This is an edited excerpt from part 2 of the Ariel School puppetry hypothesis available in full here at gideonreid.co.uk
Believe The Kids, But Get The Details Correct
…I can only imagine that the reason people get so upset by any words that stray from the dominant narrative of the Ariel School events being a true encounter with aliens is that they have a firmly held belief that they know what happened. “How dare you, those kids aren’t lying!” Is typically the first line of defence of this belief. My starting point was to state the obvious: the kids were not lying.
But, others around them were distorting perceptions of what they described and drew and almost 30 years later this is an ongoing process. It is next to impossible to get a bald reading of the known facts about the mysterious events at Ariel school without also having layers of spooky music, editorialising voiceovers, misleading juxtapositions of footage, edited, shown out of sequence or without proper context, that are thrown at you along with some heavily skewed numbers.
This is a general problem not just in ufology, but across all media which needs to be acknowledged.
James Fox
Here’s just one of many examples of how this story is manipulated. Filmmaker James Fox – who should know better as he has visited the Ariel School – recently claimed (on Impaulsive clips 6 March 2021) there were “100 witnesses” and “66 on camera” interviews that Dr. John Mack did with witnesses.
“The amount of children, I think 66 went on camera for this guy Dr. John Mack who was a Harvard psychiatrist…and he went and brought a camera crew and documented… there were 100 witnesses, but 66 of them went on camera”
This is not correct. However – and this is how we know it’s not him misspeaking or having an off day – Fox repeats those exact same numbers in another interview on 29 Aug 2022 on Koncrete.com.
“Within I think a week or two, Dr. John Mack this Harvard psychiatrist…gets a camera crew and flies to Africa and goes to Ariel school, within a week or two, and so he interviews, I think it was 66 kids on camera, right after it happened”
The untruth of these claims is easily verified, not least, by looking at the official website of the John E. Mack Institute where Mack’s research assistant at the time Dominique Callimanopulos writes “we interviewed 12 witnesses” or almost any of the archival footage of the interviews on YouTube where the headmaster, Colin Mackie, says a total of 62 – not 100 – children saw something. Or if you like you can read Dr. Mack’s own words:
“Dominique and I met with twelve of the children, and I also interviewed the headmaster, Colin Mackie. In addition we met with most of the teachers [none of whom said they saw anything] in a group and attended a fourth-grade class where the incident was discussed.”
Mack, J.E. Passport to the Cosmos (1999) p.43
The most generous reading of this is that Fox is either thinking of the audio of the BBC’s Tim Leach talking about “64 children” who were filmed as a group – which is the first audio clip in his section on the Ariel School in his own film The Phenomenon (2020) – or he is considering the fourth-grade class Mack “met with” to be “on camera” interviews. 28 years later no known footage of that group “interview” is available.
I’ll be right over…in 77 days…
Also, rather than being “right after” it was seventy seven days after the event that Mack began his interivews with the Ariel children. (Just a small detail, but a very important one because before Mack arrived there was no mention of telepathic messages being recieved by anyone).
Still, this isn’t a clear or accurate picture of what happened, and this comes from one of the most listened to storytellers there is on the topic.
It is a consistent problem of inaccuracy with the retelling of the Ariel school story.
Randall Nickerson
The other most listened to voice on the case is Randall Nickerson, who also made a film, Ariel Phenomenon (2022) and who’s claims about the details are equally sketchy and lacking in evidence.
Salma, now an adult, is a key witness, (she claims to have been within arms reach of an alien). Her various interviews appear to contradict some of the new claims made by Nickerson. Here she is explaining that the experience was limited to only the older children.
“…that entire half of the playground, where the grade ones through grade fours were, nobody had any experience on that half of the playground, they were playing like nothing had happened…” (emphasis added).
Martin Willis Live Shows PodcastUFO.com 8 Oct 2017
However, in May 2020 Nickerson gave another interview, also with Martin Willis, where he claims that it was not just Salma and Emma that saw the being close up, but “a very large group” of children. So despite Salma earlier saying that nobody on the other half of the playground had any experience Nickerson is now claiming that those children not only saw something but they saw more of it and there was a “a very large group” that did so.
MW – “I remember when I was talking with Salma she said that she could have reached out and touched the being, that’s how close it was, to her, um, did other students actually report the same, I mean was this thing right close to a lot of them?
RN – “A large group, yes, a very large group…the younger kids, I believe, saw a lot more because they were out earlier on the playground…”
Martin Willis Live Shows, PodcastUFO.com 19 May 2020
Who are we to believe here? The woman who was there at the time or the man retelling her story 28 years later? What evidence do we have to help us choose between the two?
Now there were THREE adult witnesses!
Then there is the new claim that there were actually three adults who “witnessed this event”.
* “There were three witnesses, females, teachers, that were in different locations at different times…I’ve just kept that quiet because, the fact that the kids saw this themselves is, I thought, what’s more important than that?”
Randall Nickerson on Martin Willis Live Shows – PodcastUFO.com 23 Aug 2022
So was the headteacher, Colin Mackie, being untruthful when he said at the time that all the teachers were in a staff meeting when the aliens landed?
“There were no adults who saw it, it was only children at the school, and all the children in the playground, something like 250 of them, and out of that only sort of 60 claim to have seen it”.
Zimbabwe School UFO 1994 https://youtu.be/6sK2eGdfNNQ?t=1070 [Timestamp from 17:50]
The Same, But Different, But the Same
Related to this is an often repeated claim made by Nickerson and others is that variation in witness descriptions, rather than being a problem, is actually a sign of authenticity.
“When somebody’s in a car accident… everybody saw the same thing, but people see different things about what happened…their accounts are different…every child that was interviewed, or the adult that was interviewed…they all had their own experience of the story…that was unique to them.”
Martin Willis Live Shows podcastUFO.com 18 Oct 2017
How do we untangle this?
If you see a car accident it is not an insignificant matter of personal experience if one witness sees a red car crash into a blue car, and another sees a red car crash into a purple kangaroo; it is a material difference. You may have seen a car crash – just like I argue the Ariel children saw something – but the fact that they described and drew significantly different details needs to be examined instead of obsfuscated with airy arguments about unique experience like that above.
Especially because we have competing descriptions of figures who have long black hair or no hair, porcelain-like white skin or are all black, are tall and stick-like or shorter than a 6th grader, are far away or are within arms reach.
Either Salma and Emma (the second witness to claim to have been 1m away from an alien) were the only ones to be that close to a figure, or “a very large group” did, but both things cannot be true.
The Mysterious Events at Ariel School, Zimbabwe – 16 Sept 1994