The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (23 page)

But what were such creatures doing in the middle of the desert, near Timbuktu? In fact, the idea is obviously absurd. Temple points out that to the northwest of Mali lies Egypt, and for many reasons, he is inclined to believe that the landing of the Nommo took place there.

Temple also points out that a Babylonian historian named Berossus – a contemporary and apparently an acquaintance of Aristotle (fourth century
BC
) – claims in his history, of which only fragments survive, that Babylonian civilization was founded by alien amphibians, the chief of whom is called Oannes – the Philistines knew him as Dagon (and the science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft borrowed him for his own mythology). The Greek grammarian Apollodorus (about 140
BC
) had
apparently read more of Berossus, for he criticizes another Greek writer, Abydenus, for failing to mention that Oannes was only one of the “fish people”; he calls these aliens “Annedoti” (“repulsive ones”) and says they are “semi-demons” from the sea.

But why should the Dogon pay any particular attention to Sirius, even though it was one of the brightest stars in the sky? After all, it was merely one among thousands of stars. There, at least, the skeptics can produce a convincing answer. Presumably, the Dogon learned from the Egyptians, and for the ancient Egyptians, Sothis (as they called Sirius) was the most important star in the heavens – at least, after 3200
BC
, when it began to rise just before the dawn, at the beginning of the Egyptian New Year, and signaled that the Nile was about to rise.

So the Dog Star became the god of rising waters. The goddess Sothis was identified with Isis; and Temple points out that in Egyptian tomb paintings, Isis is usually to be found in a boat with two fellow goddesses, Anukis and Satis. Temple argues convincingly that this indicates that the Egyptians knew Sirius to be a three-star system – the unknown “Sirius C” being the home of the Nommo. An ancient Arabic name for one of the stars in the Sirius constellation (not Sirius itself) is Al Wazn, meaning “weight”, and one text says that it is almost too heavy to rise over the horizon.

Temple suggests that the ancients may have looked toward the Canis constellation for Sirius B and mistaken it for Al Wazn. He also suggests that Homer’s Sirens – mermaidlike creatures who are all-knowing and who try to lure men away from their everyday responsibilities – are actually “Sirians”, amphibious goddesses. He also points out that Jason’s boat, the Argo, is associated with the goddess Isis and that it has fifty rowers – fifty being the number of years it takes Sirius B to circle Sirius A. There are many other fish-bodied aliens in Greek mythology, including the Telchines of Rhodes, who were supposed to have come from the sea and to have introduced men to various arts, including metalwork. Significantly, they had dogs’ heads.

But if the Egyptians knew about Sirius B and the Nommo, then why do we not have Egyptian texts that tell us about aliens from the Dog Star system? Here the answer is obvious: Marcel Griaule had to be “initiated” by Dogon priests before he was permitted to learn about the visitors from Sirius. If the Egyptians knew about Sirius B, the knowledge was revealed only to initiates. But it would have left its mark in Egyptian mythology – for example, in the boat of Isis.

Temple’s book
The Sirius Mystery
(1976) is full of such mythological “evidence”, and much of it has been attacked for stretching
interpretation too far. Yet what remains when all the arguments have been considered is the curious fact that a remote African tribe has some precise knowledge of an entire star system not visible to the human eye alone and that they attribute this knowledge to aliens from that star system. That single fact suggests that in spite of von Däniken’s absurdities, we should remain open-minded about the possibility that alien visitors once landed on our planet.

15

The Mystery of Eilean More

The Island of Disappearing Men

In the empty Atlantic, seventeen miles to the west of the Hebrides, lie the Flannan Islands, known to seafarers as the Seven Hunters. The largest and most northerly of these is called Eilean More – which means in fact “big island”. Like the
Mary Celeste
, its name has become synonymous with an apparently insoluble mystery of the sea.

These bleak islands received their name from a seventh-century bishop, St Flannan, who built a small chapel on Eilean More. Hebridean shepherds often ferried their sheep over to the islands to graze on the rich turf; but they themselves would never spend a night there, for the islands are supposed to be haunted by spirits and by “little folk”. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, as Britain’s sea trade increased, many ships sailing north or south from Clydebank were wrecked on the Flannans, and in 1895 the Northern Lighthouse Board announced that a lighthouse would be built on Eilean More. They expected construction to take two years; but rough seas, and the problems of hoisting stones and girders up a 200-foot cliff, made it impossible to stick to the schedule; Eilean More lighthouse was finally opened in December 1899. For the next year its beam could be seen reflected on the rough seas between Lewis and the Flannans. Then, eleven days before Christmas 1900, the light went out.

The weather was too stormy for the Northern Lighthouse Board steamer to go and investigate, even though the lighthouse had been built with two landing-stages, one to the west and one to the east, so one of them would always be sheltered from the prevailing wind. Joseph Moore, waiting on the seafront at Loch Roag, had a sense of helplessness as he stared westward towards the Flannans. It was inconceivable that all three men on Eilean More – James Ducat, Donald McArthur and Thomas Marshall – could have fallen ill simultaneously,
and virtually impossible that the lighthouse itself could have been destroyed by the storms.

On Boxing Day, 1900, the dawn was clear and the sea less rough. The
Hesperus
left harbour soon after daylight; Moore was so anxious that he refused to eat breakfast, pacing the deck and staring out towards the islands; the mystery had tormented him, and now he was too excited to take food.

The swell was still heavy, and the
Hesperus
had to make three approaches before she was able to moor by the eastern jetty. No flags had answered their signals, and there was no sign of life.

Moore was the first to reach the entrance gate. It was closed. He cupped his hands and shouted, then hurried up the steep path. The main door was closed, and no one answered his shouts. Like the
Mary Celeste
, the lighthouse was empty. In the main room the clock had stopped, and the ashes in the fireplace were cold. In the sleeping quarters upstairs – Moore waited until he was joined by two seamen before he ventured upstairs, afraid of what he might find there – the beds were neatly made, and the place was tidy.

James Ducat, the chief keeper, had kept records on a slate. The last entry was for 15 December at 9 a.m., the day the light went out. But this had not been for lack of oil; the wicks were trimmed and the lights all ready to be lit. Everything was in order. So it was clear that the men had completed their basic duties for the day before tragedy struck them; when evening came there had been no one on the island to light the lamp. But the 15th of December had been a calm day . . .

The
Hesperus
returned to Lewis with the men’s Christmas presents still on board. Two days later investigators landed on Eilean More, and tried to reconstruct what had happened. At first it looked as if the solution was quite straightforward. On the westward jetty there was evidence of gale damage; a number of ropes were entangled round a crane which was sixty-five feet above sea-level. A tool chest kept in a crevice forty-five feet above this was missing. It looked as if a hundred-foot wave had crashed in from the Atlantic and swept it away, as well as the three men. The fact that the oilskins belonging to Ducat and Marshall were missing seemed to support this theory; they only wore them to visit the jetties. So the investigators had a plausible theory. The two men had feared that the crane was damaged in the storm; they had struggled to the jetty in their oilskins, then been caught by a sudden huge wave . . . But in that case, what had happened to the third man, Donald McArthur, whose oilskins were still in the lighthouse? Had he perhaps rushed out to try to save them and been swept away himself?

All these theories came crashing when someone pointed out that the 15th had been a calm day; the storms had not started until the following day. Then perhaps Ducat had simply entered the wrong date by mistake? That theory also had to be abandoned when, back at Loch Roag, Captain Holman of the
Archer
told them he had passed close to the islands on the night of the 15th, and that the light was already out . . .

Then what if the three men had been on the jetty on a calm morning – which would explain why McArthur was not wearing his oilskins – and one of them had slipped into the water? Perhaps the other two had jumped in after him and been drowned. But then there were ropes and lifebelts on the jetty – why should men leap into the water when they only had to throw in a lifebelt?

Suppose the drowning man was unconscious, and could not grab a lifebelt? In that case only one of his companions would have jumped in after him, leaving the other on the jetty with a rope . . .

Another theory was that one of the three men had gone insane and pushed the others to their deaths, then thrown himself into the sea. It is just possible; but there is not the slightest shred of evidence for it.

The broadcaster Valentine Dyall – the “Man in Black” – suggested the most plausible explanation in his book
Unsolved Mysteries
. In 1947 a Scottish journalist named Iain Campbell visited Eilean More on a calm day, and was standing near the west landing when the sea suddenly gave a heave, and rose seventy feet over the jetty. Then, after about a minute, it subsided back to normal. It could have been some freak of the tides, or possibly an underwater earthquake. Campbell was convinced that anyone on the jetty at that time would have been sucked into the sea. The lighthouse keeper told him that this curious “upheaval” occurs periodically, and that several men had almost been dragged into the sea.

But it is still hard to understand how
three
men could be involved in such an accident. Since McArthur was not wearing his oilskins, we can presume he was in the tower when it happened –
if
it happened. Even if his companions were swept away, would he be stupid enough to rush down to the jetty and fling himself into the sea?

Only one thing is clear: that on that calm December day at the turn of the century, some accident snatched three men off Eilean More, and left not even a shred of a clue to the mystery.

16

Fairies

Are the “Little People” Just a Fairy Tale?

In the summer of 1897 the poet W. B. Yeats went to stay at Coole Park, in Galway, with Lady Augusta Gregory, who was to become his close friend and patroness, and the two of them began collecting fairy stories from the local peasantry. Yeats had already compiled two collections of Irish myths and fairy tales by interviewing peasants in his home county of Sligo. But he now came to recognize that the majority of Irish country folk accepted the existence of fairies, not as some kind of half-believed superstition – like touching wood – but as a concrete fact of life.

Yeats’s father was a total skeptic, and Yeats himself had been inclined to toy with a belief in fairies as a kind of reaction to the materialism of the modern world – in short, as a kind of wishful thinking. His collabouration with Lady Gregory made him aware that belief in fairies could hardly be dismissed as wishful thinking. G. K. Chesterton, who met him several years later, was impressed by his insistence on the factual reality of fairies and wrote of Yeats in his autobiography.

Chesterton goes on to make a very important point:

A few years later Yeats was to encourage the orientalist W. Y. Evans Wentz – best known for his translation of the
Tibetan Book of the Dead
– to study the folklore of the fairies; the result was Wentz’s first book,
The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries
(1911), a bulky and scholarly volume based upon his own extensive field-work. Yeats’s friend, the poet AE (George Russell), contributed an anonymous piece to the book (under the title “An Irish Mystic’s Testimony”) in which he described his own fairy sightings with the factual accuracy and precision of an anthropologist describing primitive tribes: shining beings, opalescent beings, water beings, wood beings, lower elementals: