Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

It is still a puzzle that the Dogon do seem to know something about Sirius B—that it exists, for example, and that it is made of very dense matter. It’s one thing to shoot down Temple’s ancient astronaut explanation, which doesn’t hold water on close examination, but skeptics should be able to provide at least a reasonable alternative explanation. It turns out that what the Dogon say about Sirius B corresponds very well to what astronomers thought about the star in the 1920s. At that time it was thought to be made up of the densest matter in the galaxy, just as Dogon legend says it is. It is now known that much denser matter is found, for instance, in neutron stars so this aspect of the Dogon legend is also incorrect. The error suggests that the Dogon obtained their knowledge of Sirius B not from space travelers, but from contact with Westerners during the 1920s or later. Their legendary views about Sirius and its twin companions can be attributed to the great importance of Sirius itself in their religion and of “twinness” in their culture. This would lead the Dogon to the natural conclusion that any object as important as Sirius would have twin companions. If they couldn’t be seen, they must still be there, but invisible. When Westerners in the early twentieth century learned of the Dogon’s interest in Sirius, they told them of Sirius B and that information was incorporated into the legends.

Is it reasonable to think that such contact took place? Yes—as Ridpath (1978–79) points out, the Dogon have had considerable contact with Western culture since the early part of the twentieth century. There were French schools in the area as early as 1907, and missionaries visited the tribe in the 1920s and thereafter. The tribe is settled in an area near a trade route and the Niger River and has been in contact with Europeans since at least the late 1800s. There has been ample opportunity for them to acquire their knowledge of Sirius B.

Ridpath (1978–79) recounts an amusing story that demonstrates how quickly modern knowledge can become part of legend and folklore. A member of a primitive tribe in New Guinea astonished a physician by explaining that a particular disease was caused by invisible spirits that got into the body through the skin and made the victim sick. The native then drew in the sand and described verbally a picture that corresponded almost exactly to the view of germs through a microscope. Temple and von Daniken would no doubt have concluded that this knowledge had been obtained from extraterrestrial sources. How else could one explain this advanced medical knowledge on the part of so primitive a tribe? Happily, the story was told by the physician Arleton Gajdusek, who won the Nobel prize in medicine in 1976 for his work on the New Guinea disease kuru. It turned out that Gajdusek had shown members of the tribe a view of germs through a microscope while he was doing field work in the area. The natives had remembered the explanation and incorporated it into their own worldview, with a few changes.

The weaknesses and inconsistencies in Temple’s (1976) extraterrestrial hypothesis for the Dogon’s knowledge of Sirius B and the demonstration of contact between Europeans and the Dogon since the late 1800s add up to a convincing argument that there was never any contact between the Dogon and amphibious visitors from the Sirius system.

I will not spend the time or space to refute the hundreds of false claims, evasions of the truth, and deceptions perpetrated by von Däniken and his imitators. That has been ably done by several other authors. The interested reader is referred to the references cited above as well as to Stienbing (1984), Krupp (1981), Omohundro (1976–77), Story (1977–78), and Loftin (1980–81). Krupp (1978) has edited an excellent book on the true astronomical abilities of ancient peoples.

Von Daniken’s ancient astronaut theory was created in the 1970s. Another modern myth was also fabricated in the 1970s: the Bermuda Triangle, where ships and planes allegedly disappear under the most mysterious of circumstances.

Stories of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle area are alleged to date back to the 1800s. For years they appeared in books of miscellaneous “mysterious” events, such as Frank Edwards’s Stranger Than Science (1959) and Strangest of All (1956). It was Charles Berlitz’s 1974 The Bermuda Triangle Mystery that really brought to the public’s attention the idea that strange events were taking place in the area. The book became a best-seller and, like von Däniken’s books, spawned a series of films, television programs, and imitators. Berlitz, like von Däniken, made a fortune from royalties and the lecture circuit.

The Bermuda Triangle is a manufactured mystery from start to finish. The numerous articles and books touting the “mystery” are inaccurate, misleading, and often wilfully deceptive in their descriptions of the alleged mysterious happenings in the triangle. Kusche (1981, p. 297) accurately characterizes the triangle mystery as “the epitome of false reporting; deletion of pertinent information; twisted values among writers, publishers and the media; mangling of scientific principles; and the often deliberate deception of a trusting public.” For example, ships that are said to have vanished under mysterious and unexplainable circumstances turn out upon investigation to have sunk during hurricanes. Other reported disappearances never happened at all. In some cases ships said to have disappeared never existed in the first place. Other sinkings and disappearances attributed to the triangle took place thousands of miles away.

As was the case for von Daniken’s claims, there is not enough space in the present volume to detail what really happened to each of the ships and planes that, according to the mythmakers, vanished mysteriously in the triangle. I will describe several representative cases found in the sensational literature and contrast these fantasies with the results of careful investigations of the actual occurrences. These investigations were carried out by Kusche and are reported in his book The Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved (1975), to which the reader is referred for further details. Other critical discussions of the Bermuda Triangle can be found in Kusche (1977–78a) and Dennett (1981–82).

Berlitz’s (1974) best-selling The Bermuda Triangle Mystery describes the strange case of the Marine Sulphur Queen. She carried a cargo of fifteen thousand tons of molten sulphur and sailed from Beaumont, Texas, on February 2 1963. According to Berlitz, “the weather was good” and “the large vessel disappeared in good weather” (p. 56, caption on fourth page of plates). Berlitz further states that two life jackets were the only remains of the ship ever found and that the Coast Guard investigation offered “neither solution nor theory concerning this disaster” (p. 57).

These statements are simply false. The weather may have been good on February 2, 1963, when the ship left harbor, but it certainly wasn’t good when she sank. A routine radio message from the ship was sent at about 1:30 A.M. on February 4. This was the last radio contact. About twelve hours previously, according to the Coast Guard Board of Investigation report that Kusche (1975) has examined, another ship in the area reported that there were “very rough seas and her decks were awash” (p. 186). Winds gusted to just below hurricane strength, and the waves were more than thirty-five feet high. This is hardly the calm, peaceful ocean scene painted by Berlitz.

The claim that only two life jackets were ever found adds to the picture of a ship simply vanishing without a trace. The Coast Guard Board of Investigation report shows that the true story is quite different. A foghorn from the ship was found, and over the second phase of the search “additional debris were recovered and identified as coming from the Marine Sulphur Queen” (Kusche 1975, p. 188).