The Mysterious Events at Ariel School, Zimbabwe – 16 Sept 1994

Introduction

This blog is about the supposed spaceship sighting and close encounter of 16 Sept 1994, at Ariel Primary School, Zimbabwe. It assumes the reader is familiar with what is claimed to have happened that day and has read or watched the interviews with the children who witnessed it. If you are not familiar, there is no better place to start than Charlie Wiser’s website Three-Dollar Kit which gives the clearest overview and is the best resource to understand this topic. I have referred to it frequently in putting together this blog. 

I have one main argument to make in this blog and it is in agreement with Colin Mackie, the headmaster of the school at the time said who said:

I also believe the children saw something, but that there is a good argument, based on circumstantial evidence, that what the children saw was nothing out of this world.

An Unusual English Class Exercise

I come to this topic like everyone else who enjoys a mystery, especially one involving multipule witnesses, and as the parent of two children roughly the age the Ariel School children were when they had their strange encounter. 

Just last year my children’s primary school staged a mysterious UFO landing in the school grounds. The charred wreckage of a craft was created and a staged crash site was set up with a police cordon. A masked scientist in a green hazmat suit was seen collecting green goo in a test tube, an inspector with a magnifying glass performed checks and a policeman stood by protecting the scene against tampering. Apparently there had been a call from the Ministry Of Defence and even the Prime Minister, and there was a rumour that an alien had been spotted leaving the scene… 

What made all this more mysterious is that it happened during the COVID restrictions on movements in the UK, so no parents (except those who were in on the hoax or played one of the characters mentioned) were able to see the UFO on the school grounds. All of the reports about it came from the children. Most other parents were not told about it ahead of time.

I hadn’t known it at the time but this is a common English class writing exercise in UK primary schools that has been on the curriculum for more than a decade, and is designed to encourage children to be observant when they are asked to write up a report on the incident.

Accuracy in Reporting, a Test of Recollection

About a year after the event I asked my son (9) to draw what he had seen. Then I came across a photograph on the School’s Twitter account of what the crashed UFO actually looked like. He had also not seen the photo, just the original scene a year prior, and he drew his picture from recollection. What is interesting are the details he got right, but there were others he added or exaggerated because they made him think. For example when I asked him to describe the craft he spent a lot of time talking about a hole in the middle of it, asking who could have made it? What was it for? What did they use to make it? But when you see the actual craft there is no hole, at least not one where he indicates in his drawing, yet for him it was a distinctive feature. 

The kids (then aged 6 and 8) both understood it wasn’t a real space object, and that there wasn’t an alien loose around the school. They were brought by their teachers to view the scene in a structured way, just like a normal class. It was not a spontaneous discovery. It was a bit of fun and they both embraced the faux mystery. They talked about it for weeks afterwards. It was a success.

Overall I think the eldest, a bright observant articulate 8 year old, was a fair witness to what he had seen and his report was fairly – although not wholly – accurate. 

I think the Ariel Primary School children were articulate and accurate, to about the same degree, in describing what they saw. As Mr Mackie says, it is clear they definitely saw something, but rather than a spaceship and alien beings I think there’s better evidence that what they saw was more down to earth.

I Think They Saw Puppets

There are a number of descriptions in the children’s remarks, that don’t appear to be influenced by the interviewer, the situation, pressure to perform for the teachers, the television cameras, or the expert questioners, but that are offered spontaneously and which support the hypothesis that what the children observed were puppets.

These features include:

• grey or an unusual skin colour
• large head 
• big eyes 
• scrawny neck
• long black hair
• shiny black (clothing or skin)
• no facial expression
• stiff necks
• running in slow motion
• wordless communication
• running up and down on top of a “spaceship”
• [figures] hovering, not touching the ground

These features are mentioned in the television interviews with the pupils of Ariel School and in recent interviews with them as adults. Some details such as “large heads” and “big eyes” are repeated in some of the drawings they made as children. 

The drawings were made on the Monday morning more than two full days after the event that occurred on Friday morning around 10am, in Sept 1994.

In the weeks and months that followed their collective descriptions have been spun to the point where they are today. Any media report mentioning the Ariel School will now refer to it as the landing of an unidentified flying object and a mass close-encounter with alien beings. It is repeated as a fact that 62 children had an identical experience, that they saw a hovering spaceship, experienced a kind of time dilation, saw teleporting oddly coloured aliens wearing shiny black diving-suit-like clothing, who stared at them with captivating large black unblinking eyes and delivered to them a wordless telepathic message about environmental conservation, technology, and stewardship of the earth.

Instead, I believe, there are enough details in their descriptions and drawings that map on to the puppetry hypothesis, and make this a worthy – if rather less fantastic – explanation for what they saw.

What Kind of Puppets Could The Ariel Children Have Seen?

Originating in 1987 the African Research and Educational Puppetry Programme (AREPP) is a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) that uses the principles of “applied theatre” puppetry to teach school children via dramatic presentations. One of its stated goals, according to director Gordon Bilborough, is “precipitating cognition among audiences by means of the productions”. In other words to educate via puppet shows and to have their audience go away thinking deeply about what they saw. 

AREPP’s main outreach to audiences is via puppet theatre shows which travel to and perform in schools throughout Southern Africa. Their earliest show Puppets Against AIDS¹ (PAA) began touring South Africa in 1988 and was designed to bring AIDS awareness directly into communities. They used puppets as a device to more easily give voice to a taboo or socially difficult subject to address in a public forum.

A Puppet Show About AIDS For Children?

Yes. The AIDS epidemic was considered a significant public health crisis in African and other rural communities in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and AREPP sought to debunk and destigmatize the disease and its transmission. They took their message to people and played free of charge to public audiences of all ages. 

A 1994 review of the company’s objectives says:

---

“Applied theatre”, was a success in Africa. Theatre with the purpose to create political and social change was evidently working. In 1994, after the success and franchise of Puppets Against AIDS the company experimented with new projects and with new styles of puppetry. 

This style of Bunraku puppetry, in Japan at least, has three puppet operators, two of which are dressed entirely in black. Part of the puppet is controlled by rods and, as it is supported by the puppeteers, it appears to float in front of them.

There’s a resemblance with this Bunraku style puppetry in the children’s descriptions of figures all in black, or faceless, this also appears in some of their drawings.

Emily Trim, another Ariel pupil at the time, in a recent interview⁵ as an adult recalls the beings she saw as having:

• longer thinner necks
• limbs that were flimsy
• hovering – not touching the ground
• pot bellies

As far as i’m aware there are no descriptions of feet of any kind in any of the interviews with the Ariel pupils.

Puppetry is Indistinguishable From Magic

Clarke’s famous phrase is often invoked in science-fiction and ufology to describe the unbridgeable gap between our current experience and the future. But the same magic can also be the product of the most primitive technology when combined with a skilled puppeteer and the audience’s imagination. Bunraku puppetry is just one example of this. Animated living creatures spring into life from only the most basic of materials.

For hundreds of years puppetry has been a low-tech storytelling device, performed in the open using simple materials. For example this medieval manuscript Romance of Alexander⁶ from Belgium depicts a travelling puppet booth not dissimilar to the ones used by AREPP.⁷ Examples like this in Africa have mostly been a relatively recent import from Europe.

Puppets are able to almost instantly elicit emotions. They can cause us to suspend our disbelief in their inanimacy. For example this clip is from a street performance by Igor Fokin⁸ where a marionette interacts with the audience and creates a bond with a young audience member.

As puppeteer Hobey Ford explains here the puppeteer can be immaterial to this effect, even when performing to a more mature audience.

We are also obsessed with attributing life to anything that has eyes. Even non-blinking expressionless ones like those described by some of the Ariel children. Again Hobey Ford gives an excellent explanation of this magical phenomenon in practice.

Telepathic Communication or Mime?

The aim of political theatre like AREPP’s work, is to provoke an audience reaction. If an audience reports being involved or ‘caught up’ in the production, if their experience of the performance is as it’s being ‘real’ and ‘true’ then the production is a success. 

Dr John E. Mack – Psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor – interviewed 12 of the children two months after the event and brought out new details about the children’s experience. Of note are how their feelings and the imagined motives of the beings are brought to the foreground. Most notable is the idea that the children received a wordless message about the environment and technology from the beings they encountered. 

These interviews place the Ariel School children within the targeted creation of a personal “epiphany” in the audience that companies like AREPP sought to achieve with their productions. If an audience is left evaluating their own beliefs then they have succeeded. This is what Gordon Bilborough, a director of AREPP refers to in his analysis of the pedagogy of AREPP’s puppetry as a “Theatrical Peak Experience”.

This effect, lasting long after the performance, is echoed in the views of other artists of the same era who also saw the magic in puppetry and it’s power to deliver a lasting message. Writer Jane Taylor, on the audience relationship with the puppetry used in her work Ubu and the Truth Commission a puppet play performed by South Africa’s Handsprung Puppet Company about the Apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

As we saw with the Igor Fokin clip above, the consent to submit to the “ambiguous processes of puppetry” is not as clear cut with children as it is with adults. I suggest with children there is a less conscious discernment about the reality of the spectacle, especially if the puppets use mime to convey their message.

In a 1996 interview with Gary Friedman, founder of AREPP, Daryl Accone quotes him saying:

A similar theme is brought up in this discussion of their 1994 project Puppets For Democracy which aimed to demystify the democratic process before the first free election in South Africa that April.

Read part 2 of the Puppetry Hypothesis for a more in-depth look at Mack’s influence on the children’s responses

A Wordless Message About The Environment That Was Ahead of its Time?

One of the claims made about the Ariel School incident is that the children’s reports about messages of concern for the environment and use of technology were ahead of their time. Given that they were in rural Zimbabwe, with perhaps little exposure to media or popular culture it is claimed it was impossible for them to know about such complex ideas like Earth Stewardship.

However a look at the newspapers of the day of the sighting 16 Sept 1994 show that not only was the climate crisis in the news, with concerns about excessive carbon dioxide production and greenhouse gasses but products such as this AEG washing machine were being marketed to consumers with the specific claims that they were “Specifically designed to protect our environment”.

For more details about what was in the newspapers at the time read my related posts:
•  Lights in the Sky Over Zimbabwe: Contemporaneous Newspaper Stories From 1994

•  Russian Rocket Over Africa

Environmentalism and concerns about technology were far from new concepts in Africa. In fact Ariel headmaster Colin Mackie told Michael Hesemann that “Well, of course we are very environmentally conscious here, if only because of the location of the school.“¹⁴ Many of the charities working in Africa also shared these concerns and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that ideas about pollution or conservation were part of the everyday background conversation within a rural community such as Ruwa.

The claim that the children attending a private school in Ruwa were somehow so remote as to be cut off from popular culture is verifiably false. (I return to this discussion in much more detail in Part 2). Take for example this conversation on a phone-in to local Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) where the host speaks with someone from Ruwa. He asks his guest what she spends her weekends doing. Her response is very relatable, “cooking sometimes, listening to the radio sometimes, or watching television“.

We now know what television programming was available. Read:
• Demystifying Zimbabwean Newspaper and Television Content Available to the Children of Ariel School in September 1994
So we know what programs the children could have watched over the weekend before they returned to school to make drawings of what they had seen.
We also know what newspaper stories were in the local news that week in the days before the disturbance at Ariel School. Read:
•Lights in the Sky Over Zimbabwe: Contemporaneous Newspaper Stories from 1994

There were also puppetry teams addressing similar environmental topics and engaging with primary school aged children across Africa in the early 1990’s. The messages they brought covered a range of topics not just about public health, but also conservation, and environmental degradation.

---

Puppetry Workshops

In Africa in the 1990’s puppetry was growing in popularity as an educational tool and AREPP was driving that growth.

In 1992 in this clip from Puppets Against Aids – Zimbabwe, Gary Friedman describes the puppetry workshops they were running.

Not all puppets looked the same. There were a wide variety of puppet creations and puppet booth types such as this one that resembles a UFO seen in Township to Tundra, 1993.

Often puppets resembled their creators. Some also had long black hair.

---

1993 saw the expansion of AREPP and the training of new puppeteers to perform their own versions of Puppets Against AIDS.

In April of 1994 AREPP had two teams of touring puppeteers.

These teams were working to train others in the art of puppetry.

As an indication of their success as they developed new projects they expanded to bring in new puppeteers. In 1994, when discussing their upcoming television project Puppets For Democracy that was in development for the upcoming election of April, 1994 Gary Friedman says:

Similarities Between AREPP Puppetry and What the Ariel Children Reported Seeing

Description: 

• grey or unusual coloured skin
• large head 
• big eyes 
• no facial expression

Salma, then aged 11, was interviewed at the time and has spoken publicly about her experience more recently as an adult. 

To quote her (then aged 11):

In an interview (as an adult) with Randall Nickerson²³ she described the figure she saw,

---

Lisel, another pupil, described something similar. Her drawing includes a figure with a large head in a suit with what appears to be a belt and buttons.

Features of Lisel’s description:

• wearing black
• big eyes

Nathaniel – gives a similar description when interviewed by John Mack:

Features of Nathanial’s description:

• big head
• big eyes
• short legs, long top

The AREPP Puppets and the Puppets in Puppets Against AIDS

Some of the puppets created in AREPP workshops had big heads, large eyes, short (or no) legs and long “tops” or bodies. The puppets in Puppets Against AIDS were coloured grey. Gary Friedman explains this choice,

The puppets were not only grey, some of them were tall & captivating. This is captured vividly here:

“It did what it was supposed to do, namely, cause a stir and draw an audience to see a performance“

The similarity between the AREPP puppetry and Salma’s description of a figure with arms and legs “like a human’s” but with a head that was “much too big” is reinforced by her drawing, especially when it is compared with images of the puppet of Mary from Puppets Against AIDS, (see image slider below) which is a puppeteer wearing an oversized styrofoam and papier mache head and a black shirt with buttons. The head had no moving features and so remained in a fixed staring expression.

Another child, Munyaradzi, described something similar,

---

Ariel Primary School and a Rural Landscape

Cynthia Hind, the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) investigator who visited the school described this area outside of the school playground. She wrote:

We have to remember that by some estimates the children observed what they saw from possibly hundreds of meters away²⁷ and were looking across an area of long grass and other vegetation.

The earliest publicly available satellite Image of the school and surrounding area is from 2005. Here the yellow arrow from top right shows the direction of the sun at 10am on 16 Sept 1994. A 100m and 220m radius from the approximate location of the children and the direction of view of the children is also shown.

From the various news interviews on the scene at the time the children appear to be looking approximatly North.

It seems quite possible that this vegetation and the uncertainty of the terrain beyond the playground could affect how a figure seen across this landscape was percieved. Especially if that figure is already of unusual proportions such as one of the 2m tall AREPP puppet costumes.

Here I’ve attempted a rough visualisation using a photograph of the actual area beyond the school playground. In it i’ve placed amongst the vegetation two of the commonly seen elements from the travelling AREPP puppetry teams. Namely the white VW T3 Microbus that they used and the 2m tall Mary puppet from Puppets Against AIDS.

In another visualisation here is a video, filmed on an iphone SE, of a ice cream van with a white roof parked behind a hedge row. The aim here is to give some sense of the distance between the children, and the object and figures they saw on the ground. I’m standing exactly 220m from the road that the van is on, and the video is zoomed after a few seconds. Note the barely visible figures in the scene which appear black (on the grass and in front of the hedgerow) and the glinting vehicles catching the sun in the street behind. Only the top of the ice cream van is visible and it appears somewhat like a disc hovering over the ground. If it were catching the light in the same way as the cars to it’s right the effect would be must more distinct.

---

“Running in Slow Motion”

The AREPP puppeteers who wore the papier mache head for the large Mary and Joe puppets would bob, and bound almost as if in slow motion. There are a number of examples of this movement in the available archival footage. 

Emily B, an Ariel pupil describes the one of the figures she saw:

As well as the human puppeteers wearing oversized heads AREPP, and it’s workshopping puppeteers, used a variety of different sized puppets from person-sized to hand puppets. The movements of these figures are exaggerated. They are typically operated from below a puppet booth (although bunraku style puppets don’t require a booth) which screens the puppeteer from view. They appear to bob, and turn or abruptly disappear and reappear below the puppet booth between scenes. Expression is given through gestures made with one puppet hand that is operated by a rod and by the turning of the head operated on a rigid stick by the puppeteer’s other hand.

---

“Stiff Necks”

In a television interview with Cynthia Hind, these observations are made, again by Emily B.

And then later in her interview with John Mack she mentions this interesting detail.

I think this is perhaps the most revealing detail in all of the available interviews, because it is spontaneous and so specific. I think it is an example of how this child was accurate in her description but that it also maps directly onto the puppetry hypothesis because it describes both the kinds of puppets AREPP were using at the time and the way they would engage with the audience by “staring”.

Both the large “mobilization puppets” and the smaller bunraku-style puppets had “stiff necks” because they were constructed without flexible neck joints (as seen in the diagram above). They were given expression by bobbing and turning. Their engagement with the audience was with a stare that was performed with the whole body of the puppet. Again, nearly all of the AREPP puppets had no operable facial expressions and had fixed features rendered in papier mache or fiberglass. 

---

The “Spaceship”

As well as the descriptions of the figures they saw there were descriptions of the “spaceship” or UFO that have a number of common features. Something silver and glittering are the most common.

• something silver
• glinting in the trees
• a silvery thing in the bushes
• silver light

“It almost looked like a real person”

There are also several drawings of the “spaceship” which include what appear to be windows. Again, I think we should not overlook this specific description, respect the accuracy of recollection from these children, but ask ourselves what already known object this detail could relate to.

Specifically, one known object sharing these features is a Volkswagon T3 Microbus, the exact kind which AREPP used to tour its puppetry teams with – one of the most popular vehicles in Southern Africa at that time.

It should also be noted that the VW T3 van has a line around its middle formed by the creases in the body panels. This might be apparent from a distance if the suns light is reflected off it in just the right way.

---

More Similarities

Not a Conspiracy Theory, A Theory Derived From Coincidences

The puppetry hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory. It doesn’t point to a shadowy actor operating behind the scenes out to deceive a playground full of school children. There is literally no group pulling the strings. It doesn’t discount the descriptive accounts of the child witnesses. It agrees they saw something they couldn’t explain, but which, according to this theory, is explainable as being some element of AREPP puppetry that coincidentally was seen for a few minutes by some of the children in the playground that day. 

Gordon Bilborough, a director of AREPP, describes the coordination process between AREPP and schools, 

It’s unclear, however, if this was the same process of pre-planning that would have been used in 1994 or, crucially, whether there was even a puppetry team operating in Ruwa, Zimbabwe on that date.

Perhaps AREPP was scheduled to visit the school that morning. Perhaps this was a miscommunication. Perhaps it was a misunderstanding about the subject matter of the performance and a last moment cancellation.

There were no adults present – all of the teachers were inside the school while some 250 children were outside, and only a quarter of those children reported seeing anything. This only makes the story more mysterious and open to conspiracist thinking. As Headmaster Colin Mackie explains in this television interview,

The absence of all the teachers with so many unattended children outside is striking. There was one adult in the tuck shop adjacent to the playground but she was not witness to what the children saw.

Again there is a read across that can be made with AREPP’s work and on HIV/ AIDS education in schools. Teachers, “save one” were asked to leave so that a “respectful open relationship between performers and the audience”(Bilborough, 2008) could be formed. However, this appears to be a process decision taken by AREPP in 1996 – after the Ariel School event – and there is no evidence I have found so far that suggests they did this prior to that date, or with primary aged children.

Table of Comparison

Non-Matching Features (the cherries left unpicked)

The vast majority of features have a match or a debatable match, but there are some features of the encounter that don’t line up in a such a direct way with AREPP puppetry.

These are:

• shiny black clothing – in the puppetry images I could find black clothing is typically matte, fabric but not “very, very shiny black” as is described by Emma K.  
• orange glittering thing or a maroon colour in the sky. The puppetry hypothesis provides no explanation for objects or light(s) in the sky. While the traveling shows are descirbed as bringing mobile generators and loud speakers there don’t appear to be any kind of additional lights since performances are during daylight.
• flashing coloured lights that were” yellow, purple and green” – nor does it account for coloured lights on the ground.

Conclusion

The evidence presented here supports the argument that there is better evidence that the children at Ariel school witnessed something related to the established puppetry education occuring in Africa at the time, than there is that a spaceship landed and the children encountered aliens or otherworldly beings. What it lacks is verifiable records, perhaps from AREPP, that place them or one of their teams in that location on that date. I’ve reached out to AREPP to see if they can help in this regard and await their response. I have also reached out to a witness for their opinion about this hypothesis.

However, the evidence above makes a strong case that:

• there is a physical similarity between the AREPP puppets – including those made by trainee puppeteers in various workshops – and the “alien(s)”
• there is a similarity between AREPP puppet movements and that of the “alien(s)” as described by the children
• puppets are used to deliver a message, sometimes powerfully and without words
• the spectacle of puppetry can render the puppeteer unnoticed or “invisible” to the audience
• there is a physical similarity between the AREPP vehicle(s) and the “spaceship” drawn by some of the children (given the observation distance / environmental conditions from the children’s point of view)

From the available newspaper reports cited here it is verified that:

• AREPP sent puppetry teams into rural areas, (Ruwa, Zimbabwe possibly being one of them on the date in question)
• in April of 1994 there were at least two puppetry teams of 3-4 people working in the field, “mostly in rural areas”.
• by at least 1994 AREPP had trained up to “40 troupes of puppeteers” (in Kenya) and “600 puppeteers” more broadly in southern Africa

Footnotes and References

1. Puppets Against AIDS (Zimbabwe) https://vimeo.com/113830584 ↩︎
2. Qualitative Evaluation of the African Research and Educational Puppetry Programme (AREPP) Executive Summary and Recommendations, p.15, January 1995, C.Evian B.Oskowitz Z.Hlatshwayo https://www.garyfriedmanproductions.com/uploads/1/0/5/1/10518366/paaevalsum95.pdf ↩︎
3. Playing for Keeps: An examination of arepp: Theatre for Life’s applied theatre pedagogy with regard to adolescent sexuality. Gordon Bilbrough, 2008 https://open.uct.ac.za/handle/11427/7784 ↩︎
4. Bilbrough (2008) ↩︎
5. Interview with Martin Willis & Randall Nickerson. https://youtu.be/RhosxOMHTME?t=2372 ↩︎
6. Romance of Alexander, fol.054v and fol.076r Digital Bodleian https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/objects/ae9f6cca-ae5c-4149-8fe4-95e6eca1f73c/ ↩︎
7. If I had my Ancient Astronaut theorists (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_astronauts) hat on I might I be tempted to submit this as evidence of an historical close encounter with a hovering craft containing diminutive humanoids. ↩︎
8. Clip fromThe Puppeteer https://youtu.be/cJ2gizaqVw8?t=1296 ↩︎
9. Clip from Master puppeteer Hobey Ford’s magical creations inspire children & adults alike. https://youtu.be/V2clNdbwPYw?t=272 ↩︎
10. Clip from Meet Hobey Ford https://youtu.be/gS-r8h87W2Y?t=266 ↩︎
11. Quote from Jane Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubu_and_the_Truth_Commission Ubu and the Truth Commission https://youtu.be/lVgT_x53z14 ↩︎
12. Master Puppeteer Gary Friedman pulls strings, not punches, as he unmasks us. The Sunday Independent (South Africa) 21 April 1996 ↩︎
13. AREPP Voter Education Puppetry Television Series, The Journal, Brigid Schutz & Gary Friedman, 1994 ↩︎
14. The Ruwa Incident, Michael Hesemann, Magazin 2000, 1997 ↩︎
15. Puppets Against AIDS, Zimbabwe, 1993. [Timestamp 13:05] https://vimeo.com/113830584#t=785s ↩︎
16. Follow The Grey Giants, Thomas Riccio, Puppet Notebook, British UNIMA, Summer 2005 ↩︎
17. More about Gary Friedman, Judith O’Hare, The Control Stick, The Boston Area Guild of Puppetry, September 2005 ↩︎
18. Quote transcribed from Puppets Against Aids – Kenya [Timestamp 1:17] https://vimeo.com/113826143 ↩︎
19. Puppet Power, Neil Oelofse, UNESCO Sources, France, April 1994 ↩︎
20. The Saturday Star, South Africa, 29 May 1993 ↩︎
21. AREPP Voter Education Puppetry Television Series, The Journal, 1994, Brigid Schutz & Gary Friedman ↩︎
22. UFO envounter Zimbabwe 1994, YouTube. [Timestamp 23:43] https://youtu.be/xBSpMSnLgqs?t=1423 ↩︎
23. Ariel School Encounter Witness, Salma Siddick & Filmmaker Randall Nickerson, 10-18-17 https://youtu.be/1rtJpw_WWDg?t=4636 [Timestamps 17:30 and 1:17:16] ↩︎
24. African Puppeteers bringing AIDS education to province, The Evening Telegram (Canada) 4 August 1992 ↩︎
25. Follow The Grey Giants, Thomas Riccio, Puppet Notebook, British UNIMA, Summer 2005 ↩︎
26. MUFON Journal, p.7, Dec 1994 ↩︎
27. We have to remember that by some estimates the children observed what they saw from possibly hundreds of meters away (fn) and were looking across an area of long grass and other vegetation. ↩︎
28. Ariel School UFO landing 1994 https://youtu.be/eBqKJHSrYZg?t=456 [Timestamp 7:35] ↩︎
29. Ariel School UFO landing 1994 https://youtu.be/eBqKJHSrYZg?t=268 [Timestamp from 4:28] ↩︎
30. Ariel School UFO landing 1994 https://youtu.be/eBqKJHSrYZg?t=390 [Timestamp from 6:30] ↩︎
31. Bilborough (2008) ↩︎
32. Zimbabwe School UFO 1994 https://youtu.be/6sK2eGdfNNQ?t=1070 [Timestamp from 17:50] ↩︎

---

Where’s the audio version?

Coming soon. For now you can hear me talk about my puppetry hypothesis on the third season of Toby Ball’s Strange Arrivals podcast recorded in winter of 2022.
Episode 3 – Puppets
There’s also some prior discussion of the Ariel School mystery on
Episode 2 – Excited and Scared at the Same Time

More articles in this series about the Mysterious Events at Ariel School, Zimbabwe

The Mysterious Events at Ariel School, Zimbabwe – 16 Sept 1994 – Part 2

UFOs and Aliens in Southern Africa Before Ariel School

Demystifying Zimbabwean Newspaper and Television Content Available to the Children of Ariel School in September 1994

Lights in the Sky Over Zimbabwe: Contemporaneous Newspaper Stories From 1994

The Inconsistent Claims Made About the Ariel School Mystery

---

More by Gideon Reid

Russian Rocket Over Africa

The Abduction of Margaret Keane