Germaine Dieterlen, the Sirius Mystery, and the Quest for Truth

Authors of extraordinary claims have two modes when under attack for their false claims. They either lash out wildly like a cornered animal, or they retreat into their shells to ride out the storm like a tortoise or a snail. I have previously documented how alternative authors like Erich von Däniken, Robert Temple, and Graham Hancock have imagined conspiracies to suppress the truth of their claims. Even Philip Coppens this week accused me of a hate-filled “obsession” with him because I dared criticize but a single claim of his. 

Robert Temple, who sometimes complains that the CIA and the “hypnosis community” are sabotaging his career, tends to be more of a tortoise. In his 1998 edition of The Sirius Mystery, he failed to acknowledge that the very center of his work—the claim that the Dogon tribe of Africa possess anomalous knowledge of nature of the Sirius star system that only aliens could provie—had been proven untrue by fieldwork conducted with the Dogon by Walter E. A. van Beek in 1991. To this day, he has refused to acknowledge the existence of van Beek’s work.

Temple derived his claims about the Dogon from Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, two anthropologists who had written Le Renard pale (Temple's primary source) about the Dogon. The whole story is rather long and complex—and laid out here—but the gist of it is that Griaule convinced himself of mythologies and facts that were not external to him, and Dieterlen embraced these same views after working with Griaule among the Dogon for many years.

So, when  Van Beek discovered no factual support for the claims, he courteously let Dieterlen—who died in 1999—see a copy of his findings before he published them. Her reaction—and she was an actual, credentialed academic—was just like that of any other alternative theorist: suppress the truth to protect the lie. Van Beek sat down with Dieterlen in Paris to discuss his article:

I braced myself for a long critique, but she had just one question: “Pourqois le publier?” Only that, why publish? She had no answer to my arguments; in fact during our two-hour conversation that followed she never ventured into the content of the article at all, but just pleaded not to publish it. It was, evidently, also the most difficult question to answer, and one I had been reflecting on very long. I answered, truthfully I think, that publishing is the very soul of science, and that debate is the way to proceed in getting closer to the truth. She had no comments on that, but instead started reminiscing on the past.

Walter E. A. van Beek, “Haunting Griaule: Experiences from the Restudy of the Dogon,” History in Africa 31 (2004) (via Mike Heiser).

That pretty much says it all.