Flim-Flam! Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions - James Randi [40]
The faith the Dogon had in the visitors who dropped by must be somewhat dimmed by the realization that these folks just didn't know the length of their "stellar year," so to speak. You see, the Dogon say it is sixty years, not fifty. One would think that voyagers who have mastered astronautics and are able to travel more than 50 billion miles to a landing on Earth would be somewhat more precise.
(Left) The original diagram of the Dogon. (Right) The censored Temple version of the Dogon diagram. According to Temple, "a" is the orbit/egg, "b" is the star Sirius, and "c" is its companion star, Sirius B.
It is extremely doubtful that the Dogon really have ancient legends that include sophisticated knowledge of stellar orbits. Even if they do, we know they did not obtain such information from visiting beings from outer space. There are many other means by which information about the Sirius double-star system could have come to them, and the rest of their cosmogony cannot be explained away except by the means Temple has used—by ignoring it as inconvenient and extraneous.
I would have liked to believe that the Dogon (as once was thought to be the case with Jonathan Swift and his guesses about Mars) knew of astronomical wonders that were beyond their means to determine. What a wonderful story to tell around the campfire. But it just isn't so.
I had the great satisfaction, many years ago, of proving to myself and to the listeners of "The Long John Nebel Show," a radio program in New York, that most people just love to get in on a good thing. Nebel and I planned in advance to perform a minor experiment, and as we settled in for a long evening of talk about the wonders of a subject very much in demand on that show—flying saucers—we made sure that the telephone lines were cleared for action. It came thick and fast.
I breathlessly described how, earlier that evening, I had been driving through the Perth Amboy area of New Jersey and had seen a V-shaped formation of triangular orange objects going overhead in a northerly direction. I said I wasn't sure whether there had been any noise, because of the traffic sounds around me. Immediately the station switchboard lit up like an electronic Christmas tree, and John's secretary began taking down reports from callers who had also been witnesses to this remarkable sighting. Some were even switched through to the studio and told their stories on the air. Within half an hour we had established the exact number of triangles and the speed, altitude, and precise direction of the formation, and had discovered that I had seen only one pass of the "saucers" when there had been several!
As I look back on it now, I think it was unfortunate that we "blew the gaff" right there on the show about an hour after going on the air. Otherwise the reported sighting would undoubtedly have gone into the vast literature about "unidentified flying objects" and would have been by now one of the unassailable cases quoted by believers. As it was, we mercifully terminated the hoax to show listeners just how easy it was to create from nothing a full-blown flim-flam that would be supported and built upon by willing conspirators.
The UFO silliness can be said to have started during World War II, when military pilots brought back stories of what they dubbed "foo-fighters," which were described as fuzzy balls of light that appeared at the wing tips and kept pace with the planes in flight. To this day, opinions about this phenomenon are varied. "Ball lightning," "St. Elmo's fire" (a static electrical display often seen on sailing ships), Venus and other bright celestial bodies viewed through haze, and various optical effects have