Throughout the history of the Near East it was known that the Sumerians claimed their civilization really began to flower when they made contact with a sky creature who flew down into the sea in a ship. Note this creature was not described as a god, and not as an angel, just as another real living creature. Like our amphibians this creature needed to live near and in water. In fact when portrayed in Near East sculpture he is carved half man-half fish. Apparently, it met repeatedly with a Sumerian native on a beach and gave him many of its secrets, among them the gift of the alphabet/writing. This legend, or story, was passed down through generations and numerous tribes including the Babylonians.
In 1936, the legend was rediscovered by French archeologists in Mali in an African tribe called the Dogons. The Dogons were a descendant of a Near East people, probably the Sumerians themselves, who had carried their oral traditions for thousands of years.
Respected by the Dogons the archeologists were indoctrinated into the tribe's greatest secrets. They worshipped the star Sirius, saying the sky creature had come from a water world in its solar system. Sirius is our brightest star. Commonly called the Dog Star, is sits about 7 light years from our sun. Among the sizable collection of astronomical information the creature imported, including a description of the Big Bang theory, was that Sirius was actually a three star system. According to the creature the Sirius system had a large sun, a second, tiny, very dense, almost invisible sun, and a third, somewhat less heavy, sun. The second sun was enormously heavy despite its small size. It revolved around the large sun we call Sirius A with A at one foci of an ellipse, hardly everyday information for a preliterate people. They also described how A rotated on its axis. Transsecting the orbits of these three suns the orbit of the creature's planet was egg shaped and took fifty years.
The French team recorded their story and subsequently published it. At the time scientists thought Sirius was a binary sun system, though a few astronomers had speculated the possibility of it being trinary. The matter rested there until the 1970s when scientists using the latest powerful telescopes finally were able to get good photos of the Sirius system. To their amazement it was a triple star system with a large sun, a white dwarf star, very heavy and basically invisible, and a third, less powerful sun, not yet visible but calculated.
Using computers astronomers calculated that a planet in the position that had been described by the Dogons would have an egg shaped orbit taking fifty years to complete. Nowadays stories claim that at least forty years before our most powerful telescopes could even foretell the existence of the second and third Sirius star, the Dogons knew about it, described its properties, at that this is incontrovertible proof that extraterrestrial visits occurred in the past.
A closer look shows that there is no proof. Yes, the Dogons tradition reports an ancient extraterrestrial contact, but, no, it cannot be claimed that it was impossible that they knew that Sirius is a triple star system only from extraterrestrial sources.
On the other end, the case is not closed. There remains a Dogon indication about the third star that may or may not match future astronomical discoveries...
Here is the investigation I did on this fascinating topic.
