A Fable

Once there was a little girl sitting by the seashore. Her mother had told her to go and play. She watched the waves and thought: 'If only something marvelous would happen to me today!' The sun was shining very hot upon the strand and the girl became drowsy. The sound of the quiet surf was like a lullaby. She began to doze.

Suddenly she awoke. The air was alive with a new coolness, a haze had lifted, everything was startlingly clear to the sight. Far out, she glimpsed a flash in the sea, then another flash, a glint of something in the sun. There it was again - something coming towards the shore and making its way through the waves. It must be a porpoise. The girl was terribly excited. Something was happening to make her day memorable. Now she would not have to sit by the seashore and be bored.

Now that the porpoise was getting nearer, it alarmed the girl. Could it be about to crash against the sand, as she had heard giant whales did from time to time in despair? Was it a dolphin actually intent on self-destruction? The girl ran hurriedly towards the spot which seemed to be the dolphin's objective. She saw its tail fin, quite close, appear for a moment.

 

Some seaweed it seemed to be trailing with it showed through the water. It was a bright, almost shiny, porpoise ... it was now near the sand . . . what would it do? She could see it now, through the water. It stopped. It seemed to be groveling in the sand. Its tail splashed up, then down. It remained stationary.

The poor dolphin had crashed into the sand. Full of pity, the girl began to wade out towards it. But it moved away slightly. It wasn't stuck in the sand. It was looking up at her from under the water. What could it be trying to do? The girl went back to the shore. The fish now moved in closer again. From quite near to the fish, a woman put her head above the water. She had silver make-up on her face and eyes that went up.

 

The little girl was worried about the fish. 'Have you got hold of the dolphin?' she asked the woman. Just beneath the woman's shoulders there was a noise like a swimming suit strap snapping against her skin. She replied to the girl with a fixed stare and a high wail which seemed to be a song. She moved towards the girl, her eyes never straying from her. Her eyes were clear blue, like the sky.

 

It was as if there were two holes in her head and you could see the sky through them. Again her swimming suit strap snapped against her. Her eyes were like the hot sun. The girl wanted to go to sleep. The woman's eyes were like the sound of the surf. The girl sat down in the sand and tried to make herself see the woman more clearly.

 

The woman's face appeared to be really silver.

The woman's chest showed above the water now. Her bosom was bare. Her swimming suit strap must have snapped. The woman's bosom was a beautiful silvery green and shiny in the sun. The woman seemed unable to go any farther.

 

She stared at the girl and remained motionless, except for a slight swaying to and fro.

'Who are you?' asked the girl. 'Have you come from a boat?'

The woman gave a long wail, but the expression on her face did not change. Then there was the snapping of the swimsuit again. But this time the girl saw that above the woman's bosom were two long thin slits, which had opened and snapped shut loudly as if they were muscles flexing, just under her beautiful sleek collarbones. The woman stirred as if she were resting uncomfortably on a high stool.

 

She looked dissatisfied and, twisting her torso, she leapt forward and fell with a splash in the surf near where the girl sat. She had no legs. It was what the girl had thought was the dolphin. The woman was a mermaid. Her body stretched out long, sleek, shiny in the sun, with the surf rushing up past her and then retreating. She leaned on an elbow and raised her dolphin's tail slightly in the air, then tapped the shallow water, and did so several times in the way that the girl herself tapped her fingers on her desk at school sometimes.

The mermaid had no scales like an ordinary fish. Her skin was like that of the dolphins in the aquarium who jumped through hoops. But she was more silvery and more green. And there was a kind of hair streaming down her back like thin seaweed, which looked brown, or silver, or green, or grey, or even black. It was all those colors. And still the mermaid tapped her tail against the surf and stared at the girl. She was very much like a naked woman. She looked like the girl's mother did when she hurried to put on her dressing-gown before a bath.

Once again there was the snapping noise, only quieter. The girl saw the long thin slits in the woman's chest open and close instantly. Then the woman made a low, pleasant humming sound and looked sleepy. She leaned forward and an amazing series of clicks and pops were apparently made by her in her throat, which the girl could see constricting and moving.

The girl stood up and said to her, 'I've never seen a mermaid before. Can I tell Mummy ?' The mermaid seemed to reply by smacking a fin against her skin somewhere behind her, rocking, and making a long, loud hum. She leaned forward more and looked at the girl and her eyes seemed to gloss over and go green. She opened her mouth, little pointed teeth showed in pink gums, and a long whispering sound came out which sounded like the sea at a distance. She then beckoned the girl to her with her arm, and her webbed fingers.

The girl stood in the surf and touched the mermaid.

'You're so soft,' said the girl, 'not like fish are. I mean fish are soft, but you're so smooth.'

The girl liked the mermaid. She had never seen anyone so smooth and silvery and beautiful.

'I bet you can swim better than ordinary people. I'm going to run and tell Mummy you're here!'

The girl began to walk away.

'You won't go away, will you? Wait here!'

And she made every effort to smile and signal her intentions. The woman seemed to nod in agreement. The girl ran quickly, looking back often to see if her mermaid woman would wait for her. The mermaid made no attempt to move, but merely watched the girl.

From a distance the mother could see something lying in the surf, as her daughter tugged at her skirts excitedly.

'It's something from a wreck,' said the mother.
'No, Mummy, it's a mermaid!' said the little girl.
'Don't be silly darling, mermaids don't really exist. They're just in stories. Now what is it you've found?'

Then suddenly the thing in the surf moved. It was horrible, like a serpent.

'Oh! It's alive! It's moving! No!' and she turned and tried to push her little girl back home.

'I'm going to get Daddy. He'll know what to do. It may be a creature which is injured. Now come with me.'

But the little girl eluded her and ran towards the sea.

'No, Mummy, it's a mermaid! Come and see!'

Feeling sick in the pit of her stomach and apprehensive, the mother followed her daughter and feebly called after her. The girl quickly reached her friend from the sea, and the mother, seeing her standing beside the moving creature, cried,

'No! Get away! Get away from it!'

She then ran and — it was a woman and fish, it was! It was silver. It was a mermaid!

'No, darling, no! Get away from it! It's horrible!'

Her daughter came to her obediently and the mother stared in disgust and nausea at this awful slimy sea creature with a grotesque human frame grafted on to it - a monster, an abomination. She felt her stomach constrict, she gasped, she bent forward in the thought that she would be sick.

'God!' she gasped. 'Go home! Go home!' and pushed her daughter violently to make her run.
'What is it, Mummy?!' asked the girl, who was now becoming terrified.

'Mummy!' she cried in alarm.

Her mother was choking, eyes bulging, stumbling towards her with her flat palm outstretched to push her away towards home.

'Mummy! Mummy!'

They heard a loud splash and turned just in time to see the mermaid slip away effortlessly at lightning speed into the deep water gone instantly from sight.

'Oh God!' said the mother, as she clasped her head and fell to her knees on the sand.
'She's gone, Mummy. The mermaid's gone. But you saw her!'

The mother looked at her daughter as if the girl might at any moment herself turn into a mermaid.

'Oh darling, what was it? Tell me it isn't true!' said the mother, and put her head down into the hot, sharp sand.

A little story about a child and an adult and their different reactions to a strange, intelligent amphibian. To the child 'it could swim better' and was silvery and fascinating. To the mother it was repulsive and horrible.

In Appendix II the reader will find in English translation the surviving fragments of the lost Babylonian History written in Greek by a Babylonian priest named Berossus, who seems to have been an acquaintance of Aristotle and drew on his own country's temple archives (which were in cuneiform, of course) to compile the history of his country from original documents.

 

The readership would have been the cosmopolitan inhabitants of the Hellenistic world created by the conquests of Alexander.

In his work, Berossus describes his country's tradition of the origins of its civilization. And the tale is a strange one. For a group of alien amphibious beings were credited by the Babylonians with having founded their civilization.

The main individual of the group of amphibians is called Oannes. We have had occasion to refer to him earlier. There are several illustrations of him throughout this book (Plates 6, 7, 8 and 9 and Figures 30 and 31). In somewhat later traditions than the ones Berossus drew on, Oannes became the fish-god of the Philistines known as Dagon and familiar to many readers of the Bible. By that time Oannes, as Dagon, had become an agricultural deity. In the surviving fragments of Berossus we have no reference to the Philistine tradition, and we shall probably never know whether Berossus mentioned it or not.

 

But in the Berossus fragments preserved by the historian Apollodorus, we read that,

'there appeared another personage from the Erythraean sea like the former, having the same complicated form between a fish and a man, whose name was Odacon'.

This seems fairly clearly to be a corrupted form of 'Dagon'. Unless 'Dagon' is a corrupted form of 'Odacon'.1

Apollodorus criticizes Abydenus, who was Aristotle's disciple, for not mentioning that there were other amphibious beings besides Oannes himself. He says: 'concerning these Abydenus has made no mention'. Apollodorus, therefore, seems to have given Berossus a close attention to detail which Abydenus, for his purposes, neglected.

 

This is an extremely important point, as we shall now see.

 

Berossus, according to the close account of Apollodorus, calls the amphibians by the collective name of 'the Annedoti'. They are described as 'semi-daemons', not as gods. For some time I thought that 'the Annedoti' must be a convenient and tradition-sanctioned name for these creatures. I was concerned to have a name for them because, as we learn in a moment, the Dogon tribe claim that amphibious creatures with fishtails founded their civilization too, and that they came from the system of the star Sirius.

 

If there are intelligent creatures living on a planet in the Sirius system, it would seem from all the evidence that they are amphibious, resembling a kind of cross between a man and a dolphin. It is therefore necessary to come up with some name for these creatures if we are to discuss them from time to time.

With this in mind, I suddenly wondered what the word 'Annedotus', which is never translated in the Cory translations of the fragments of Berossus, could actually mean.

 

I read once again the fragment of Berossus from the careful Apollodorus and scrutinized the translation of it, which was:

'. . .in whose time appeared the Musarus Oannes the Annedotus from the Erythraean sea'.

The Erythraean sea is that body of water known to the ancients which we today subdivide into the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean.

What was meant by the untranslated words 'Musarus' and 'Annedotus'? Strangely enough, until I purchased my own copy of Cory's Ancient Fragments, I had never before noticed that the words 'Musarus' and 'Annedotus' were untranslated. In libraries, with a pressure of time, one tends to overlook these details. I also had overlooked this in the account of Apollodorus quoted by Carl Sagan in his Intelligent Life in the Universe.3

 

These are all reasons why I felt that I should include as an appendix to this book the complete surviving fragments of Berossus (excluding a couple unrelated to our concerns which may be found in the third and final, 1876 posthumous edition of Cory's book). For unless all of the material is available and easy to hand, one invariably overlooks something and neglects to make the frequent and necessary comparisons which enable one gradually to read between the lines and obtain additional insights.

It so happens that the most frequently cited version of Berossus's account is usually that preserved by Alexander Polyhistor.4 But that is where problems can begin. For Alexander Polyhistor does not use the words 'annedotus' or 'musarus' in his account.

 

And the version preserved by Abydenus uses the word 'annedotus' only as if it were a proper name:

'...in his time a semi-daemon called Annedolus, very like to Oannes, came up a second time from the sea . . .'

As for the word 'musarus', Abydemis does not use it at all.

So I turned to the lexicon to find the meanings of these words. I assumed that Cory would have translated them into English if they had simple and obvious meanings. But to my surprise I found that their meanings were quite simple and specific.

 

A 'musarus' is 'an abomination', and an 'Annedotus' is a 'repulsive one'.

Now the reader may appreciate why I wrote the little fable. For the creatures credited with founding civilization in the Middle East were frankly described by the Babylonians who revered them and built huge statues of them (Plate 9) as being 'repulsive abominations'.

 

If ever anything argued the authenticity of their account, it was this Babylonian tradition that the amphibians to whom they owed everything were disgusting, horrible, and loathsome to look upon. A more normal course for any invented tradition of the origins of civilization would have been to glorify the splendid gods or heroes who founded it. But instead we find specific descriptions of 'animals endowed with reason' (Alexander Polyhistor's account) who make their awed and thankful beneficiaries want to be sick with revulsion.

 

And what is more, the tradition admits this freely!

The problem of revulsion is a difficult one. It seems to be partly a result of what we are taught when young. No doubt psychologists would have a great deal more to say about it. But whatever origins it may have, it seems to be almost uncontrollable once a propensity to it has developed. If someone finds snakes or spiders repulsive, it would take a great deal of persuasion to get him to change his attitude, and the chances of success are minimal at best.

 

As humans, we tend to dislike all slimy creatures, creepy-crawling creatures, creatures which ooze or slither or wriggle. Indeed, people who have a pronounced fondness for such creatures often seem to be suffering from a pathological condition themselves.

 

I once knew a girl who kept a pet boa-constrictor in her bedroom, next to her bed for 'company'. She fed it a live mouse every Thursday and she loved to watch it being eaten alive. She loved more than anything to hear the snake at night in the dark when it made a curious slithering fall against the side of its tank; this excited her greatly. Now, I do not wish to criticize the girl for her strange tastes but I think most readers will agree that the girl had somehow transformed the interest in a snake into something else. And that kind of substitution is the promotion of a fantasy which can probably be classed as pathological, though possibly not dangerous to anyone (except the mice).

Granted all these circumstances of human relationships to slithery creatures and the problem of revulsion in general, it does strike me as a most superb irony that a race of intelligent beings may really exist in our near neighborhood of space who are slimy and repulsive, and yet who have founded many of the elements of our own human civilization and have a technology sufficiently advanced to enable them to travel between the stars.

 

Indeed, when all other pleasures in life fail, the one remaining is a delight in irony. I recommend it, both to men and Annedoti.

According to Berossus as preserved by Alexander Polyhistor, the amphibians look like this:

The whole body of the animal was like that of a fish; and had under a fish's head another head, and also feet below, similar to those of a man, subjoined to the fish's tail. His voice too, and language, was articulate and human; and a representation of him is preserved even to this day. . . . When the sun set, it was the custom of this Being to plunge again into the sea, and abide all night in the deep; for he was amphibious.

Who was Berossus, and how reliable was he? It is best to quote Cory's own preface for the information:

Berossus, a Babylonian, flourished in the reign of Alexander, and lived some time at Athens: and according to many wrote his Chaldaean history in the Greek language. As a priest of Belus he possessed every advantage, which the records of the temple and the learning and traditions of the Chaldaeans could afford; and seems to have composed his work with a serious regard for truth.

 

He has sketched his history of the earlier times from the representations on the walls of the temples: from written records and traditionally knowledge, he learned several points too well authenticated to be called into question; and correcting the one by the other has produced the strange history before us. ...

 

The first book of the history opens naturally enough with a description of Babylonia. . . . The second book appears to have comprehended the history of the ante-diluvian world; and in this the two first fragments ought to have been inserted.

As for two of those later writers who preserve fragments of Berossus, Abydenus the disciple of Aristotle wrote an Assyrian History, now lost, and Megasthenes wrote an Indian History, also lost. None of the four writers who have preserved Berossian fragments has had any of his own writings survive intact either. Later writers such as Eusebius, the Christian historian of the fourth century a.d., and Syncellus, the ninth-century a.d. Byzantine historian, have preserved in turn all of the fragments of Berossus which the earlier writers had quoted in their own works.

 

For it seems that the original of Berossus was lost long before the originals of Abydenus, Apollodorus, Megasthenes, and Alexander Polyhistor. And unless some obscure Byzantine monkish library or Egyptian papyrus of Hellenistic date or Babylonian tablet produces new fragments, we may never know more about Berossus than we do now at third hand. But at least my Appendix II should be a help.

 

For it will be the first time since 1876 that the fragments of Berossus will have been published.5

Let us take a look now at what the Dogon tribe have to tell us about the amphibious creatures who are credited with founding their civilization as well, and who seem to have come from Sirius. In Figures 32 and 34 are Dogon tribal drawings of what the creatures actually looked like. They are credited with having descended in an ark which, in landing, looked like Figure 35 which portrays 'the spinning or whirling of the descent of the ark'.

 

The god of the universe, Amma (whose name I feel certain is a survival of that of the god Ammon of the Oasis of Siwa), sent the amphibians to earth. They are called the Nommos. But just as the Babylonians tended to speak of Oannes, the leader, instead of always saying 'the Annedoti' collectively, the Dogon often just speak of 'Nommo' or 'the Nommo' as an individual.

The Nommos are collectively called 'the Masters of the Water' and also 'the Instructors', or 'the Monitors'.

 

They have to live in water:

'The Nommo's scat is in the water'.6

The Dogon describe the sound of the landing of the ark. They say the 'word' of Nommo was cast down by him in the four directions as he descended,* and it sounded like the echoing of the four large stone blocks being struck with stones by the children, according to special rhythms, in a very small cave near Lake Debo.8

 

* The reader will recall that near the end of Chapter One I mentioned that 'the word' represents a concept like the logos to the Dogon, for it means 'air'. We may take this description to refer not only to noise but to a rushing wind.

 

Presumably a thunderous vibrating sound is what the Dogon are trying to convey. One can imagine standing in the cave and holding one's ears at the noise. The descent of the ark must have sounded like a jet runway at close range.

The landing of the ark is visually described:9

'The ark landed on the Fox's dry land and displaced a pile of dust raised by the whirlwind it caused.' For this, see Figure 33. They continue: 'The violence of the impact roughened the ground ... it skidded on the ground.'

The descriptions of the landing of the ark are extremely precise. The ark is said to have landed on the earth to the north-east of Dogon country,7 which is where the Dogon claim to have come from (originally, before going to Mande) and that is, of course, the direction of Egypt and the Middle Hast in general.

The latter is much like the Babylonian tradition of their god Ea (Enki to the Sumerians), whose seat was also in the water, and who is sometimes connected with Oannes.

It is said of Nommo, or more probably of his ark:

'He is like a flame that went out when he touched the earth'.

They say:

'The Nommo was "as red as fire" . . . when he landed, he became white'.10

And consequently a bit of folklore:

'The albino is the testament on Earth of the Nommo's burns as he came down; he is said to be the "trace of the burn", the scar of the Nommo.'11

There seems to be a use by the Dogon of 'spurting blood' to describe what we would call 'rocket exhaust'.

 

And let us remember that, short of anti-gravity machines (which may be impossible), rocket propulsion is likely to be used by craft landing on any planet, no matter how sophisticated and non-rocket-like the interstellar main craft, or no matter how immensely advanced the civilization may be which is making a landing on a planet.

For the principle of the rocket is a simple one unlikely to be dispensed with entirely in any foreseeable future technology.

 

Actually, the Dogon seem to make a clear differentiation between the ark in which the Nommos actually landed on earth and what we may surmise was the true interstellar spaceship hovering above in the sky at a great distance, and which the Dogon seem to describe as appearing in the sky as a new star, and leaving with the Nommos at their departure from Earth.

 

In fact, this is the sort of arrangement one would expect. An interstellar spaceship would probably look like a bright new star, possibly visible in daytime as well as by night, and the landing craft would be simple rocket-propelled craft not so different in principle from machines which we use at the present time for landing on the moon.

At this point I should make it clear that I do not believe that spaceships from extraterrestrial civilizations are flitting through the skies at this moment. I am not a 'flying saucer' enthusiast. I do not believe that spacecraft would behave in the erratic fashion in which UFOs behave. It makes no sense to me that spacecraft would fly idly around making spectacles of themselves - and ambiguous spectacles at that - for years on end.

 

If we went to another inhabited planet, would we waste either time or resources on such apparent nonsense?

 

What seems to be lacking in UFOs is purpose, of any kind, which could conceivably fit into a framework of extraterrestrial visitation. So I therefore do not believe that 'flying saucers' are spacecraft, although I am willing to admit I may be wrong.

 

I have encountered nothing but flak from both sides about this believers in flying saucers are incredulous that I am not one of them, since I have written a book on extraterrestrials and I even maintain that spaceships visited Earth in the past; those who do not entertain for one moment the notion that spaceships could ever have visited the Earth naturally assume that my book is about flying saucers.

I should add, however, that I feel certain that the Earth is being monitored at this moment by a more advanced extraterrestrial civilization, and I assume this monitoring must be by automatic computer probes left behind in this solar system at some time in the past.

 

Although I consider most so-called UFO sightings as pure hysteria or simple error, it is possible that a small percentage of UFOs may be what the devout 'believers' in UFOs claim they are. It is unfortunate that this subject has become so burdened by the oppressive enthusiasm of people whom I can only describe by the unflattering epithet of 'the lunatic fringe'.

The Dogon may describe the interstellar spaceship hovering high above the Earth by what they call ie pelu tolo, 'star of the tenth moon'. The Dogon say: 'As (the ark) landed, the weight of the ark caused the "blood" to spurt to the sky'.12

 

This would seem to be a rocket craft landing on earth. But this 'spurting blood' (flame ?) is said to be shared with ie pelu tolo, and 'gave the star reality and brilliance'.13

 

For three different complementary tribal drawings ie pelu tolo, see Figure 37. These seem to represent the 'star' in three separate conditions, differing in the amount of 'spurting blood' being emitted by the presumed spacecraft. The Dogon also describe this 'star' specifically as having a circle of reddish rays around it, and this circle of rays is 'like a spot spreading' but remaining the same size.14

It is said that the Nommos will come again. There will be a 'resurrection of the Nommo'.

 

It should thus not surprise us that,

'the celestial symbol of the resurrection is the "star of the tenth moon", ie pelu tolo . . . This star is not easy to see. . . . The ten rays, placed in pairs, are inside the circle because the star has not yet "emerged"; it will be formed when the Nommo's ark descends, for it is also the resurrected Nommo's "eye" symbolically.'15

In other words, the 'star' is not a star, and can only be seen when the Nommo returns and his ark descends to Earth.

  • The Nommo is 'the monitor for the universe, the "father" of mankind, guardian of its spiritual principles, dispenser of rain and master of the water generally.'16

  • Not all the Nommos came to Earth. The 'one' called Nommo Die, or 'Great Nommo', remained 'in heaven with Amma, and he is his vicar'.17

  • He manifests himself in the rainbow, which is called 'path of the Nommo'.18

  • He is guardian of the 'spiritual principles of living creatures on Earth'.19

There are three other distinct kinds of Nommo, each personified as an individual.

  1. There is the Nommo Titiyayne, 'messenger (or deputy) of the Nommo Die ... he (executes) the latter's great works.'20

  2. The Nommos who came to earth in the spaceship arc presumably of this class. Figures 3a and 34 represent these beings in particular.

  3. A third class of Nommos are represented by O Nommo, 'Nommo of the pond'.

    • 'He will be sacrificed for the purification and reorganization of the universe ... He will rise in human form and descend on Earth, in an ark, with the ancestors of men . . . then he will take on his original form, will rule from the waters and will give birth to many descendants.'21

  4. The fourth Nommo is the naughty disrupter named Ogo, or Nommo Anagonno.

    • 'As he was about to be finished (being created) he rebelled against his creator and introduced disorder into the universe. Eventually, he will become the Pale Fox (le Renard Pale) which is the image of his fall.'22

    In many ways, the Fox resembles the Egyptian deity Set.

The name Nommo comes from a Dogon word linked to the root nomo, 'to make one drink'. It is said:

'The Nommo divided his body among men to feed them; that is why it is also said that as the universe "had drunk of his body" the Nommo also made men drink. He also gave all his life principles to human beings.'23

He was crucified on a kilena tree which also died and was resurrected.24

After the ark had landed, according to the Dogon, an interesting series of events took place which make a great deal of sense if one remembers that amphibious creatures were inside. Something described both as a 'horse' and just simply as a 'quadruped' appeared which pulled the ark with ropes to a hollow.25

'This stage, momentarily, transformed the ark into a chariot drawn by a quadruped with ropes.'26

The hollow then filled with water. However, an untoward incident then occurred:

'After the first rainfall, when the water had filled the pond, the water-insect . . . entered the water ... it wanted to "bite" the Nommo's head . . . but it was unable to reach the edge of the ark.'27

The bad 'water-insect' was thus unsuccessful in wishing to do harm. When the water filled the pond, the ark floated on it like a huge pirogue. ... It is said:

'The great ark came out of the sky and came down. In the centre the Nommo was standing, he came down. Then he returned to the water.' ...

From then on he was called O Nommo, 'Nommo of the pond', - through respect men will not utter this name, but will call him instead di tigi, 'master of the water'.28

 

Thus we see that the second and third categories of Nommo are really the same, but represent successive states. And as for the future:

His twin who will descend later on with the Blacksmith, 'twin of the victim', will also be transformed in the pond. They will have many descendants and will always be present in the fresh 'male' water of the brooks, rivers, ponds and wells and also in the 'female' sea water.29

As for this reference to fresh water as male and sea water as female, it is similar to the ancient Babylonian and Sumerian tradition where Apsu (Abzu) was a male fresh-water deity and Tiamat a female sea-water deity. The Dogon say,30 'O Nommo has his seat in the waters of the earth', which could just as well be a description of Enki/Ea, whom I mentioned above.

I feel impelled to reproduce in this book as Figure 38 a Dogon drawing showing four variants of the Dogon sirigi mask design. Anyone can see that they look like rocket ships. Griaule and Dieterlen give31 detailed accounts of the meanings of the lozenges, rectangles, etc. These variant designs are said specifically all to represent 'the descent and impact of the ark'.32

 

The descent of the ark was like a lozenge, its impact was like a rectangle.33 Perhaps this is why the Dogon say:

'When the ark was descending, space was four angles; when the ark was down, space had four sides.'34 The sirigi design itself represents 'a "house with stories" . . . (and) indicates the ark as well as its descent.'35

So maybe the Dogon have actually drawn a rocket ship.

The Dogon say36 that 'lpo tolo (Sirius B) and Sirius were once where the sun now is'. That seems as good a way as any to describe coming to our solar system from the Sirius system, and leaving those stars for our star, the sun. But let us now take leave of our friends the Dogon. Let us go to where Sirius and its white dwarf companion star are the suns, and where our own sun has become just another star in the sky.

 

Let us visit the planet of the amphibians.

What are Sirius and Sirius B like as suns?

 

We know that they revolve around a common centre, which is in fact equivalent to Sirius B revolving around Sirius A in an elliptical orbit.

 

Sirius A, a big, bright star, has two and a half times the mass of our sun. Sirius B has ninety-five per cent of the mass of our sun, but because it is made of degenerate matter and is so tiny, this is not obvious. If Sirius B with its mass were not a white dwarf, we could easily see it from earth as a star of magnitude 2, though the problem of parallax would make it difficult to separate it from Sirius A. In any case, if Sirius B were on its own somewhere at its distance from earth, and were not a white dwarf, it would be one of the brightest stars in the sky.

In reality, Sirius A is ten thousand times brighter than Sirius B. The luminosity of Sirius A is thirty-five and a half times the luminosity of our sun. That makes it a pretty hot number. We can be certain that our planet is not too near it. The 'habitable zone' discussed in Chapter One is much farther out from Sirius than it is from our sun.

 

As for the actual size of Sirius A, its radius is a little more than one and a half times the sun's radius. This means that Sirius will be smaller in the sky than our own sun, seen from the planet. It will be a good deal smaller, but will need to have roughly the same amount of heat, which is not too difficult, considering how terribly hot and bright it is. To us it would be a strange experience to see such a small body in the sky giving out so much heat and light. Looking directly at it would probably be as injurious as staring into an arc lamp.

 

All the more reason to be under water, and not so tempted.

Our planet will probably be quite hot. In fact, it will probably even be covered with a vaporous layer of cloud at most or all times. It might look something like Venus from a distance, though of course Venus does not have temperatures or clouds of the sort which living creatures are likely to find agreeable. It would seem important to keep cool on this probably rather hot and steamy planet.

 

Therefore intelligent life is likely to have evolved as amphibious and never have taken to the land. These amphibians might easily inhabit the surface of the water, of course, for they would need to breathe atmosphere and would not have gills like fish - they would probably need to be mammals of some kind in order to develop the brain sizes and other characteristics necessary for intelligence.

 

They would probably spend a lot of time hanging about marshes and might have developed an indigenous way of life originally which involved the use of woven reeds for huts and transport, and so on. (They would long ago have got past that stage, of course.)

 

But perhaps their first style of life, to which they may even look back with some nostalgia as 'the good old days of simplicity and a carefree existence', was something like that described by Wilfred Thesiger in his book The Marsh Arabs 37 in which the inhabitants of southern Iraq are pictured in the marshes of the lower Tigris and Euphrates (quite near where Oannes and his friends are said to have spent most of the time, one is tempted to note!).

If you were one of these creatures, you would be a good deal like a dolphin with arms and hands. You would, due to your amphibian nature, have a separate blowhole for breathing in addition to your mouth. You would be able to hold your breath for long periods, and when you did breathe through your blowhole, it would be a gasp and make a bit of noise.

 

Your blowhole would open and close almost instantaneously and your breathing would tend to be infrequent but loud and quick. The blowhole might be placed in such a way that it consisted of one or of two small slits, long and thin, just beneath your clavicles (collarbones). In fact, the Dogon have a tradition that their Nommos breathed through their clavicles.38

You could not go about bare-skinned in any atmosphere for long. You would require moisture on your skin after a few hours at the most; when your skin dried you would be in absolute agony - worse than a human with sunburn.

 

Because you would frequent the surface of the water a great deal, there would inevitably be a considerable contrast between the top half of your body and the bottom half.

The tradition known to us of the mermaid expresses this state of affairs quite well. Your lower extremities would be quite fish-like, but you would have articulate limbs and fingers on your upper half and your skin would be more capable of resisting solar radiations and hence would be more like that of a land mammal.

 

Probably cartilaginous structures would have evolved in your head to rigidify your features beyond the simple streamlined form required for a strictly undersea life, and there would be something on your upper body resembling hair - perhaps like the hair of our own walruses.

Your teeth would probably be feeble compared with those of ferocious carnivores such as sharks. You would probably have evolved from more peaceful creatures capable of feeding on small fish in considerable numbers. Your ancestors would have run in packs as the dolphins do and you would be extremely sociable because you evolved in schools (packs). Nudity is probably the natural state of your species.

 

Overpopulation is not one of your problems because most of your planet is water and all of the water is habitable. Even on the planet Earth, it is estimated that dolphins outnumber human beings two- to-one, and the oceans are hardly overcrowded.

As one of these creatures, you might find human beings repulsive, for many reasons. Their rough hair, dry skins, bony limbs, and particularly their pungent smells might disturb you greatly. Their sweat is not continually washed away in the way that your skin is continually cleansed by the watery medium which you inhabit.

 

And as an amphibian you have exceedingly well developed senses of smell and taste. You 'taste' smells or spoor-substances underwater at enormous distances and though your sense of smell is not quite as acute, it is competent enough. Unlike yourself, human beings tend to have areas in or near their dwellings which smell of their excrement and urine - places to which they habitually return to perform these functions.

 

As an amphibian whose waste products dissipate in the water, you find such an idea revolting. How can human beings stand going back to those same odors day after day?

One of the most disturbing sights to you is to watch human beings walking.

When humans stand still with their legs together, they look almost normal. But then suddenly they 'split' into two and begin walking, which makes you slightly dizzy and upsets you. It makes you feel nervous with the thought of how dreadful it would be for you if you 'split' and thereby became a cripple in the water. You admire the agility of the humans on dry land.

 

They can climb trees and cliffs, all of which is terribly impressive. They can go at a great speed on land with what they call 'running', they even have a certain capacity to jump over obstacles; they are not as swift on land as you are in water, but they do passably well. You do have difficulty in seeing them sometimes because, as you are in a watery environment, your vision is not good at long range.

 

And the humans, being dry, do not stand out against their background as much as you could wish. When they move you can instantly detect motion without optical definition, but a stationary human who is even approximately camouflaged and blends with this background is impossible for you to differentiate with your unaided eye. You rely on your sense of smell, like a rhinoceros.

 

But when the wind is against you, you have no hope. A human can easily elude your perception on dry land if he knows what he is doing and you do not have your goggles or technical aids with you.

You would have an extremely agile mathematical mind. Your ancestors developed from the primitive state by computing the intricate astronomical phenomena and radiations falling on your planet without benefit of direct optical observations. The brains of your species were thus engendered to conceive and solve vast intricate abstractions. Your powers of holding complicated mathematical structures suspended in your mind's eye while performing mathematical operations on them is extraordinary.

 

You have a phenomenal conceptual and generalizing faculty. It is easy for you to conceive of invisible, and even imperceptible, forces, because your daily environment is a suggestive, allusive one. You taste and smell your ambience rather than see it. Your powers of telepathy may be extremely highly evolved - possibly a characteristic of your species from their earliest history.

The climate range of your planet is greater even than the Earth's because there are no ice caps, due to there being more radiation from the two or three stars in your multi-solar system. Your oceans are all the more extensive, therefore, for not being locked up in ice caps at the poles.

Space flight is less uncomfortable for you than for humans, as the state of weightlessness is often approximated under water (indeed, on Earth the astronauts train under water). Your blood circulation is thus better suited to the weightless condition than is the case with humans and you do not at all mind living in the gigantic water tanks orbiting your planet which constitute your many satellite space cities. It is not as difficult to simulate a watery environment in space as it is to simulate a dry land environment. Your wants are few, your existence simple. You do not eat cooked food and you do not have stoves to keep warm. Farming for you is mostly the breeding of delicious small fish, and meals are an adventure as you love a good chase and the satisfaction of catching your food. Dinner is a family sport.

The amphibians must have a name, and the Dogon name for them of 'the Monitors' may be the best to consider using. 'Monitor' is more specific than 'Instructor', and 'Masters of the Water' is too long. There is no point using the euphemism the 'Annedoti', knowing that it means the 'Repulsive Ones'.

 

A more generic and neutral term, I suppose, would be simply the 'Sirians'. If we ever come into contact with them again, they will probably be called the 'Sirians' officially, and their civilization will be the 'Sirian civilization'. Their art will fall under the heading of 'Sirian culture' and their technology will be 'Sirian technology'. But what about their religion? There's a delicate point.

 

It will be called the 'Sirian religion' and we will try to pretend it has nothing to do with us. But inevitably we will have to take into account that, whereas 'cultures' and 'technologies' can be localized, the greater problems of the nature of life itself and of an individual's relation to the universe - existential problems - are not localizable.

 

There will in fact be no such ultimate thing as 'Sirian religion' except in the ethnographic sense. To speak of a 'Sirian' God will get us into deep waters. What do we mean when we speak of a 'Jewish' God or a 'Christian' God? There is no doubt that it is at the level of our deepest concerns - our religious and philosophical ones - that contact with an extraterrestrial civilization will make its deepest impact on us.

 

And it is at this friable level of our preconceptions that we are most vulnerable. Here the foundations of our beliefs can crumble with the first shock wave. Here the entire edifice of our civilization can give way. Only by being prepared can we safeguard our own cultural integrity.

We must not dismiss speculations such as those we have just indulged ourselves in as idle, thinking that we will wait and see what turns up in a spaceship some day. If we are going to be coming into direct contact with amphibious extraterrestrials, we should try to get some thoughts together on their physical nature and requirements at the very least - if only to make them welcome.

 

It is quite true, as Carl Sagan says:

'. . . stories like the Oannes legend . . . deserve much more critical studies than have been performed heretofore.'39

The critical studies should be institutionalized by the governments of the major powers, and made official programs. The resources of the governments which pour into programs to prevent their countries being overrun by military invasions, chemical warfare, nuclear blasts, should also pour into programs to prevent our planet as a whole being overrun by a sudden extraterrestrial contact which gives little warning. No matter how much care may be taken by any superior extraterrestrial civilization in dealing with us, it is really up to us to be ready for any contact.

 

I would even venture that we may be under observation or surveillance at this very moment, with an extraterrestrial civilization based at the Sirius system monitoring our development to see when we will ready ourselves for their contacting us. In other words, we may very possibly be allowed to control the forthcoming contact ourselves.

 

One wonders what any possible amphibious extraterrestrials living at Sirius would think roughly ten years later (speed of radio transmission at speed of light-across ten light years means a ten-year lag) upon receiving news from some automatic monitoring device which picked up a radio or television program at Earth mentioning a book just published about amphibious extraterrestrials living at Sirius. Would they think that was their cue? If what I propose in this book really is true, then am I pulling a cosmic trigger?

When this book was accepted for publication, the managing director of the publishing company asked me to his office for our first meeting. He had personally decided to accept the book and he had himself read it.

 

On this basis his first question to me was:

'Mr Temple, do you believe it? Do you believe it yourself?''

My answer was:

'Yes, I do. I have become convinced by my own research. In the beginning I was just investigating. I was skeptical. I was looking for hoaxes, thinking it couldn't be true. But then I began to discover more and more pieces which fit. And the answer is yes, I believe it.'

The information in this book cannot really rest with publication. I hope that many people will take an interest in exploring the ramifications of what I have here presented. This process has already begun, some months before publication. Portions or versions of this book have been read by a number of people already, nearly all of whom have made valuable comments on the material.

 

With a subject like this which is new, fresh insights are possible from almost anyone. The least educated person might have the most profound thought on some aspect of this question. But primarily it is from the highly qualified professionals that progress should come. Astronomers in particular must deal with this material. Fortunately, they are an open-minded community, perhaps due to the open-ended nature of the universe which it is their job to study.

It may be of interest to the reader to see an example of a reaction to this book by an eminent astronomer who is internationally known in his field. Professor W. H. McCrea, F.R.S., Emeritus Professor of Astronomy at the University of Sussex and a former President of the Royal Astronomical Society, read an early draft of the book.

 

Though a great deal of the book is changed since then, I nevertheless quote portions of his reactions in a letter to me dated 20 August 1973:

 

My reaction is:

  1. The special interest of Egyptians and others in Sirius is well known and you have made a strong case (as I think the people you quote have done) for supposing that the Dogon interest in Sirius is connected with this.
     

  2. In your very clever investigations of Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek . . . myths, you seem to have shown that some of these people may have had ideas about a dark, dense star possibly associated with Sirius. But, as I say, anything beyond that seems to me not established.
     

  3. In spite of all this, if you will allow me to say so, I think your investigations are fascinating and they make an exciting book.
     

  4. Your work does appear to bring out more strongly than ever the impression that, as you say, ancient cultures did not develop gradually. I do not know whether this impression is significant, but it bears investigation. I cannot see how it could have anything to do with space travelers. But you may think it right to argue the case.

     

    [Unfortunately none of the material in Chapter Eight of this book was known to Dr McCrea when he wrote this, for it was added in a later version of the book, as was much more.]

I may add that I realize that some of the matters about which you write may have been mysteries of religion, and so it may be hopeless to expect anything more explicit than what you describe. Also, as you say, there seems to have been a liking for puns. So it could be that the revelations by the Dogon tell us what has been left secret for 6,000 years. . . . To some extent, I am being advocatus diaboli so that maybe I am letting you see the sort of thing you will be up against when your work is published.

A great many of the criticisms which I have not quoted were dealt with in the complete rewrite of the book which took place after Professor McCrea and others had kindly blasted me with specific points. I was less fortunate in obtaining such comments from authorities on the ancient world.

On the whole it is the astronomical community who have shown the most interest in this matter, for it is they who are directly concerned with such a subject. And no astronomer has contributed a more detailed appraisal of the actual Dogon accounts than Dr Irving W. Lindenblad of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, who in a letter to me dated 14 June 1974, made these comments:

I agree that one should think twice before disagreeing with the Dogon. From an astronomical viewpoint, however, there are difficulties with the Dogon's suggestion of a third Sirius component having a period of 32 or 50 yrs., yet having a 'greater trajectory'. Kepler's third law states that the squares of the orbital periods are proportional to the cubes of the orbital semi-major axes. Thus, a 'greater trajectory' must be accompanied by a greater period.

Among the numerous observed triple systems of stars circling a common center of gravity, it has been found that the third member always has a much greater distance and period than the other two components. Celestial mechanics illuminates this phenomenon by demonstrating that a triple system is unstable if the two secondary stars are nearly equidistant from the system's center of gravity.

If the periods of B (Digitaria) and C (emmeya) are similar, as stated by the Dogon, their orbits must have similar dimensions (Kepler's Law). But this constitutes an unstable system (celestial mechanics) and it would also contradict the Dogon's thesis that emmeya has a 'greater trajectory'.

The Dogon must have realized that the orbital radii of Digitaria and emme ya could not remain at right angles with one another unless the periods were the same. If he did, this would constitute an argument in favor of accepting the tradition assigning a 50 yr. period to emme ya, as opposed to the tradition assigning a period of 32 years.

As to the diagrams to be found in this book, Figures 6 and 7, showing the comparison between Dogon tribal and modern astronomical conceptions of the relative orbits of Sirius A and Sirius B, Lindenblad, who has been studying the Sirius system for seven years, comments on them in a letter dated 7 March 1974:

'Regarding your orbital diagrams of Sirius, my work would not affect them at all. The changes I have been dealing with involve very minute quantities which can be detected only in large telescopes and even with such instruments a great amount of observation is required.'

Dr Lindenblad had not read this book prior to going to press, although he did read the Griaule and Dieterlen account of the Dogon Sirius system and see the diagrams. As for Professor McCrea, he had discovered quite in dependency of my own work that the Dogon knew of the existence of an invisible companion star to Sirius. He was informed of this by a friend in Argentina who had read a French account, which mentioned Griaule and Dieterlen's work.

 

McCrea has spent a considerable amount of time analysing the Dogon tradition, but I leave to him an exposition of his own views when the full material is available to him, which it has not been to date.

 

(Indeed, I received a great deal of it after the book was written and therefore I had to rewrite the book to incorporate it. The new material all served to strengthen rather than weaken my thesis.)
 

Figure 40.

Dr Su-Shu Huang's diagram for possible orbits of habitable planet in binary star system.

A and B are stars. The curves with different values for C are suggested orbits, one of which is a figure- eight configuration.

The most recent suggestion by an astronomer that habitable planets could exist without difficulty in binary or multiple star systems

is that of Dr B. M. Oliver, 'Proximity of Galactic Civilizations', in ICARUS, 25, 360-7 (1975), noticed at time of going finally to press
 

In considering the material set forth in this book, I hope that serious scholars will bear in mind that the existence of amphibious beings with high intelligence and advanced civilization is not a previously unheard of idea.

 

As far back as 1966, in their book Intelligence in the Universe, Roger MacGowan and Frederick Ordway wrote:40

Little can be said specifically about universal physical characteristics . . . life, especially the more intelligent forms, tends to be physically small, discrete, and highly mobile. . . . Humans, being land animals, tend to think in terms of land animals when considering intelligence, but we know that the sea contains a great variety of life. Moreover, all evidence points to the conclusion that the primordial seas were probably the site of the origin of life. Oceans provide an excellent environment for animal life and the competition between many species should encourage rapid evolution.

 

A liquid environment provides more buoyancy and support for animal bodies than does an atmospheric gas. For this reason the marine environment may be expected to develop many species that are larger than most land animal species. Knowing that larger bodies can support larger brains one might expect to find superior intelligence among the larger marine animals.

Considering this larger potential size, the great variety of life, the good stable environment of the oceans, and the competition among species, one is at first tempted to assume that the majority of intelligent extrasolar life would be marine. . . . Fins, ideal for ocean locomotion, are not well suited to developing tools (and thereby brains).

 

However, a few ocean species have developed other appendages more suited to tool manipulation. The octopus is a very well known ocean creature which could conceivably develop tool manipulation capability with further evolution. Some other ocean floor creatures could develop the equivalent of human arms and hands. . . . The patently high intelligence of certain whales and dolphins raises the question as to whether tool manipulating appendages are really vital to the development of superior intelligence.

 

And it makes it difficult to say whether some intelligent extrasolar life may be marine rather than land dwelling. . . .

We conclude that the majority of intelligent biological species will not differ greatly in gross morphological characteristics when compared to humans. They can be expected to range from less than half the size of a human to several times larger, and they should be expected to have, in most case, two legs and two arms with hands and fingers. In a few cases centaur-like animals having four legs and two arms with hands and fingers, or elephant-like animals having four legs and one arm or a trunk might be possible.

 

Another possibility is some form of marine life having fins and two short arms with large hands and webbed fingers.

 

This diagram showing the general orbits of planets capable of supporting life in binary systems. Notice that one such orbit is a figure-eight exactly of the kind I suggest for Sirius C, with its accompanying planet. However, this kind of orbit would more probably be unstable. It is a possibility, but if it has existed at one stage, it would probably have collapsed into some other configuration after a short time - long before life could have evolved in the Sirius system.

 

Dr Paul Murdin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory summed the situation up brilliantly when he said that a coin, when tossed, may indeed land on its edge; but even if it does, it will soon topple over, so that the probabilities for a tossed coin landing on its edge become meaningless in real situations. Our figure-8 orbit therefore probably cannot exist as a permanently stable feature of the Sirius system, no matter how attractive it may be to us in theory. But my idea of an orbit for Sirius C at right angles to the plane of Sirius B's motion (but without the figure-8) was, I was assured by Murdin, probably the ideal solution.

 

For the hypothetical star could penetrate the Sirius B plane of motion in a vast range of places without disrupting Sirius B's orbit, as long as the perpendicularity of the two planes of motion was retained. A 50-year or 32-year elliptical orbit for Sirius C, therefore, in a plane perpendicular to that of Sirius B's orbit is entirely possible. These multiple star motions involve such complicated celestial mechanics that the necessary computations are well beyond the competence of most professional astronomers.

 

Only certain specialist astronomers are capable of such work. Plottings have been made of the possible orbits for third stars in certain binary systems, and at the time of going finally to press, I am seeking the views of R. S. Harrington, S.S. Huang, and D. Lauterborn on these hypothetical problems. Harrington has demonstrated that a triple-star system is stable under conditions where the perisastron distance in outer orbit divided by the semi-major axis of inner orbit is not less than 3.5 if the orbit is direct or 2.75 if it is retrograde.

 

Bearing this in mind, Dr Paul Murdin of the Royal Greenwich Observatory concludes:

'There seems no reason to me why there should not be a Sirius C, say another white dwarf, at a distance from Sirius A of four hundred times the radius of our Sun, with orbital plane in the plane of the sky so as not to perturb the radial velocity of Sirius A.' And he says that 'its orbit will precess in time due to B, but with a period larger than the period of B, so we may be unlucky at this time in not seeing the perturbations.' (This refers to Lindenblad's negative results.)

As I remarked in Chapter One and now I mention again, it may well be that Sirius C follows a figure-eight orbit around both Sirius A and Sirius B alternately. Perhaps its total orbital period is 50 years and its larger loop period is 32 years. It may orbit in a plane which is at right angles to the plane of Sirius B's orbit. It would genuinely be a 'greater trajectory' because its figure-eight would encompass both of the other stars, but its actual distance and time would still obey Kepler's third law and would not exceed those of Sirius B with the same period.

 

Indeed, the identity of the periods of Sirius B and Sirius C might be a synchronous phenomenon lending stability to such a complex system. The Dogon seem to claim that the planet on which the amphibians live elliptically orbits the star emme ya, Sirius C. What is required now is a great deal of calculation by a professional astronomer to consider the amount of radiation to which a planet would be exposed following the star Sirius C in a figure-eight orbit of the kind I have proposed. Would life be possible on such a body?

 

The astronomer Su-Shu Huang has written an essay 'Life Supporting Regions in the Vicinity of Binary Systems' which appears in the book Interstellar Communication.41 This essay examines the conditions under which planets supporting life can exist in systems with more than one sun. I reproduce as Figure 40.

In closing, I wish to make a final point of considerable importance. Let us assume that what I have proposed in this book really is true. Let us grant all the premises. Say that there really is an advanced civilization based at the Sirius system. No doubt we are under routine monitoring. No doubt they know by now roughly where we stand on the ladder of evolution.

 

They have picked up our radio signals. They know we have been to the moon. Let us assume they wish us well. Let us assume even that they contact us someday when they think we are ready for it - or after we have discovered them by examining the Sirius system as I suggest and finding evidences of their existence.

Let us assume all this. Well, if that day comes - or if it doesn't and if some other day comes, some other civilization some day is known to us at some other star - there is one thing we must not forget. We must remember that no matter how grand and glorious they may be, they are still mortal beings in a universe which to them is still mysterious. They cannot and never will know all the answers.

 

We may very well have a handful of answers that they have not. We may have some quirky skills which they cannot attain. We may have some peculiar native ingenuity which they lack, even if this is not obvious for centuries. There may be something about us that is so valuable that we are not just worthless primitives beside them. Let us never accept a view of ourselves as recipients of cosmic charity. We are men, and for all our faults, we have a few things about us which are worth some attention. We have had some remarkable characters in our history and we will have more.

 

Whatever one's views of what lies beyond death - extinction, reincarnation, heaven and hell - the genetic stream goes on. There will be more men, and there will be great ones. We can rise to challenges. We have demonstrated courage throughout our history. Any superior civilizations may have even more superior civilizations behind them of whom they are curious. Let us not forget the principles of hierarchy, let us never blind ourselves to the possibility of a door behind the door behind the door.

 

And if we ever find ourselves oppressed, let us be certain that there are others somewhere - who would free us. The universe is finite but unbounded. There are between ten and a hundred million intelligent civilizations in our galaxy alone, in all likelihood. And there is always one more to contact than the one we have already contacted.

 

We can afford to shop around in a shop the size of the universe.
 

Back to Contents

 

 

 


Notes

  1. The reader may wonder if the name of the Dogon tribe is in any way connected with the names 'Dagon' and 'Odacon'. This is pure speculation but not unlikely in my opinion.

  2. See Appendix II, for reference.

  3. With I. S. Shklovskii. Dell, New York, 1966. See Chapter 33.

  4.  For instance, by Kenneth Demarest in Consciousness and Reality, p. 351.

  5. See end of Appendix II and the Bibliography. Thomas Stanley in his The History of the Chaldaick Philosophy, London, 1662, p. 12, notes some additional interesting information about the family of Berossus by telling us: 'A daughter of this Berossus is mentioned by Justin Martyr, a Babylonian Sibyl, who prophesied at Cumae . . .' On p. 10 Stanley describes Berossus as the man 'who first introduced Chaldaick learning into Greece'.

  6. Le Renard Pale, p. 462.

  7. Ibid., p. 458.

  8. Ibid., p. 460.

  9.  

  10. Ibid., p. 441.

  11. .

  12. Ibid., p. 440.

  13. .

  14. Ibid., p. 440.

  15. .

  16. Ibid., pp. 309-10.

  17. .

  18. Ibid., pp. 156-60.

  19. .

  20. Ibid., pp. 156-60.

  21. .

  22. Ibid., pp. 157-60.

  23. .

  24. Ibid., p. 287.

  25. .

  26. Ibid., pp. 444-5.

  27. .

  28. Ibid., pp. 444-5.

  29. .

  30. Ibid., p. 506.

  31. .

  32. Ibid., p. 438.

  33. .

  34. Ibid., p. 436.

  35. .

  36. Ibid., p. 474.

  37. The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger, Penguin Books, London, 1967; and originally Longmans Green, London, 1964.

  38. Le Renard Pale, p. 370.

  39. Sagan and Shklovskii, op. cit., p. 461. (It is not true, as he says on p. 460, the previous page, that 'the idea of planets circling suns and stars is an idea which essentially originated with Copernicus', as anyone reading Appendix One will see.)

  40. MacGowan, Roger, and Ordway, Frederick. Intelligence in the Universe, Prentice-Hall Inc., New Jersey, U.S.A., 1966, pp. 242-4.

  41. Interstellar Communication, ed. by A. G. W. Cameron, op. cit., p. 93. Dr. Huang is currently of the Dearborn Observatory at Northwestern University in the U.S.A.

    Ibid., p. 440. Ibid., p. 441. Ibid., p. 440. Ibid., pp. 309-10. Ibid., pp. 156-60.

    pp. 156-60.

    pp. 157-60.

    p. 287.

    p. 444.

    pp. 444-5.

    pp. 444-5.

    Ibid.,

    Ibid.,

    Ibid.,

    Ibid.,

    Ibid.,

    Ibid..

    Ibid., p. 439. Ibid., pp. 437-9. Ibid., pp. 436-9.