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.

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

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. 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".

A protege of Arthur M. Young, Temple received a B.A. in Oriental Studies and Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and has served as an occasional broadcaster with the BBC. He has also served as the president and chief executive officer of several media and technology companies oriented toward the Chinese market, including Chinatech Enterprises Ltd., China Vocational Videos Corp. Ltd. and China InfoNet Ltd. He lives in England (where he has resided since 1966) with his wife, Olivia.

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