Month: May 2011

Did you know there’s this tribe in Africa called the Dogon? There really is – this is true. What’s particularly interesting about the Dogon is that they have this weird relationship with the star, Sirius – aka the Dog Star – which is the brightest star in the Northern Hemisphere. Exciting astronomy fact of the day: Sirius is actually a binary star – there’s a great big star and around it orbits a tiny white dwarf star that’s impossible for the naked eye (and even most telescopes) to detect: its presence was only inferred mathematically in 1844.

And the Dogon knew that there was a second star there. In fact, they reckon there’s a third star there, too. And in 1995, some evidence emerged that there might well be a brown dwarf in orbit around the two main stars.

Freaky, huh?

Now there are various explanations for this that I won’t go into, but back in in 1984, enterprising New Zealand TV station TVNZ created a six-part children’s TV series, Children of the Dog Star, in which it was suggested the Dogon know all this because they were visited by an alien probe from Sirius thousands of years ago that told them all this. That wasn’t the only probe, however, and out in a New Zealand swamp, the remains of another probe might still exist, waiting to be reactivated.

Here’s the title sequence:

Continue reading “Lost Gems: Children of the Dog Star (1984)”