Robert K. G. Temple

Robert Kyle Grenville Temple (born 1945) is an American author best known for his controversial book The Sirius Mystery: New Scientific Evidence of Alien Contact 5,000 Years Ago (first published in 1976 though he began writing it in 1967, with a second edition in 1998 with a new title). The book presents the hypothesis that the Dogon people preserve a tradition of contact with intelligent extraterrestrial beings from the Sirius star system.[1]

His writings on the Dogon are based on an interpretation of the work of ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen.

Books

Some other books by Temple are: The Crystal Sun (2000), Oracles of the Dead (2005), The Genius of China (2007), The Sphinx Mystery (2009), and Egyptian Dawn (2010). He has also written several articles for Time Life and has contributed to journals such as the New Scientist.

In a review of The Genius of China Peter Golas wrote that " Temple is not very good at qualifying. He seizes with, unabashed enthusiasm on any Chinese advance that might be seen to prefigure a later development in the west. In doing so, he all too often overstates or misstates the facts." Golas also notes that Temple relies almost exclusively on the work of Joseph Needham and Science and Civilisation in China, ignoring later research which has made some of the texts Temple used obsolete.[2] In the Beijing Review Needham himself criticized the book writing that it had "some mistakes ... and various statements that I would like to have seen expressed rather differently".[3]

Career

Temple was an undergraduate in Oriental studies and Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and an occasional broadcaster with the BBC. He lives in England with his wife Olivia.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Temple, Robert K. G. (1976). The Sirius Mystery. ISBN 0-09-925744-0.
  2. ↑ Golas, Peter (December 1991). "Review of Robert Temple "The Genius of China"". Chinese Science. 10: 66–68. JSTOR 43290372.
  3. ↑ Ling Yuan (Mar 23, 1987). "East-West: Bridging the Scientific Chasm" (PDF). Beijing Review. Retrieved 2011-02-06.


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