Career
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. Temple was an undergraduate in Oriental studies and Sanskrit from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965.
He was a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and an occasional broadcaster with the British Broadcasting Corporation.