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In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than 100 years before either moon was discovered!

Kepler had already speculated on their existence well before that.

Swift was close but not that close on their speed of orbit, but he was way off the mark on their sizes.

Kepler had already speculated on their existence well before that.

Swift was close but not that close on their speed of orbit, but he was way off the mark on their sizes.

As if you've been there................

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<h3 style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; ">In 1976 Robert Temple published the Sirius Mystery claiming that the extraordinary astronomical knowledge of the Egyptians and the Dogon of Mali(1) was due to visitations from inhabitants of the Sirius system. These claims were dealt with in a article in The Skeptical Inquirer (Ridpath 1978). Since that time, however, the Afrocentrist movement has revived and expanded these claims (Adams 1983a; 1983b; 1990; Van Sertima 1983; Ortiz de Montellano 1991), and they have been naively parroted in more mainline publications (Gebre-Egziabher 1993/1994; Harding 1991). Adams (1990: 60) briefly presents the current claims:

They knew of the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter, the spiral structure of the Milky Way, where our star system lies. They claimed that billions of stars spiral in space like the circulation of blood in the human body... Perhaps the most remarkable facet of their knowledge is their knowing intricate details of the Sirius star system, which presently can only be detected with powerful telescopes. The Dogon knew of the white dwarf companion star of Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. They knew its approximate mass ("it is composed of 'sagala,' an extremely heavy, dense metal such that all the earthly beings combined cannot lift it') its orbital period (50 years) and its axial rotation period (one year). Furthermore, they knew of a third star that orbits Sirius and its planet [sic]. The X-ray telescope aboard the Einstein Orbiting Observatory recently confirmed the existence of the third star. (2) The Dogon with no apparent instrument at their disposal, appear to have known these facts for at least 500 years.

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http://www.ramtops.co.uk/dogon.html