of Arthur Posnansky about Tiahuanaco in Bolivia; I knew Peter Allan, who did the studies of the Tiahuanaco 'Sun Gate', personally.

I was puzzling over the Nazca Lines in Peru by 1963. I am familiar with many of these fields even though I have not mentioned them here. I have thought about them for more years than many current authors have been active. I do not dismiss them at all lightly as evidence of an 'Atlantis'. Nor is there any reason to believe that there will not be extraordinary further discoveries in relation to Tiahuanaco, for instance.

But these things must not be allowed to distract us from realizing the strong evidence in favor of a Contact Period.

The Dogon and the Egyptians spoke of civilization coming from the Sirius System, and the Babylonians spoke of it coming from the heavens; the Dogon and the Babylonians agreed on the amphibious nature of the beings who did this.

The information which has been preserved is astrophysically accurate to an uncanny degree. Its precision is such that the onus is really on those who do not wish to accept the consequences to try and disprove it. So far nobody has been able to do this. My collected replies to various critics may be read in a separate pamphlet for reviewers published with this new edition.

But the discovery of Sirius C has in any case rendered most criticism obsolete.

As far as the 'Atlantis' hypothesis is concerned, I believe that the 'evidence of the Sphinx' is nonexistent, as I shall explain in a moment. I do not intend my observations to be discourteous to any individuals, with whom I have friendly relations, and if their theories did not exist I would still be writing about this subject, because it concerns my own work. Let me stress once again, therefore, that I am not making the following pints as part of any argument or dialogue with anyone else.

Opposed to John Anthony West and his supporters are the orthodox Egyptologists, who are - as one might expect - horrified at the notion that the Sphinx might be 12,500 years old. However, I believe that both sides are probably in error.

The Egyptologists are in error because in order to counter West's argument, they have been led to deny the existence of the water erosion at the Sphinx. But anyone can see that there is water erosion at the Sphinx, so all the members of the public who see that with their own eyes think, quite rightly, that the Egyptologists on that point at least must be wrong.

West and his supporters are so astonished at the 'blindness' of the Egyptologists that they are encouraged to make more and more impassioned criticisms of the Egyptologists, thereby driving the harassed Egyptologists ever further into their desperate corner from which they issue supercilious snarls, which the public generally ignore.

This goes to show the lack of resourcefulness of the Egyptologists, and their rather limited capacities. Just as a man who lays the bricks for a beautiful wall is rarely the architect who has designed that wall, so the archaeologists with spade in hand are rarely capable of interpreting the vast array of findings made by their professional class, or to make sweeping historical observations, much less to formulate grand theories about their field.

I am amazed that the Egyptologists have fallen so readily into the trap of denying the water erosion at the Sphinx, thinking thereby to rid themselves of the heinous notion of a Sphinx 12,500 years old. For they have in that way put a noose around their own necks.

It seems tome that the debate about the Sphinx cannot move forward one inch on either side until we can dispense with the assertion of the Egyptologists that there is no water erosion at the Sphinx. It is there for all to see - so we have to accept it!

However, it is not at all necessary to assume that if you acknowledge the existence of water erosion at the Sphinx, you have to admit that it was caused more than 10,000 years ago by rain in a previous, less dry era!

There is one obvious thing that both sides in this dispute have overlooked. Anyone visiting the Sphinx or looking at a sufficient number of photos of it can readily see that the Sphinx sits in a deep pit carved out of the rock. We know for certain that that pit has often been filled with the shifting sands of the desert. Indeed, only in our time has the pit been cleared out again so that we can see the whole figure of the Sphinx once more.

There are still people alive who remember when the Sphinx was only a head sticking out of the sand. The Sphinx had been cleared in 1816,in 1853,and in 1888,15 but was half-covered again by 1898, as I see from a photo of that date which I found amongst my grandmother's papers. In 1916 it was again fully covered by sand except for the head.16

And here is my helpful suggestion: What if we consider that the pit was once filled with water!

I have seen on an archaeologists' plan the indication of an ancient well in either the Sphinx Temple or the Valley temple which is beside it, and the presence of water on the Giza Plateau was substantiated also by the excavation of a number of stone water conduits in 1995 and 1996 (which have now been covered over again, but were photographed before that was done). We also know from ancient texts that the Nile used to rise very high indeed, causing floods nearly to the level of the Giza Plateau, in ancient times.

There is some very intriguing evidence for substantial quantities of water on the Giza Plateau to be found in the History of Herodotus, the Greek 'Father of History' who lived in the fifth century BC and spent a long time in Egypt, of which he left a substantial account which survives today.17

In his Book II, Herodotus discusses the pyramids at some length but does not mention the Sphinx at all. It is therefore practically a certainty that the Sphinx was buried in sand at the time of his visit.

This is an important point to remember when we attempt to interpret the remarks he recorded about water on the Giza Plateau. First, in considering the environs of the Great Pyramid, Herodotus strangely states that he was told the following by his Egyptian informants:

They worked in gangs of a hundred thousand men, each gang for three months. For then years the people were afflicted in making the road whereon the stones were dragged, the making of which road was to my thinking a task but a little lighter than the building of the [Great] Pyramid, for the road is five furlongs long and ten fathoms broad, and raised at its highest to a height of eight fathoms, and it is all of stone polished and carved with figures.

 

The ten years aforesaid went to the making of this road and of the underground chambers on the hill whereon the pyramids stand [i.e. the Giza Plateau]; these the king meant to be burial-places for himself, and encompassed them with water, bringing in a channel from the Nile.18

This passage has largely been ignored by Egyptologists. But before we consider its implications, let us consider three further passages in Herodotus:

Chephren also built a pyramid, of a less size than his brother's [Cheops was his elder brother]. I have myself measured it. It has no underground chambers [we now know this to be false], nor is it entered like the other [the Great Pyramid] by a canal from the Nile, but the river comes in through a built passage and encircles an island, in which, they say Cheops, himself lies.19

And further:

Thus far I have recorded what the Egyptians themselves say. Now ... I will add thereto something of what I myself have seen.20

And further still:

[The Egyptians] made a labyrinth, a little way beyond the Lake Moeris and near the place called the City of the Crocodiles. I have myself seen it, and indeed no words can tell its wonder; were all that the Greeks have builded and wrought added together the whole would be seen to be a matter of less labour and cost than was this labyrinth, albeit the temples of Ephesus and Samos are noteworthy buildings.

 

Though the pyramids were greater than words can tell, and each one of them a match for many great monuments built by Greeks, this maze surpasses even the pyramids. It has twelve roofed courts ... There are also double sets of chambers, three thousand altogether, fifteen hundred above and the same number under ground. We ourselves viewed those that are above ground, and speak of what we have seen; of the underground chambers we were only old; the Egyptian wardens would by no means show them, these being, they said, the burial vaults of the kings who first built this labyrinth, and of the sacred crocodiles.

 

Thus we can only speak from hearsay of the lower chambers; the upper we saw ourselves, and they are creations greater than human. The outlets of the chambers and the mazy passages hither and thither through the courts were an unending marvel to us as we passed from court to apartment and from apartment to colonnade, from colonnades again to more chambers and then into yet more courts... Hard by the corner where the labyrinth ends there stands a pyramid forty fathoms high, whereon great figures are carved.

 

A passage has been made into this underground.

Such is this labyrinth; and yet more marvelous is the Lake Moeris, by which it stands. This lake has a circuit of three thousand six hundred furlongs, or sixty schoeni, which is as much as the whole seaboard of Egypt. Its length is from North to South; the deepest part has a depth of fifty fathoms. That it has been dug out and made by men's hands the lake shows for itself; for almost in the middle of it stands two pyramids, so built that fifty fathoms of each are below and fifty above water; atop each is a colossal stone figure seated on a throne.

 

Thus these pyramids are a hundred fathoms high; and a hundred fathoms equal a furlong of six hundred feet, the fathom measuring six feet and four cubits, the foot four spans and the cubit six spans. The water of the lake is not natural (for the country here is exceedingly waterless) but brought by a channel from the Nile; six months it flows into the lake, and six months back into the river.21

And finally:

When the Nile overflows the land, the towns alone are seen high and dry above the water, very like the islands in the Aegean sea. These alone stand out, the rest of Egypt being a sheet of water. So when this happens folk are ferried not, as is their wont, in the course of the stream, but clean over the plain. From Naucratis indeed to Memphis the boat going upward passes close by the pyramids themselves; the usual course is not this way ...22

From all these passages we can see quite clearly that in the fifth century BC, when Herodotus was an eye-witness, large stretches of water were far more important in Egypt than we assume today. The amazing account of the Great Labyrinth, of the three unidentified pyramids of considerable size adjoining it, and of the artificial lake, are astonishing in themselves, and have never been satisfactorily explained to my knowledge.

Certainly the huge artificial lake sounds like a very good base for visiting amphibians, and is the sort of thing amphibians rather than men would have constructed. But since no one today seems to have much idea of where on earth the ruins of all this are to be found (although the Egyptologist Sayce thought it might be near the Pyramid of Hawara23), we shall not detain ourselves with speculations on this subject here.

I have mentioned it in order to gather together Herodotus's various statements about substantial hydraulic engineering works bringing Nile water in by channels to dry places, and the extent to which the flooded Nile and a huge lake spread water over Egypt to the foot of the pyramids.

Let us now analyze exactly what it is that Herodotus says about the water brought into the Giza Plateau. The account is somewhat garbled, and the fact that Herodotus did not know of the existence of the Sphinx (other than, possibly a head sticking out of the sand, which he didn't bother to mention; and who is to say even that it was visible?) must be borne in mind.

He mentions,

'the underground chambers on the hill whereon the pyramids stand; the king meant to be burial places for himself, and encompassed them with water, bringing in a channel from the Nile'.

The first thing to be pointed out is that the testimony explicitly contradicts any notion that King Cheops intended himself to be buried inside the Great Pyramid! Herodotus clearly states that the king intended himself to be buried in the underground chambers on the hill whereon the pyramids stand, meaning underground chambers in the Giza Plateau, not underneath or within any actual pyramid.

This very clear evidence appears to have been willfully neglected by the Egyptological community, who insist that Cheops was the builder of the Great Pyramid and that he intended it as his own tomb. But they are overtly contradicted in this by Herodotus.

The next thing to note is that the burial-places on the Giza Plateau, or at least one of them, were 'encompassed with water'; the word encompassed indicates that somewhere on the Giza Plateau an important site was surrounded by water. How could this be without a retaining-pit? And where is such a retaining-pit on the Giza Plateau except around the Sphinx?

Now let us look at the second passage from Herodotus, where he speaks of water from the Nile which,

'comes in through a built passage and encircles an island, in which, they say, Cheops himself lies'.

Is this not absolutely clear?

The Sphinx bears the face of the Pharaoh, and if encircled by water in the retaining-pit, the Pharaoh lies there, just as the Egyptians said, in an island surrounded by water. Whether the face is of Cheops or his brother Khephren matters little, and the two could be easily confused.

Although Herodotus says it is Cheops who lies in the island surrounded by water, he does so in the section where he is really discussing Khephren, having dealt with Cheops, and immediately afterwards he states:

'Chephren, they say, reigned for fifty six years.'24

If we disentangle all of these secondhand accounts recorded by Herodotus, we have a clear tradition in the fifth century BC in Egypt that somewhere on the Giza Plateau (a place where the body of the Sphinx could not be seen) there was at the time of Cheops and Khephren an island surrounded by water in which the Pharaoh lay.

Since the body of the Sphinx would be covered by water and only the head of the Pharaoh would protrude from the water at that time, it was literally correct to say this. The Pharaoh did indeed lie on an island surrounded by water, if the retaining-pit of the Sphinx was full of water, which we suggest that it was.

If it were not, then where is the island on the Giza Plateau? Does anybody know of any other candidate?

My suggestion is, therefore, that the Sphinx was surrounded by water originally, and for a significant portion of its history. And furthermore, the record of this fact has been sitting there in the text of Herodotus unrecognized for 2500 years. As for how the water got there, the raising of water by simple wooden devices called norias is very ancient and survives today throughout the Nile Delta.

I suggest therefore that from the Nile, from the well in the Sphinx Temple or Valley Temple, or by the stone water-conduits excavated on the Giza Plateau in 1995 and 1996,for much of its history the pit around the Sphinx was a moat, and that the Sphinx was kept artificially surrounded by water. Apparently there is still some water beneath the Sphinx today, a fact which has puzzled modern archaeologists.

The notion of Nile water reaching the Sphinx is in any case well addressed by James M. Harrell, who writes:

'The floor of the Sphinx enclosure is 19.9 to 20.2 meters above sea level ... The normal Nile-flood maximum at the Roda Nilometer near Cairo has ranged between 19.0 and 19.5 meters above sea level this century, with exceptional floods reaching elevations of 20.3 meters in 1938 and 21,4 meters in 1874. During the past two centuries, there have been numerous reports of flood water reaching the base of the Giza Plateau.' 25

If the Sphinx was sitting in a moat for much of its history over thousands of years, this could explain its significant water erosion. The winds on the plateau would have whipped up the water and caused a sloshing motion on countless occasions. This could have been rendered far more erosive by the fact that sand would have blown continually into the water and, in churning with the water, would have had a significant scouring effect on the stone.

The moat would have had to be dredged frequently to clear it of the sand, and in the dredging process, great quantities of raised water would pour back down along the sides, not uniformly but at certain points. This corresponds with the observation that the subsurface weathering of the limestone floor of the sphinx pit is greater in some places than others.

The fact that there is less sub surface weathering at the rear of the Sphinx could also be explained by the possibility that as the space there is narrow, drifting sand may have regularly accumulated in the water there more readily and to a greater depth, faster than in the more spread-out regions in other directions. It would have been a kind of sand-trap.

And the effect would have been to insulate the limestone floor at that point from water action. It should be noted also that the head of the Sphinx is considerably less eroded than the body; the reason for this could be that it was never submerged in water.

(If the 'ancient rain' theory were true, the head of the Sphinx would be eroded to the same extent as the body.)


 

While we disagree with Temple's assertions about the evidence of water erosion on the Sphinx (the head is less eroded than the body because the head was a later addition, not because it was never submerged in Temple's theorized "moat"), we are fascinated by his recounting of the writings of Herodotus.

 

This is nothing less than a first hand account of a tour of the secret chambers beneath the Giza plateau that were only admitted to by the Egyptian authorities during last years "Lost Tombs" special. It also seems plausible that the burial site mentioned in the texts as being Chephren's planned resting place is the chamber revealed as the "Tomb of Osiris" on that same special. So why mislead the public about this?

 

Ahh, but we are getting ahead of ourselves ...

Why is it that no one has 'seen' that the Sphinx sits in a moat? And that the moat, having been filled with water for much of ancient history, at least prior to the New Kingdom, there is naturally water erosion around the Sphinx?

As I have already said, I do not subscribe to the 'Atlantis'-theory of a high civilization having existed 12,500 years ago. And I certainly do not believe we can invoke the weathering of the Sphinx to try to prove that the Sphinx dates from that time. I believe that the extraordinary things which happened on our planet occurred much more recently than that.

It may be shocking to some people, but to me there is nothing unusual in postulating that an extraterrestrial visitation was responsible for kick-starting high civilization on Earth. It is not really unusual if you believe that the Universe must be filled with life, some of it intelligent. And I believe that that visitation to our planet came from the system of the star Sirius, as the ancient peoples as well as the Dogon have tried to tell us.

And since the accounts are of aquatic beings from a watery planet there, it may well be that the reason why the Sphinx - which I believe to have been a statue of Anubis - was sitting in water, was because the visitors from the planet in the system of the star Sirius were amphibious. If the chambers said to have been discovered by geologists beneath the Sphinx are filled with water, this may be no accident. If it be true that they are filled with indications or records of some kind, as many enthusiasts of the 'Hall of Records' idea believe (a suggestion made in this book in 1976, by the way), it would make sense that aquatic beings would prefer to leave some traces of that kind in watery chambers rather than in dry ones.

And the moat around the Sphinx might then be seen as a simple but brilliant protection device, since only with diving suits could tomb-robbers hope to break in and steal anything preserved in water-filled chambers beneath the Sphinx moat. These chambers, on the other hand, could readily be entered by amphibians.

So I put forward the possibility that this was all done by design.

This is not the place to survey the many attempts to find significance in the measurements of the Great Pyramid: such efforts fill many books. Certainly some are the work of fanatics, especially in the cases where Biblical or prophetic messages are sought in pyramidal proportions. But I believe that some of the geophysical, astrophysical, and mathematical correspondences make sense, and that some of the measurements of the Great Pyramid do represent aspects of the size of the Earth for instance.

It has been suggested by many writers that the Great Pyramid represents the Earth's Northern Hemisphere, and that is quite likely to be one of the things it represents. It also appears to incorporate or express the values of pi (3.1416) and another natural constant, phi (1.618), which is connected with the Golden Section and a series of numbers called the Fibonacci Series. All of this has been discussed by many previous investigators.

I am suggesting new insights into the pyramids which should be viewed as additional to those I just mentioned, and which do not rule out any of the above.

I now see in retrospect that in The Sirius Mystery I pioneered a strange kind of thinking whereby stellar constellation patterns were seen as represented on the ground in Egypt. I concentrated on the constellation of Argo, as the reader may see in Chapter Six (a pattern of the key stars of Argo is shown as represented geodetically in Figure 19 in Chapter Six).

To me this was a normal way to think, but to most people it was unusual. Robert Bauval, who has paid generous tribute to my work on many occasions, readily fell in with this manner of thinking and also looked for a stellar pattern displayed on the ground. The result forms the basis for his fascinating book The Orion Mystery (1994), in which he points out that the layout of the three main pyramids at Giza corresponds with the three stars of Orion's belt.26

Orion and Argo, which we see to have these symbolic presences on Egyptian soil, are two constellations most associated with Sirius.

However, an enigma remains. Surely there are direct associations with Sirius itself - but where are they? Bauval explains how the southern shaft of the so-called King's Chamber of the Great Pyramid in ancient times pointed to the constellation of Orion; he then worked out that the southern shaft of the so-called Queen's Chamber pointed directly at the star Sirius.27

I have now discovered a further association, which I suspected in the 1970s, when the existing astrophysical measurements were imprecise so that my instinctive hunch could not be confirmed. Now, however, the astrophysical measurements available since the publication of the new figure in Astrophysical Data in 1992 make it possible for me to suggest this correspondence, which I had been disappointed that I could not make earlier because the figures appearing in the former reference book Astrophysical Quantities in 1973 were, it now turns out, inaccurate and did not yield the intuitively sensed correspondence which I strongly felt at the time.

I am referring to the strange fact that the Great Pyramid stands beside another pyramid which is nearly but not quite the same size. This always seemed to me very peculiar, and I felt that it must symbolize something - but what? I look upon the Great Pyramid as being associated with the Sirius cult and I felt that it must represent the star Sirius B. I knew that our own sun had a mass nearly but not quite that of Sirius B; or perhaps (according to the obsolete 1973 figures) it was the other way around.

Couldn't the two pyramids represent by some key measurement of theirs the relative masses of our sun and Sirius B?

However, it was not possible to pursue this notion in the 1970s because at that time the mass of Sirius B was incorrectly believed to be 0.98 that of our own sun,28 and such relative measurements did not correspond to the two pyramids. However, that situation has now changed.

According to the new figures, Sirius B has a mass 1.053 that of our sun.29 The new figures also suggest that Sirius B has a radius 0.0078 that of our sun.30

It is now possible to make a correlation whereby the Great Pyramid may be seen to represent Sirius B and the Pyramid of Khephren may be seen to represent our sun.

If we follow this line of reasoning, we find a correlation accurate to two decimal points. The way I arrived at it is this: according to the leading authority on the pyramids, Dr. I. E. S. Edwards, the measurements of each side of the base of the Pyramid of Khephren was originally 707.75 feet.31

As for the Great Pyramid, Edwards says that the original measurements of the four sides of the base were: North: 755.43 feet, South: 756.08 feet, East: 755.88 feet, and West: 755.77 feet.32

The mean of these four measurements is 755.79 feet. If we compare the mean side of the base of the Great Pyramid with the side of the base of the Pyramid of Khephren, we find that the larger measurement is 1.0678 that of the smaller. We know from the new astrophysical data that the mass of Sirius B is 1.053 that of our sun. The correspondence is thus accurate to 0.014.

However, even this tiny discrepancy may be highly significant. For 0.0136 (which rounded off is 0.014) is the precise discrepancy between the mathematics of the octave and the mathematics of the fifth in harmonic theory, where 1.0136 is referred to as the Comma of Pythagoras, and was known to the ancient Greeks who are said to have obtained knowledge of it from Egypt.

A value of the Comma of Pythagoras computable to an astonishing nine decimal places appears in the form of an arithmetical fraction preserved in the ancient Greek Pythagorean treatise Katatome˜ Kanonos (Division of the Canon).33 There we are told that the number 531,441 is greater than twice 262,144. Twice 262,144 equals 524,288,though this number is not actually stated.

The ratio is not computed in the text either, but if we carry out the division we obtain the number 1.013643265, namely, the Comma of Pythagoras expressed to nine decimal places. The Greek text is coy in the extreme, giving the information in such an obscure manner that only someone initiated into its significance could be expected to have any idea what was being said.

The only explanatory comment earlier in the passage is:

'Six sesquioctave intervals are greater than one duple interval.'

One has to be fairly well educated in these matters to have any idea at all of what the author means!

Andre Barbera, the immensely learned modern editor and translator of this text, has apparently not noticed that this passage, which he has translated from no less than three separate versions, in fact presents obliquely the mystery of the Comma of Pythagoras. He does not mention the Coma, has evidently never carried out the necessary multiplication and division to arrive at it, and gives no indication whatever that he is aware of the special significance of the passage.34

If Barbera, who is probably the world's expert on this text, has no inkling of its true importance, then it is no wonder that no one else until now has either.

The actual author of the strange treatise from which this comes is unknown. Certainly the material in it, according to the Barbera, could have been put together in some form in the fifth century BC or at the turn of the fourth century BC,35 and reworked some centuries later.36

But some of the content, and in particular the sly reference to the Comma of Pythagoras, appear to come from very ancient and unidentified Pythagorean sources which cannot be traced today. There seems to have been an actual, and typically Pythagorean, attempt to state but conceal the main mystery. No overt statement of the important number is given, and even its computation requires two successive arithmetical operations, the carrying out of which would not even occur to anyone who didn't know what he was looking for in the first place.

The nine-decimal value of the universal constant, the Comma of Pythagoras, is therefore concealed in this ancient text in a kind of code, but one which is entirely unambiguous once it has been recognized as such. The ancient text is so extraordinarily dry, technical and boring, that only expert musical theorists would ever have read it, and of those, only a handful of initiates would have deciphered the purposely concealed reference to one of the greatest discoveries ever made in ancient science and mathematics.

The text therefore seems to have been intended, amongst its other, more mundane discussions, to preserve this secret Pythagorean (and originally Egyptian) knowledge whilst hiding it so carefully that its preservation would await discovery by the right kind of person.

I have done a great deal of work on the Comma of Pythagoras over many years, and I found it necessary to give a name to the decimal increment 0.0136 itself; I have named it the Particle of Pythagoras, which I hope will be found acceptable by others - should anyone but myself ever wish to discuss it, of course.

I believe the numerical coefficient of this Particle, 136, is related to the 136 degrees of freedom of the electron discussed by the famous physicist, the late Sir Arthur Eddington,37 and that the number plus one gives the Fine Structure Constant of nuclear physics, which is 137.38 (The Fine Structure Constant is a universal natural constantly greatly beloved by physicists, although hardly anyone else has ever heard of it.)

I have discovered relationships between this natural constant and several others such as phi, e, and pi. However, such discussions are too lengthy and distracting for inclusion here. I mention this only so readers will understand how important the Particle of Pythagoras really is. Essentially, one could say that it expresses the minute discrepancy between the ideal and the real.

For the pyramid builders to incorporate it as the identical discrepancy just discussed in the Sirius and pyramid correlation should be interpreted as their way of signaling to us:

'This is a symbolic representation of a real cosmic fact.'

Musical theorists will be well aware that the discrepancy 0.0136 necessitates the tuning technique known as 'equal tempering'. I have published an account of the invention of the Equal Temperament system elsewhere.39 As if to tease us, the builders of the pyramids appear to have left a microscopic discrepancy in the correlation precisely equal to a universal numerical constant. For the Comma of Pythagoras is implicit in the structure of the Universe itself, and is absolute throughout the cosmos.

However, another point should be made about this correlation. That is, the ratio of 1.053 is actually the precise value of the sacred fraction 256/243 mentioned by Macrobius at the turn of the fourth/fifth centuries AD, who describes its use in harmonic theory by people who to him were 'the ancients'.40 The fraction was also mentioned in antiquity by the mathematical, harmonic, and philosophical writers Theon of Smyrna (second century AD), Gaudentius, Chalcidius (fourth century AD), and Proclus (fifth century AD, for whom see Appendix II of this book, as he seems to have been aware of the Sirius Mystery).41

One must ask how it is that this precise value of 1.053, which we see is astrophysically the precise ratio between the masses of Sirius B and our sun, was mentioned so frequently in the works of writers dealing in esoteric astronomical lore in ancient times, one of whom (Macrobius) is prominently identified with the heliocentric theory, and another of whom (Proclus) appears to have been initiated into the Sirius Mystery and specifically mentions the existence of important but invisible heavenly bodies.

Especially in the case of Proclus, who appears to have known of the existence of Sirius B, to have him also mentioning this number, exact to three decimal places, specifying its mass stretches credulity beyond its limits. Surely the coincidences are multiplying to an impossible degree if we are to view this as all being by chance.

As regards him, I recently discovered the following passage in an old book about the pyramids:

'The hieroglyph for Sirius is, oddly enough, the triangular face of a pyramid. Dufeu [a nineteenth-century French author who wrote about the pyramids] and others suppose that the pyramid may have been dedicated to this venerated star... Proclus relates the belief in Alexandria that the pyramid was used for observations of Sirius.'

Unfortunately, this has come to light just before going to press, so I have not been able to locate the passage in the works of Proclus.


 

We consider this last portion to be extremely significant. If Temple is right and he has put this together correctly, then he may have found yet another critical linkage to the pyramids. If, as Bauval asserts, the pyramids represent the "belt" of Orion, and the triangular face of each pyramid is meant to invoke Sirius [in the constellation of "Canis Major"], then the pyramids themselves are the literal embodiment of the gods that those two constellations represent ...

... Our old friends Isis and Osiris!

Could this be the case? Frankly, we are a little chagrined that we did not think of it sooner ourselves.

But there is also this purely cosmological question: why is it that our sun and the star Sirius B have a mass ratio of 1.053 in any event?

For the fraction 256/243 of which 1.053 is the decimal expression does appear to have a universal harmonic status. So by stumbling upon this coincidence we may have uncovered some hitherto unsuspected astrophysical harmonical value in operation between two neighboring stars.

I don't believe anyone before has found a precise numerical correlation which could extend the notion of a 'harmony of spheres' beyond our solar system, to link it with a neighboring one. But this appears to be the case here. Perhaps it has something to do with the inherent nature of white dwarf stars and their dimensions vis 'a vis normal stars like our sun, and this ratio would thus occur throughout the Universe frequently. It makes more sense to view the correlation as one which appeals to underlying fundamentals of cosmic structures than to view it as a special case applying only to Sirius B and our sun.

But even so, the correlation is extraordinary and so precise that it suggests whole avenues of research and offers hope of absolute numerical expressions recurring in the cosmos where none had been suspected. And by discovering this, we can only be pleased, since it enables us to discern some scaling elements of concealed structure which may be cosmic in scope.

I hope cosmologists will not neglect this observation. I believe it demonstrates that the Universe has more structure than we thought, and that that structure can be so precisely articulated that it can generate an exact value of this kid as a ratio between neighboring stellar bodies. For Sirius Band our sun, in terms of the cosmos, are certainly neighbors. And it all comes down to the question: how is it that two stars 8.7 light-years apart can have a mass ratio which is not random but which expresses a universal harmonic value which is precise to three decimal points? It can only be because the astrophysics of stars and their evolutionary development (such as in the formation of a white dwarf) follow certain harmonic laws which we have not yet suspected, much less expressed.

And we should not overlook the fact that the universal harmonic fraction concerned is not one which today receives a lot of attention. This in turn indicates that it is ancient harmonic theory that should be dusted off and studied for clues as to what is going on. Many of us have believed this for years, even without this evidence.42

One of my 'hobbies' is trying to get to grips with ancient harmonic theory, which is why I took the fraction seriously enough to work out its decimal expression and notice its importance; needless to say, the decimal value of the fraction does not appear in Macrobius, and only someone actually doing the division and holding up the result beside the mass ratio value of Sirius B and our sun for comparison would ever have noticed anything at all.

The implication of all this is that different types of stars express different harmonical values in a surprisingly precise way. But why should stellar evolution not have a harmonical nature and structure to it?

This will probably be found to be relevant to the concept of the 'stellar mass function' which astrophysicists speculate about. It may be found, for instance, that the difficulties of star formation in the first place are regularly overcome by some kind of binary-star formation; in our own solar system we could view the planet Jupiter as an incipient brown dwarf star in the making.

And in 1983 I published an account of the possible existence of the possible existence of another actual small invisible star in our own solar system, which was first suggested in 1977 by the radio-astronomer E. R. Harrison because of a perturbation which he discovered that our solar system was exercising on six particular pulsars in a small region of the sky.43

Star formation might thus involve a binary process in far more cases than we think, possibly in all. Binary stars may only be able to coexist according to specific harmonic relations, just as certain musical notes when struck together are consonant when they are in specific proportions such as the musical fifth or fourth.

Fundamental to an improved theory will be a realization that star types are expressions or articulations of harmonical ratios and frequencies and that however much variance they may show, even those variations are always methodical and coherent. Any lack of method and coherence which appears in these cosmic occurrences is thus due not to any lack of structure in the Universe, but is due rather to our own lack of understanding of it. We have learned this lesson in any case by discovering that even chaos is ordered, with the marvelous development of Chaos Theory.

More important is Complexity Theory, which is still in the process of establishing itself. It deals with the sudden onset or loss of long-range order by what scientists call 'phase transitions' and 'symmetry breaking'. I should point out that the mass ratio of Sirius B and our sun demonstrates that long-range order exists between the two solar systems, extending over a distance of 8.7 light-years, which can only be explained by conceiving of the two solar systems inhabiting the same 'cell' of space.

And if that is the case, then we know from Complexity Theory that a strange form of what resembles 'instantaneous communication' subsists in such 'cells' whereby huge macro-regions of space behave as if their elements were not separated by spatial or temporal distance, and the 'cell' engages in what is called 'self-organization'.

Such a 'cell' turns into what is called by scientists a "dissipative structure' which turns disorder into order.

The 1977 Nobel laureate for Chemistry, Professor Ilya Prigogine, whom I have visited in Brussels, has stressed that the onset of complexity in a system can result in the instantaneous extension of long-range order by a magnitude of ten million or more, as is easily demonstrated in the onset so-called Bénard Cells caused by thermal convection in a fluid.44

This enormous expansion of order is equivalent to one fifth of the population of Britain suddenly and spontaneously adopting the same body posture at the same instant while having no direct contact with one another. Imagine ten million people suddenly standing on their heads for no apparent reason. An outside observer might call this uncontrollable turbulence, for a hairdresser doing this would start cutting toenails, drivers would lose control of their vehicles, tennis players would invariably hit the net ... It would be chaos.

But nevertheless, it would not be denied that ten million people had stood on their heads at the same time due to some mysterious long-range ordering principle which extended across the whole country. This turbulent chaos is in fact a spontaneous creation of complexity. For a moment the ten million people had nothing in common about their posture, but now there is no denying that there is an immense complexity in existence - a connection suddenly exists which did not previously exist - a coherence is established.

Ten million simultaneous, complex, intricate and criss-crossing links exist: the ten million have all suddenly stood on their heads all just like each other. This is analogous to what actually happens in a Bénard Cell, where ten million molecules instantaneously align.

The discovery of the significance of the 1.053 mass ratio between Sirius B and our sun suggests that our solar system and the Sirius system are elements of a larger entity which is a self-organizing open system - what is called in thermodynamics a "dissipative structure far from thermal equilibrium'. But let us give it an actual name.

I propose to call it the Anubis Cell.

The Anubis Cell clearly has long-range order extending over at least 8.7 light-years. Since all such structures increase their order and eliminate their disorder, a continuous ordering process must have been in operation inside the Anubis Cell since at least the formation of either our sun or Sirius B's condensation as a white dwarf, whichever was later. Long-range order has thus operated between the systems presumably for billions of years. Under such circumstances, both solar systems must have a shared movement in relation to the Galaxy.

The two systems must also be in continuous harmonic resonance with one another. It may be presumed that a significant perturbation of one would affect the other, and that this could apply to very high frequency events including the 'mental', 'thought' or 'information' events. Membership of the same cosmic cell implies the potential for the modulation of some shared field (of an unknown type, but possibly not unlike the 'quantum potential' proposed by my friend the late David Bohm to solve the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in physics - a subject we cannot go into here!) for the purposes of communication between systems. Let us call it here the 'cell potential'.

In other words, electromagnetic amplitude modulation such as radio, for signaling in the traditional manner, may be unnecessary. The strange aspects of long-range order may mean that in some way yet to be discovered by us, instantaneous communication between systems might be possible, which would seem to overcome the limitations of the speed of light for communication between them.45

Psychic communication and even nonmaterial interactions of souls might be possible. The ancient Egyptians said that the Sirius system was where people go when they die. The Dogon say the same thing, and perhaps the Sirius system is the actual location of 'the Other World' in more senses than one.

Inspiration may even come to humans on Earth from the Sirius system by harmonic resonance articulated by the (still undefined) Anubis Field of the Anubis Cell, and this might be instantaneously 'transmitted' not as a signal but by harmonic resonance response within the continuous Anubis Field subsisting within this cosmic cell.

We have similar phenomena throughout nature: even the lowly sponge has been found to have a physically impossible 'conduction velocity' for stimulus transmission from one end of its body to another. So bizarre were these findings that the three Canadian scientists involved in studying it were forced to suggest that a sponge was like a single giant nerve cell so that:

'the entire conduction system could act as a single neuron'.46

If a simple sponge can defy time and space at the bottom of the sea, surely the Anubis Cell can do so within the Galaxy. The Anubis Cell may be analogous to a macroscopic 'neuron' seen from the point of view of Galactic scale. And this brings us to another possibility: the Anubis Cell may be alive.

The vast Ordering Principle may be an Entity.

Even if it were not an Entity to start with, it must long ago have spontaneously generated considerable consciousness, if only by weighted connections in parallel distributed processing.47

And we can be sure that it has had a few billion years to do its thinking.


 

Temple here has stumbled onto the key - the connection between Sirius and Earth - and even hints at a type of "Hyperdimensional consciousness." What he does not know (or is not ready to reveal just yet) is just how deep this Sirius connection goes ...

... and how many people already know about it.

Returning now to our observations of the pyramid measurements, the value of 1.0678 given there may thus also be a double-tease by the builders. For not only does it vary from the precise mass ratio of Sirius B and our sun by a tiny amount equal to one harmonic natural constant, but it varies from another harmonic natural constant by that same exact amount.

One could then say that the builders were only intending to express the latter, ignorant of the astrophysical ratio, but the following additional correlations relating to the Sirius system discourage such a notion.

What about the respective radii of Sirius B and our sun? Are they indicated by the two pyramids?

Turning to a different form of measure, the slope angles of the respective pyramids, we find that the sides of the Great Pyramid originally had slope angles of about 51° 51' to the ground, according to Edwards,48 which is equal to 51.866°, whereas the Pyramid of Khephren had slightly steeper slopes of 52°20'according to Edwards,49 with is equal to 52.333°.

The slope of the Great Pyramid is thus 0.0089 less than the slope of the Pyramid of Khephren, which yields a value equivalent to the relative radius of Sirius B to that of our sun accurate to 0.0011. The appearance of these two correspondences act as a kind of cross-correlation on each other, since one is accurate to0.014 and the other is accurate to0.0011.

This significantly reduces the chance of coincidence being at work in these correlations, as there is not only one such correlation but a pair. However, there are two more to come.

I am not insisting that these correlations are intended, but suggesting that they may be, considering the established connections already noted between the pyramids and the Sirius cult.

From the latest information about Sirius C in their 1995 article, Benest and Duvent state that Sirius C cannot be much more than about 0.05 of the mass of our sun (and of Sirius B).50

Using one of the simple length measures of the kind which seemed to indicate the relative masses of Sirius B and our sun, the mass of Sirius C may be indicated by the height of the missing pyramidion (top point) of the Great Pyramid.

For it was 31 feet and the original total height of the pyramid was 481.4 feet, according to Edwards,51 so that the height of the pyramidion was 0.0643 of the total height of the pyramid, corresponding to within 0.01 of the 0.05 of solar mass suggested for Sirius C in1995.

This is thus the third Sirius astrophysical measurement correlation accurate to at least 0.01 to be found in the Giza pyramid complex.

What about the third pyramid in the Giza complex, known as the Pyramid of Mycerinus? What significance could it have in this scheme of things?

Edwards says that the Pyramid of Mycerinus originally had a height of 218 feet.52 The height of the Pyramid of Khephren was originally 471 feet, according to Edwards.53 The ratio of these two heights is 2.160. We note from Benest and Duvant that the latest estimates of the ratio of the masses of our sun and Sirius A is 2.14.54 The correspondence is thus accurate to within 0.02.

This is a fourth possible correspondence.


 

What Temple apparently doesn't realize is that this "coding" is MUCH closer to Earth than Sirius ... because 2160 is precisely one 12th of the Precessional Cycle ... which, of course, is the source of all our REAL terrestrial problems ... (See "The Lost Tombs Revisited").

Can it be, therefore, that the pyramid complex at Giza is representing to us, among many other things such as the value of pi and the dimensions of our Earth, the relative masses of the three stars in the Sirius system?

They all seem to be there, accurate to the second or third decimal. Nor is that likely to exhaust the possibilities. But any further discussions will have to be left for another time.

When the German edition of this book appeared in 1977, I added a lengthy Nachworst (which is not a sausage but an Afterward). In it I indulged in some speculations about the aliens, some of which I feel that I should mention here. I pointed out that interstellar travel cannot be easy at the best of times and any aliens capable of it would probably first have to master the technology of cryogenics (or alternatively some other form of suspended animation), so that they could go into suspended animation for the duration of the interstellar part of the voyage.

I then suggested that perhaps the whole thing was so difficult that such expeditions were often one-way trips from which there was no return. And that led me to the important suggestion that perhaps the ancient visitors to our planet never really went home. All the traditions seem agreed that they 'ascended to the heavens' and left Earth. But there is no guarantee that they went back to Sirius.

In fact, anyone capable of mastering the technology of suspended animation for an interstellar voyage would find it a simple matter to re-enter that state and then simply to stay put. So that the Nommos may very well still be somewhere in the solar system, either asleep or slowly bestirring themselves now that things are getting more interesting down here.

Is there any clue in the traditions as to where any sleeping Nommos might be? There is in the Dogon tradition.

For the Dogon differentiate very clearly between the fiery, roaring landing craft which they describe as bringing the Nommos to Earth, and the new star which appeared in the sky while they were here which would seem to be a reference to their larger based parked in orbit. This is called 'the star of the tenth moon'.

The Dogon do three drawings of it, showing it in different phases which seem to imply that it could be expanded and contracted as a sphere at will.

When I gave some thought to this I realized the Dogon might be suggesting that the base of the Nommos is parked in the solar system as the tenth moon of one of the outer planets. Neptune doesn't have ten moons, so that was out. It didn't take me long to realize that the tenth main moon of Saturn is anomalous in the solar system, and is the only one which seems to have a smooth surface without craters or other lumps and bumps. Its name is Phoebe.

It has a retrograde orbit around Saturn wildly different from all the other Saturnian moons, so that when our space probe photographed the moons of Saturn, Phoebe was the only significant one which was not close enough to give a good photo. (At the time I suggested Phoebe as a possible artificial body it was several years before this space probe, and I was deeply disappointed that the probe was unable to produce much more information about Phoebe.)

Phoebe is about 160 kilometers in diameter, but its mass still seems to be unknown, so that we cannot make statements about its composition. It orbits Saturn every 523 days, 15.6 hours. In 1982, following the Voyager results, I asked Brad Smith of the University of Arizona Astronomy Department about Phoebe and he said 'as far as we can see it is perfectly round'.

He also pointed out that it was too large to be a degenerate cometary nucleus. He said it had only 3% reflectivity.

We should not forget that if aquatic amphibious beings are making an interstellar voyage, they will need fresh water in their ship in considerable quantities. In the ancient legends of the Sumerians and Babylonians about the god Enki (Ea), who was the god who warned mankind about the Deluge so that the Ark could be constructed, Enki was said to sleep in a freshwater receptacle or chamber shaped like the Ark, called the Abzu.

Could this be a reference to an amphibian in suspended animation?

There is at least one occasion in Sumerian literature (fourth to third millennium BC) where the god Enki is described as behaving like an amphibian:

'Enki, in the swampland, in the swampland, lies stretched out ...' 55

The context indicates that this is his normal position, since he continues to lie stretched out in the swampland for a considerable time while his vizier goes in and out. There are two things which are puzzling here: why would Enki lie stretched out, and why in a swampland? If he were assumed to be one of the amphibious fish-tailed beings, that could explain both features.

As far as I know, no scholar has ever addressed these problems of Enki lying stretched out in a swampland, and it has just been ignored. But as Enki was generally described as inhabiting the Abzu, which is filled with water, if you think about it, someone who actually lives in the water really does need a fishtail to get around properly.

As for the 'moon' Phoebe, perhaps it is unlikely that it is an actual interstellar ship. If it really is artificial, then it may be a thin metal shell (hence 'perfectly round') inflated or manufactured here in the solar system, which is essentially hollow, perhaps even largely empty like a balloon, or containing water at the centre, suitably insulated and heated to prevent it becoming ice. A largely empty sphere might be needed as insulation for a watery core. Amphibians would not need artificial gravity to the extent that we would, because the buoyancy in their natural medium would be familiar to them, and their natural life style would be more akin to a low-weight condition.

If Phoebe is a blown-up sphere, it will have a very low density and will have an orbital precession due to solar light pressure. It could act as a 'marker' to draw our attention because of its many anomalies, and it could indicate a more important object of interest nearby or somehow in correspondence, which would be smaller and possibly invisible from Earth by ground-based telescopes.

Certainly some oddities were discovered at Saturn, such as leading and trailing co-orbital satellites, plus two satellites which periodically exchange orbits with each other, as well as a satellite about the same size as Phoebe (a 'twin'?) which moves along the leading triangular libration point of the moon Dione. Phoebe was the only one of the eighteen Saturnian satellites unobserved by Voyager I, and it may be a long time before that situation improves. I hope it will finally be observed by the Cassini probe which reaches Saturn in the year 2004.

Phoebe is the tenth satellite of Saturn in terms of size. It is also the tenth proper satellite of Saturn, disregarding the eight small inner satellites and considering them as debris associated with the rings. In short, it might well be the 'star of the tenth moon' of Dogon tradition. If so, it might have been put into its strange orbit both to call attention to itself and to keep it away from the other moons of Saturn both for the sake of safety and to ensure that any photographic missions such as Voyagers I and II would not crack its secrets too soon, since celestial mechanics would prohibit an early probe to the planet and the other moons which could possibly study Phoebe at the same time.

And the aliens would know that no one on Earth would send a probe all the way to Saturn to study Phoebe alone, until the rest of the Saturn system had first been studied. Following that logic, it could be that Voyager I might have triggered a local alarm by entering the Saturn system, and thus awakening the Nommos. The whole design might have been that simple and elegant. It avoids artificial or questionable criteria and sets as its absolute threshold entering of the Saturn system by an artificial probe (of whatever kind, since this plan would enable an alarm to be triggered by an extraterrestrial as well as by an Earth probe).

The entering of the Saturn system would thus constitute a tripwire which would have activated the Nommos in 1981.

It is interesting that two years after I published my thoughts about Phoebe, the astronomer D. G. Stephenson published a similar theory in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society relating to the outer planet Pluto.56

He said he thought that Pluto's eccentric orbit might be artificial, rather in the way I have suggested for Phoebe, and have come about as a result of extraterrestrials visiting our solar system. He also suggested the existence of 'space arks' full of extraterrestrials who never went home but continued to breed generations of descendents as they traveled for hundreds of thousands of years through interstellar space.

His notion is that such an 'ark' is parked in our outer solar system and that it may have mined and largely stripped the planet Pluto for raw materials. This is eerily similar to my own suggestion. It puzzled me that Stephenson could make a suggestion similar to my own and not be held up to ridicule for it, whereas for making the same sort of suggestion I underwent years of virulent attacks. But I was delighted by Stephenson's imaginative contribution to the debate, and he makes a lot of sense.

We should not forget that the Dogon say that the Nommos will return, and when they do it will be called The Day of the Fish.

The first indication of their return, say the Dogon, will be that a new star will appear in the sky - the 'star of the tenth moon' will have returned. Elements which are at the moment retracted inside this body will then re-emerge. Then the Nommos will land on the Earth again in their Ark - the landing craft which makes a lot of noise and emits fire.

From this will emerge 'the mythical ancestors', namely the very same personalities who figure in all the myths. This reinforces the notion that they never died and never left the solar system. After their return, this group of Nommos 'will rule from the waters'. So there will presumable be considerable political implications to their arrival!

However, it is most unlikely that they will be hostile to humans, since they have invested so much of their efforts in trying to help this planet develop civilization thousands of years ago that they won't want to see all of their work go to waste. They would doubtless be helpful, therefore, but not a little distressed.

As aquatic beings, one doesn't have to be a genius to realize that the present state of the world's oceans will greatly upset them, and they might take drastic steps about that. Can you imagine yourself as a Nommo swimming in the sea, coming up for air only to have a plastic bottle bump against your nose? And number one on their list would probably be the control of oil spills at sea.

Think like a Nommo: what would they want most? Clean seas, of course.

They are bound to have advanced technologies for cleaning up the seas very promptly. So they will be very popular with environmentalists and will probably form alliances with the world's 'green' parties. Maybe it is the future friends of the Nommos who will be the true 'little green men'.

I have mentioned the planet Mars in passing. Do I believe that there was intelligent life on Mars at one time? I would not be surprised at a Martian connection with the Sirius Mystery, as I have thought for some years. I have no idea whether the 'Face on Mars' in the region of Cydonia is really a face or not, but it looks pretty convincing, doesn't it?

And I think that a lot of other people must think so too. I thought NASA was supposed to be broke, and now suddenly they are sending ten Mars missions in ten years, and the Russians are joining in. What's going on here? The announcement of the life forms in Martian meteorites seemed pretty orchestrated to me. The first announcements were that evidence of bacteria had been found.

This then escalated to worms when nobody shot himself. Then we heard of ice on the far side of the Moon, of water on Europa (one of Jupiter's moons), of all kinds of possibilities of simple life forms on Mars in the distant past, and now of huge floods having swept that planet. More recently still, we are told Mars once had an ocean larger than the Pacific. Still no riots in the streets!

These announcements seem to be released as if a doctor were taking the patient's temperature to see if the dose can be increased. By the time this book is in print, doubtless other levels in an escalating series of revelations will have been reached. Who is to say that the Mars [Observer] Orbiter really broke down after all? Perhaps it sent back incontrovertible evidence to the official folk who are in charge of such information, and they pretended that the probe malfunctioned to buy time while they formulated a policy of slow leaks, carefully judged in case of public hysteria.

But by now those officials will have realized that a lot of (Martian flood?) water has passed under the bridge since those heady days of 1938 when Orson Welles's radio broadcast about the Martian landing sent a nation into panic and precipitated suicides. The public is now well and truly conditioned: bring on the extraterrestrials, please!

The danger now would seem to be that the public is so used to a thrill every thirty seconds on television that they would eventually become bored by real extraterrestrials, as they will probably disappoint our fantasy expectations. And, of course, they may be, as the Babylonians said, physically repulsive, though unlike the Babylonians many people today are used to seeing dolphins and whales close-up, and natural history films have made the public very familiar with strange looking creatures.

The only people likely to get really upset about extraterrestrial contact will probably be the religious fanatics, who are in any case always upset about something. The very people who can without the slightest qualm believe in blood oozing out of holy statues are going to be the last to accept that religious beliefs can extend beyond this planet, and they will take great exception to the religious centre of the Universe shifting in a kind of theological Copernican upheaval.

On the other hand, some of us may find this concept rather comforting and exciting and draw strength from it.

So let us move on now to a much-expanded version of The Sirius Mystery, which contains a great deal of new information. There have never been sufficient resources to undertake much of the research that I would have liked.

I hope this present version of the book proves useful to those who are interested in these matters, which may affect us all sooner than we think.


 

In the end, Temple gets it nearly all right.

 

While we doubt the reality of aquatic aliens from Sirius, it seems that there is sufficient reason to conclude that somebody paid a visit to the Dogon long ago in a flying Ark of fire. What we would like you to do is to keep the Nommos and their promised return in mind as we travel these next few weeks.

 

Because, even as Temple reminds us, it may be later than you think ...