First, let's recap Temple's story. At the center of the mystery are the Dogon people living near Bandiagara, about 300 kilometers south of Timbuktu, Mali, in western Africa. Knowledge of their customs and beliefs comes from the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked among the Dogon from 1931 to 1952. Between 1946 and 1950 the Dogon head tribesmen unfolded to Griaule and Dieterlen the innermost secrets of their knowledge of astronomy. Much of this secret lore is complex and obscure, as befits ancient legends, but certain specific facts stand out, particularly those concerning the star Sirius, with which their religion and culture is deeply concerned. In the information imparted to the French anthropologists, the Dogon referred to a small and super-dense companion of Sirius, made of matter heavier than anything on Earth, and moving in a 50-year elliptical orbit around its parent star. The white dwarf companion of Sirius which answers to this description was not seen until 1862, when the American optician Alvan Graham Clark spotted it while testing a new telescope; the superdense nature of white dwarfs was not realized until the 1920s. But the Dogon Sirius traditions are at least centuries old. How can we account for the remarkable accord between ancient Dogon legends and modern astronomical fact?

Temple's answer, since espoused by Erich von Daniken (of course!), was that the Dogon were told by extraterrestrial visitors.