Worlds in Collusion

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE SPACE-GODS REVEALED

by RONALD STORY

139 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

THE SIRIUS MYSTERY

by ROBERT K.G. TEMPLE

290 pages. St. Martin's Press. $10.95.

Astronomy is the oldest science, yet for most terrestrials the night sky remains a confusing game of join the dots. Faced with incomprehensible distances, intimidating mathematics and names like Triangulum Australe, the temptation is to do one's stargazing on the Tonight show. But the attraction to heavenly bodies persists. In an age when science and philosophy dress in basic black, colorful beliefs about the personal influence of the stars flourish--particularly in a specialized union of pseudo scholarship and science fiction that could be called fiction science. Like astrology or its medieval cousin alchemy, fiction science tries to explain the unknown through a system of symbolic beliefs--a kind of mythology purportedly based on scientific reason. Like religion, FS's principal aim is to explain the mysterious origin of life on earth. In that sense, the Arthur C. Clarke of Childhood's End and 2001 is a fiction scientist.

Mass UFOria. Bookstore browsers can testify that the FS imagination has been working overtime. Currently the best-read fiction science (more than 30 million paperback copies sold) is Erich von Daeniken's Chariots of the Gods? and its sequels. Von Daeniken, a former Swiss hotelman and convicted embezzler with no formal scientific training, professes the notion that the species Homo sapiens was created when astronauts from outer space descended to earth about 10,000 years ago and copulated with apes. It was a kind of one-night stand. According to the author, the satiated aliens soon left for new worlds, leaving the seeds of civilization--and the banana.

The Space-Gods Revealed by Ronald Story is a coherent and much-needed refutation of Von Daeniken's theories. Robert K.G. Temple's The Sirius Mystery argues with some sophistication the likelihood that superior beings from Sirius visited earth between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. Both books are squarely in a modern fiction-science mode that had its recent renaissance during the early '50s when the country was overtaken by mass UFOria.

As nearly everyone recalls, while President Dwight David Eisenhower was putting on the White House lawn, reported flying-saucer sightings became almost as common as Studebakers. Dozens of books and articles were generated by the UFO phenomenon. A chosen few earthlings even claimed contact with extraterrestrials. Descriptions varied, from garden-variety little green men to simple aliens who resembled Italians dressed like Greyhound bus drivers. Reactions to UFOs usually depended on one's interests, angst and reflexes. While the jittery Air Force launched a top-secret investigation to prove whether or not the saucers were real, Psychoanalyst Carl Jung groped for a different sort of explanation. Flying saucers, he speculated, were really psychic projections of mankind's hope for the existence of a higher power in a frightening and chaotic world.

Von Daeniken and other writers like Gerhard R. Steinhauser (Jesus Christ: Heir to the Astronauts. Pocket Books. $1.75) are avidly exploiting age-old yearnings. As the schlock merchants of fiction science, they peddle an old cosmological recipe: simply ad astra, mix feverishly and half bake. Naturally, their theories are highly vulnerable to anyone who, like Ronald Story, takes the time to examine them.

Story's attack on Chariots of the Gods?, etc., is a series of bull's-eyes scored at 3 ft. Von Daeniken's notions make use of ancient artifacts that he feels are proof of an extraterrestrial influence in history: the massive Easter Island statues, for instance, and the mysterious lines extending for miles on the Peruvian coastal plain at Nazca that he argues were landing strips for celestial spaceships. Story easily demonstrates that Von Daeniken's use of details and overstretched imaginings are on a par with those of children seeing camels and puppies in cloud formations.

Rocket Ships. Robert Temple's The Sirius Mystery is a bit harder to dispose of. Temple is a 30-year-old American who holds a B. A. in Oriental studies and Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania and is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in England, where he now lives.

Like Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision, Temple unleashes a torrent of arcane information. The reader must keep his bearings in a swirl of genuine astronomical mysteries, an thropological dates and the tricky cross currents of comparative mythology. The kernel of his thesis lies with the Dogon, an African tribe living in Mali. After studying their legends in the works of French anthropologists, Temple became convinced that the Dogon had precise knowledge of the star Sirius thousands of years before telescope technology revealed such information to astronomers.

The Sirius system is situated in the constellation Canis Major. Only 8.6 light-years from earth, it includes the brilliant Sirius A--the Dog Star -- and Sirius B, invisible to the naked eye and first seen by telescope in 1862. Yet crude Dogon drawings have for centuries depicted what Temple concludes is an ac curate rendering of the relative positions and movements of Sirius A and B. It is from B that he suspects superior beings came to earth, leaving behind evidence of their godlike existence that has filtered down to us through mythology and a few artifacts. Temple suggests, for example, that Dogon mask designs resembling rudimentary rocket ships may be renderings of Siriusian space vessels.

What did these visitors look like? In spired by ancient Assyrian, Babylonian and Egyptian illustrations of fishtailed gods, Temple speculates that Siriusians were probably amphibious--"a kind of cross between a man and a dolphin."

Why Dogon religious rituals contain information that is uncannily similar to astronomers' findings about Sirius is a genuine mystery. Like other writers who have attempted to explain the unknown from a preconceived position, Temple produces a dizzying patchwork of evidence that tends to support his theory, while adroitly skipping materials that may cause complications. He does not mention the legends of the lost continent Atlantis, that must surely be germane to speculation about the origins of fish gods. Even allowing for primitive artistic stylization, it is troubling that fish-god portraits resemble carp far more than dolphins.

Long Odds. Such apparent inconsistencies are trivial when compared with the slipshod logic of one of Temple's major premises. He invokes the belief of such sympathetic star trackers as Astronomer Carl Sagan and Astro physicist I.S. Shklovski'i that intelligent life probably exists elsewhere in our galaxy. Out of billions of planets, so the argument goes, statistical probability dic tates that there must be some that have evolved like earth. But Temple seems confused about probability. "The odds against life occurring fairly frequently within our galaxy are impossible ones," he writes. In fact, odds must be long, short or even--never impossible. The truly daring position--not often considered in fiction science--is that we earthlings are alone in the universe, and life's miracle is that we have beaten astronomical odds. R.Z. Sheppard

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