The Dogon people of the Bandiagara Escarpment in Mali, a living culture famous for cliff-side villages, elaborate masks and funeral ceremonies, and an Indigenous religion that survived the spread of Islam and Christianity — and famous too for a contested claim, advanced by French ethnographers, that they held secret ancient knowledge of the star Sirius.
Below a long wall of red cliffs in central Mali live the Dogon: farmers, master mask-carvers, and a people who kept their own gods while Islam spread all around them. They are also famous for a far stranger reason. In the twentieth century, outsiders claimed the Dogon had secretly known, long before telescopes, about a companion star too faint to see beside Sirius. A few even took this as proof that beings from space had once visited them. The claim is almost certainly false. But how it spread, and why people wanted to believe it, reveals far more about the outsiders who told it than about the Dogon themselves.