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

“Silly”

Is a word Mick West chose to include in his tweet that linked to my previous blog post. Although it wasn’t used to describe my blog as such, just its proximity to the word “puppets” was, I thought, an unfortunate coincidence, because it was exactly the word which sparked my interest in puppetry to begin with. Puppetry is by its nature silly, at least on the surface, and it is how silliness can be used that began my research.

From my own experience I had noticed the incredible creativity that spontaneously emerged from my children when voicing puppets. During lockdown I’d built them a shadow puppet theatre and made a few rudimentary puppets with hinged joints, a stick figure, a bowler hat, and an old fashioned perambulator were some of our first characters. They were attached via thin wire to bamboo skewers that allowed them to be independently controlled and made to appear to hover in the middle of the screen. The kids quickly improvised a scene about an out of control pram on a windy day and the man ending up on the baby. All of a sudden I was hearing them making conversations between their characters – often using phrases and voices that sounded wise beyond their years. It was totally silly fun.

I later built a more traditional puppet booth with a curtain and stage lights. What interested me is how play was so liberating. In the course of researching how to make puppets – and while also thinking about puppetry used in political communication – I discovered Gary Friendman’s work. I was drawn to his use of silliness in what I can only imagine were really difficult conditions in Southern Africa. 

One of the first short films of his that I watched was Puppets In Prison It details an eight week workshop in Diepkloof, South Africa, in 1996, that was set up by Gary Friedman and Nyanga Tshabalala. They trained prisoners in the art of puppet making and performance, but there was a very serious purpose underpinning the workshops; to allow a conversation about sex and rape in prisons and to educate the men about AIDS. That was far from silly.  

I was vaguely interested in the Ariel school mystery. The children’s interviews are compelling and it had always intrigued me that no satisfactory explanation for it existed. I would read something about it every now and then. Then our primary school staged the fake UFO scene, which I described in previous post, and that event had started me thinking…

I had originally written to Gary Friedman on an unrelated quest, more in line with my academic study of media and political communication and my personal interest in puppetry. I wanted to know more about using and training people’s silliness, whilst aiming at a political goal. Then suddenly a connection with the Ariel school mystery appeared. It was awkward. Our first emails were about politics and then I had to ask him if he saw anything in the connection I was seeing with an odd story about UFOs and aliens. Now I felt like a fake.

Talking to other parents at our school about the staged UFO landing, I was surprised that not one of them had even heard of the UFO and aliens thing at a primary school in Africa.

It seems outside of #ufotwitter people who don’t think about UFOs and aliens everyday, don’t think about UFOs and aliens any day.

#UFOTWITTER Reacts!

An unexpected side-effect of my asking Mick West if he’d consider retweeting my blog was the fallout it created between him and some of the shoutier voices in ufology. For many who were spoiling for a public spat with the boogie-man of ufology. It had all the right ingredients, including a word seemingly designed to be pronounced with spluttering indignation and a maximum of theatrical disdain – a word which might have theatre audiences regretting the purchase of their front row seats and worrying about their dry-cleaning bills. Pup-Pets? Puh! Pets! Pah!

The bickering that ensued was childish, it was a momentary kerfuffle by proxy. Some people couldn’t separate my words from West’s. There were memes of straws being clutched, rambling fist-shaking videos full ufology lingo; “swampgas”, “government disinformation”, “conspiracy”. All I could do was try and correct the record and hold my hand up to say that I’d gladly take ownership of any inaccuracies my blog contained. It was my “stupid” “ridiculous blather” that “debases the conversation”  not West’s. But it revealed a trend in social media toward a refeudalization of the public sphere, especially within the topic of UFOs and aliens, where only voices of authority on the unknown or unknowable (not an actual thing) are allowed to submit ideas for debate.

Bias & Belief

I think most people gravitate to what makes sense. To paraphrase Isaac Asimov I think most people will agree to some version of “If you give me enough evidence I will believe literally anything.” Those who may also be parents might be familiar with the daily challenge to reappraise their relationship with the concept of belief, since part of guiding new minds in the world is relearning what you yourself took for granted, constantly having to explain why something is the case, why you believe it, or why it shouldn’t be believed.

Debugging Over Debunking

So If there’s any purpose to the puppetry hypothesis it’s an attempt at debugging the process of belief (or how we arrive at knowledge) rather than debunking the existence of aliens and UFOs. It asks that you think about what could have happened in the short window of time on that Friday morning in Zimbabwe, what caused a disturbance, and to make your own decisions about what makes sense, what to believe, and what you know.

We are all working with the same incomplete information about the Ariel school mystery; incomplete witness interviews with contradictory descriptions, little to no knowledge of what conversations occurred later that Friday afternoon when school finished at 1pm, what conversations occurred between the children, or between them and their families that day and for two days over the weekend, all before any child was interviewed on camera or drew any pictures.

Some reaction to my blog has been from people scolding me. Arguing that it is improper to even question the reality of aliens landing their spaceships and communicating telepathically with a playground full of children, it is “undeniable” they say, but I’d ask them to consider whether that description is supported by sufficient evidence, or even any evidence at all.

Prior Skeptical Arguments

Prior skeptical arguments point to the lack of interviews on the day of the event and at the poor quality ones that did occur on the Monday and Tuesday, as reason why this is a case that doesn’t deserve much scrutiny, They put false memories and the general suggestibility of children high on the list of explanatory theories that helped manufacture a UFO and alien encounter – these arguments seem to make sense.

But some also cast doubt on there being anything much to analyse.

“We can’t be sure they saw anything” [emphasis added]. It is “pointless to suggest “matching” explanations” .

To dismiss all of the children’s remarks out of hand as being hopelessly corrupted, I think, gives these arguments too much work to do. Collaborative recall need not always indicate inaccuracy, or a false event, although one mistaken observation can influence the whole account, .

As for false memories – in this respect at least – I agree with Dr. John E. Mack who quotes Scheflin,

“it is illogical to reason from the fact that a memory has false details to the conclusion that there is no real incident from which this false memory is an accurate depiction”.

.

Negative Space: Listening to the Gaps in the Testimony

I think there is something there to consider even if it only exists as a negative space. Even amidst the confusion, and the two days of UFO excitement that preceded the Friday sighting, it is possible, if not actually useful, to hypothesise a “matching explanation”. Historians do this all the time. I argue the honesty of the children’s testimony shows that there was a stimulus outside of a typical school day which created a reaction, that then became the UFO and aliens story, and I ask what could that stimulus have been and what contributed to the story becoming what it is today?

Taking another cue from Mack’s work, I ask, if he can legitimately use a “co-creative intuitive process” to reconstruct the details of alien abduction accounts via hypnosis, why is it not also equally valid to look for the best matching scenario based on verifiable real world elements? The elements in this case being puppets.  

A Story Endorsed by Trusted Institutions

The grip the Ariel story has on ufology smothers all reasonable discussion. For many it is the holy grail, the best evidence there is of humans having contact with another intelligence. Its grip is further tightened by associations with institutions held dear, the BBC, Harvard, and The Pulitzer.

Some people will never believe that a parsimonious explanation for it can exist. The lettering of “The Ariel School UFO landing and Close Encounters of the Third Kind” has been chiselled deeply into folklore tablets. To even suggest rebranding it more simply as “The mysterious events at Ariel school” is insensitive and heresy that must be thrown out.

My blog was not an attempt to desperately reach for “anything other than aliens”, but to share the large number of coincidences I found which indicate that perhaps it wasn’t aliens after all and that we should wait for better evidence or consider the more likely possiblity that they saw puppets.

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 view of Ariel School in ufology, 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 this is an ongoing process. It is 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.

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) there were “100 witnesses” and “66 on camera” interviews that Dr. John Mack did with witnesses. 

This is not correct. However Fox repeats those exact same numbers in another interview on Koncrete.com.

The truth of these claims is easily verified, not least, by looking at johnemackinstitute.org which says “we interviewed 12 witnesses” , or any of the archival footage of the interviews on YouTube where the headmaster says a total of 62 – not 100 – children saw something, or by reading 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 saw anything] in a group and attended a fourth-grade class where the incident was discussed.”

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 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.

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. 

---

Rabbit Holes and Conspiracies

Toward the end of my blog hypothesising the involvement of puppets I have a section No conspiracy theory – a theory from coincidence where I specifically say I don’t think the Ariel school event is a conspiracy involving puppeteers.

I placed too much emphasis on one company, AREPP.

Puppetry was a novelty in Africa and during this time there were other emerging puppetry companies including troupes that toured rural areas extolling the virtues of drinking Coca-Cola, or Rastafarian groups touring and holding similar workshops to AREPP, with messages about public health and environmentalism. . However, AREPP seemed to have the largest footprint and a program – with verifiable numbers – that trained puppeteers to travel to rural areas.

In that section I’m also careful to ask questions, rather than make claims, about how there could have been a coincidence of these elements on that September day in 1994.

In a direct message I’d previously shared with Mick West a much rougher draft of the blog along with my own concern that it might be a kind of inverted version of Loose Change – the YouTube film that so virally polluted the narrative of the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks. In it the audience is asked to look at what they think they know about that day’s events and to see them in a way that contradicts the dominant narrative. Was I doing a similar thing?

What I’m keen to explain here is that this is not a conspiracy theory and is one I was resistant to. Mick West recently referred to my process of writing it as falling down a “rabbit hole” which to be fair is a little bit what it felt like. I later jokingly tweeted a clip from Labyrinth where Jennifer Connely’s character falls hopelessly down a tunnel, the wall of which is made up of wrinkled grey hands. 

Her fall is arrested by the puppet hands. This is also what I felt like. I was falling down a research hole but each time I felt support for the theory was failing there was another element of puppetry to grab me. Eventually there was enough support to publish my thoughts.

---

So What happened?

Mack is also not accurate on some details, saying that a UFO “landed” in their school yard” . This makes it sound like a very close proximity event. However there are no accounts of anything being in the school yard. Anything that was seen was far beyond the boundary of the playground which overlooked a sports field toward an area of long grass and trees one hundred or more metres away. .

This might be picking over small details, but like with the small details that are used to relate alien abduction storeis to one another to claim an overall coherance, these small differences add up to a confusing picture about the Ariel School mystery that is full of contradictions and mystery.

Visualising The Scene

In the absence of data or a high quality visualisation of the school grounds and vegetation we can only make educated guesses at how the observation distance, sun position and other environmental conditions affected the perception of what was seen. 

Some of these guesses can be made by using tools like SunPath. (http://andrewmarsh.com/apps/staging/sunpath3d.html). Here you can at least see how the sun’s position over the few minutes of that morning in 1994 might have reflected off any light coloured or reflective object. For example, a white Volkswagen van parked or moving along the track behind the school, to the North of the children’s position, the same direction they are shown looking and pointing in the BBC footage. 

Cynthia Hind writes that the one child described the largest “UFO” as being the size of his thumbnail held at arm’s length. .

I encourage anyone interested in understanding what this looks like to play around with this excellent easy to use tool – it allows you to change many of the parameters, angle of observation, field of view etc, and to see their effect on sample 3D objects in real time. You can even animate it!

Shouting “Aliens!” in a Crowded Playground

Imagine the scene, a reflective object the size of a thumbnail at arms reach, the long grass, the trees, the 33 degree heat, and the noise and chaos of 250 children in a playground. Add to this the report that,

“One little girl shouted “Aliens!”

.

It should be noted that there is a significant elevation change between the playground and the other side of the valley. The children were looking down over a valley minus 6m in elevation to it’s lowest point, and across to a hill side plus 6m in elevation from their position. You can see the shape of the elevation profile (read along the yellow line) on the Google Earth below.

Note: anything seen above the powerlines that run along the vally floor on utility poles (between 8m and 13m tall) need not necessarily be flying above the ground but could be reflected light from something on the other side of the valley which the children were looking across towards the hills.

---

Patterns

It’s not lost on me that searching for the solution to the Ariel school mystery is similar to that of the Shakespeare authorship problem. What Brian Moriaty calls an easter egg hunt that could drive a person to madness.

A game I deeply appreciated is The Witness – which also features the lecture referenced above, by Moriaty. Inside a gaudy 3D open-world environment puzzles can be solved by the precise positioning of your point of view – in fact in many cases you may not even realise there is a puzzle before you until you make a subtle shift in position and suddenly see it. Graphical sparkles announce your success. It’s a game that plays on the same deeply satisfying sense you get when seeing a thing of one type fit perfectly into another.

Artistic Pattern Forming

Budd Hopkins, the artist and pioneer in the field of investigating Alien abductions and author of Missing Time introduced Dr. John E. Mack to the subject in 1990. 

Carol Rainey, filmmaker, medical science writer, and ex-wife of Hopkins, wrote an article about her time inside the world of alien abduction investigation, Priests of High Strangeness: Co-creation of the Alien Abduction Phenomenon, . She also made a film of the same name. In it she makes an interesting critique of Budd’s research methods. She argues he was comparing, and looking for similarities between, drawings of alien symbols – supposedly seen on spaceships by abductees – not in a scientific rigorous way, but in an artistic way.

She calls it “Artistic pattern forming” and “stacking the deck” with images favourable to a broader theory.

This is to some degree the same process I used in looking at the Ariel case. Although I am a qualified social scientist I was comparing the children’s drawings (and also their descriptive remarks) with images I found of AREPP puppetry. But I used no particular research method other than to look at the broadest range of drawings alongside those of puppetry. With only a small amount of crowdsourcing a judgement was made that there was a notable coherance.

This sense of satisfaction isn’t restricted to video games. John Mack was self-critical enough to recognise the seduction of pattern forming, and says it may have affected his own work on alien abductions.

“What I have found to be so extraordinary…has been the readily identifiable patterns that emerge when the case narratives are examined carefully.” he goes on “It may be argued that it is my own mind that has created this coherence, and that I have shaped and interpreted data in line with a structure that I already have in mind.”

The coherence he referred to is his combining of the details from different alien abduction accounts into an overall picture which showed the reality of our ongoing contact and interaction with a superior alien intelligence.

I had certainly examined the evidence about Ariel School and puppetry carefully. Had I done a similar thing with my hypothesis I wondered? But where were my graphical sparkles?

Aliens With Long Black Hair

In media coverage of the Ariel School mystery there is a similarly stacked-deck of images used to represent it.

Long black hair was a defining feature of the figure or figures that some of the children saw. However the hairless creature described by Salma & Emma is the one which is repeated in most media accounts.

Nathaniel – “the hair was a bit like Michael Jackson’s”
Emily – “long, wavy, curly black hair”
Lisel – “a little man with pointed eyes and long hair”

Note: It shouldn’t escape your attention that Lisel’s description quoted above bears little resemblance to the drawings she made.

But there is also a coherence with puppetry of the time and place, long black hair “like Michael Jackson’s” was also a feature of those hand made human-sized puppets.

Portrait of Dominant Greys

This is a familiar occurrence in media accounts of aliens.

“Those reports that match the preferred descriptions are heavily publicised, those that do not are considered hoaxes, or ignored altogether.”

.

The more awkward or abstract images from the Ariel School children are typically not shown. Yet, they show the huge variation across the children’s drawings which I think neatly counters the sense created in newspaper headlines that they all saw the same thing.

In defence of succumbing to the methodological shoddiness of pattern forming my blog was written to start a conversation, it is a blog not a scientific paper. The images I used haven’t been altered (except for one of the composite visualisations which is clearly labelled as such). I may yet still apply a more rigorous comparative method. 

Patterns Are Useful

Searching for patterns is also a very common technique in both literary and scientific theory, so while I recognise it’s potential to distort, it’s not a totally invalid tool.

Puppets Hanging By A Thread? 

Another criticism of my blog is that it is a “fragile thread”, as Rainey might say, upon which a large theory hangs – i.e. that no aliens or spaceships were involved in the making of the mystery. If somehow proven this would upset a lot of believers. To that I would say we have to start the conversation somewhere, and I felt there were enough threads of sufficient strength to do that.

Obviously without verification there’s no proof the children saw puppets. To this I would point out that grander theories have not only been hypothesised but fervently believed with similarly scant evidence. 

Take for example the work of Dr. John E. Mack, Harvard professor of psychiatry, Pulitzer prize winner for a study of Lawrence of Arabia, and founder of the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) who worked on Alien abduction. (but more on that later).

Other’s claimed I was just pulling together evidence to fit a bias. But if I were doing that I’d include other coincidental elements I found during the course of my research. 

For example a beloved South African puppeteer named Gawie De Wet – so beloved that they put his image on a postage stamp – also created somewhat alien looking puppets with large eyes, strange complexions, and large heads.

What, if anything, are we to make of the fact that he died on 16 September 1994 the very day of the Ariel school event? 

Surely this is the kind of goosbump inducing coincidence Brian Moriarty would be in awe of?

The children told the truth and described and drew what they saw, but others had an interest in them seeing spaceships and aliens.

Tim Leach, was evidently excited about aliens in his correspondence with Cynthia Hind and PEER at Harvard, perhaps aliens were an escape from the horrors he had witnessed as a war correspondent?

For Cynthia Hind it was a significant find for her as a MUFON investigator. It matched a pattern of UFO related activity. It was similar, she said, to another sighting that she had investigated at Broad Haven in the UK.

For John Mack because he had not just a reputational need for better evidence of extraordinary experiences to support his ongoing work on alien abductions, – he was under investigation by his own university board at the time – but also a financial one because PEER was at least in part being funded by Robert Bigelow.

The Bigelow Foundation

Robert Bigelow, financially supported MUFON, funded the 1992 Roper poll – which, from a sample of 5,974 people estimated that some 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, and also financially supported Dr. Mack’s Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) which trained investigators of alien abductions.

The Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER) “Training programs, begun in 1992 with the leadership and support of Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow”

.

Aliens Still Winning, Just…

I think there’s a lot that is interesting to be said about pattern forming, and about how the puppet hypothesis has been received by those who read beyond its headline. 

Perhaps one reason the blog struck a nerve is because it uses ufology’s own trick against itself. The trick of forming a cohesive picture from incomplete and perhaps unconnected parts, like those who look at the cave paintings and see evidence of ancient aliens. But in this case it points not toward the extraordinary but the ordinary.

As an idea it seemed to have certain memetic properties.

Rejecting the Puppet Hypothesis

As a novel hypothesis it would be fascinating to get any kind of verification, not just for me, but for the people involved, I’m still hopeful that this will happen. But to see the hypothesis rejected by solid evidence would be almost as interesting. 

When I hear the children say the figures they saw had big eyes, stiff necks, no facial expression, short legs and quite a long top, that they moved in slow-motion or like they were confused, and I combine that with the distinctive visual and behavioural similarities with a style of puppets that were contemporanious, am I doing the same erroneous pattern forming? I looked carefully at it and thought, Maybe.

Competing Interpretations

So to understand why an apparently rational, self-posessed person could be convinced by the negative spaces in the children’s testimony and see a novel coherence would be very interesting – should the hypothesis be definitively rejected. 

What would it mean for other hypotheses made within ufology that also see patterns and connections between disparate things?

I believe patterns or “an argument from coincidence” are necessary to untangle the Ariel school mystery because they can be applied to other aspects of the events as a whole. To understand what the children saw and how to understand different framing or interpretation of their experience. 

I want to know if it is true, but I also want to know if it can not be true.

Were puppets an absurdity? Even Dr. Mack noted the similarity between puppets and aliens.

“Matthew…was frightened of the puppets he called “wo-wo’s” from Sesame Street, that came through a window. When the alien puppets were being shown, Matthew would cry and scream and tell his mother to turn off the TV. Bert, one of the puppets, had “scary big eyes”, Matthew said”

.

---

The Implication Problem

After publication of the puppetry hypothesis I received a response from the founders of AREPP but they haven’t confirmed or denied that they were active in the area that day.

But what was the expectation here? That I get a letter like this?

Dear Gideon, 

Thank you for bringing this to our attention. We’ve checked our records and you are correct. Our diary shows a visit to Ruwa was scheduled on the day and time in question. Please also find enclosed several Polaroid photographs and one VHS tape recording from the event. You may notice two of the girls you mention in several of the images.

Sorry for any confusion caused!

Sincerely,

AREPP

If there is any regret in making my hypothesis public it is that I hadn’t foreseen this absurdity, and the negative attention it would draw to AREPP. Twitter and reddit bristled with indignation. Angry anonymous accounts demanded that the puppet masters be brought before them. “How dare they fool us in this way!” 

Of course Gary Friedman, and others involved with AREPP have a legacy, a career of doing extraordinarily difficult humanitarian work in the real world. The last thing they want is to be somehow implicated in a flap about aliens, especially by some unknown blogger.

The headlines aren’t difficult to imagine.

REVEALED! Kooky puppeteers who gave CONDOM demonstrations in front of 5 YEAR OLDS caused ALIEN TRAUMA to African primary school kids and KEPT IT QUIET for 28 YEARS!

Every Tabloid Newspaper

This is obviously an unreasonable expectation.

The Ariel School Mystery: New Claims

We Need To Talk About Randy. 28 years after the event the pattern forming continues, with claims of new evidence about the Ariel School mystery. To understand these claims we need to be clear about where they are coming from.

Randall Nickerson is frequently referred to as a documentary filmmaker. He has reportedly had access to the John Mack Institute files and film archive since at least 2008. The film he recently released about the Ariel School mystery is categorised as a documentary. At the begining of the filmaking process he’s quoted saying,

“I don’t want to steer the documentary in any direction at all. I’d rather present all the evidence and let people make up their own minds.”

26 Aug 2008 Cape Times article, US film maker in city to probe UFO sightings

However he later describes his work on the Ariel school as storytelling. 

“I’m only going to get one chance to tell this story”

.

---

Storytelling or Documentary?

These appear to be incompatible motivations.

If Nickerson’s film is a documentary we need to be aware of its maker’s bias on the topic. If his telling of the story is our introduction to the Ariel School mystery – as mentioned above, a lot of people have never heard about it – then we would be unable to make up our own minds about it without knowing where there may be bias and what data might be left out of the finished product.

So, the audience should know that; 

• Nickerson is an alien abductee or “experiencer”.
• He is “Scott” in John Mack’s (1994) book Abduction.
• Before he became a patient of Dr. Mack’s he had hypnotic regression sessions with Budd Hopkins to “recover” details of his multiple abductions by aliens.
• Nickerson believes he and his sister were raped by aliens who took reproductive material from them in order to breed human/alien hybrids – the details of which were only hinted at in his 1994 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show in which he sat alongside Dr. John E. Mack.
• He believes he has a dual human/alien identity, saying “I am one of them”.

Incidentally, Nickerson’s abduction account is very similar in detail to Budd Hopkins hypnosis sessions with Michael Bershad alias “Steven Kilburn” in Missing Time . It is also similar to those of Whitley Streiber, who is not only another of Budd Hopkins hypnotic regression subjects but the author of the bestselling novel Communion , and screenwriter of the 1989 film of the same name starring Christopher Walken, which are based on Streiber’s own experience with another intelligence, possibly of alien origin, abducting him and his son.

Both the book and the film contributed to the dominance of the “grey alien” imagery in popular culture, not least via Ted Seth Jacobs’s mesmerising book cover painting. 

“I am you, you are me, and we are here!”

Nickerson – described by Mack as an “actor and filmmaker” – featured in a 1992 CBS Television commercial for the miniseries based on another alien abduction book by Hopkins , it included a fictional Dr. Neil Chase – which is based on the real Dr. John E. Mack. 

His line is “You’ve got no place to hide.“.

Of course we are to understand that any similarities between these abduction accounts is supporting evidence of their reality.

All this is not to deny Nickerson his experiences but seems it necessary to point these things out. Whatever their veracity his experiences must influence the claims he makes today about the Ariel school events because for him, or anyone watching the story that he is telling, the message is that it all fits a pattern. A pattern of contact and interaction with an embodied alien intelligence, the existance of which, he believes, there is no doubt.

---

Salma, is a key witness whose various interviews appear to contradict some of the new claims made by Nickerson. Here she is explaining that the experience was limited to the older children.

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.

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.

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. 

Especially because we have competing descriptions of figures who have either 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 were the only ones to be that close to a figure, or “a very large group” did, but both things can not be true.

Either the children’s descriptions and drawings are high-fidelity, accurate depictions of what they saw or they contain errors. 

Editing the Picture

Who knows what those errors could be?

In one video it appears Cynthia Hind knows that answer. Here she makes a judgement on what she thinks are errors. 

But this was possibly a spaceship or technological device of unknown origin, maybe alien or interdimensional, how does she know what it can or cannot do, or how it can be perceived? 

I raise these points because this is a theme in ufology, and with the Ariel School mystery in particular. Comparing disparate events and considering them all part of the same set of extraordinary things, patterns are seen everywhere.

There is an attempt to stack the deck in a way which heavily favours one conclusion.  

Pattern Fitting Against Bias

Let’s take a look at the Ariel school children’s descriptions of the figures they saw that day and try to make them fit a pattern of alien encounters against an apparent “anything but aliens” bias.

For arguments sake here’s a non-exhaustive look at the Ariel children’s descriptions and those of previous encounters.

Unsurprisingly there is 100% match across all categories. Therefore it is certain the Ariel children just happened upon a meeting between archetypal aliens who were having a pow-wow in the bush behind their school, and nothing else. 

If you look at collections of alien archetypes, for example , this is obvious. Here you’ll see an array of different alien forms that have visited humanity over the years. 

We know from the literature that aliens have access to superior abilities, one of which is to adapt their form to suit our imaginations – to become “unique” to us. What clearly happened here is that with so many vibrant young minds gathered in one playground the aliens became short-circuited “running about like they were confused”, blinking in and out of our dimension, flickering between embodiments like an old television set being tuned. 

This neatly explains the variation in descriptions. There were short bald pot-bellied aliens or tall thin stick-like ones with long black hair “like Michael Jackson’s” it all depended on who was doing the looking. 

Case closed?

But really, we have to ask what is more likely, what explanation makes fewest assumptions, what makes sense, that components of pre-existing UFO folklore and science fiction imagery were present in the children’s imaginations ready to be assembled (“this is a bit imaginative”), or that in fact a multitude of real alien archetypes just messed-up on a visit to our realm one day?

Alien Abduction

To gain better perspective on the Ariel School mystery it is important to look at the study of Alien abductions that was occuring around that time, because it informs us about the research methods used to study them, and it highlights a downplaying of the influence of media that has occured in both.

“Not a club anyone wants to belong to”

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in March of 1994 just before the publication of his book Abduction, Dr. John E. Mack swats away the notion that alien abductees are fantasists or attention seekers.

“This is not a club anyone wants to belong to”

.  

It’s a favorite phrase of his which he used in many television interivews during the promotion of his book Abduction. He also writes

“There is little or no social value to be gained from reporting abduction experiences”

.

Budd Hopkins was of the opinion that the terrible accounts of,

“sperm and ova ripped from their donors, tubes inserted and withdrawn while victims lie there like laboratory meat, babies artificially birthed and stolen” was “a genetically focused study of particular bloodlines.”

.

Mack also believed this club – the one nobody wants to belong to – could give people extraordinary powers,

“Abductees…sometimes demonstrate strong psychic abilities, including clairvoyance or the ability to perceive at a distance.”

.

Even, Alexa Clay the daughter of Mack’s lover and research assistant Dominique Callimanopulos, wondered why she was not “special enough” to have been abducted by aliens. .

Maybe having a “bloodline” of particular interest to Aliens or possessing new transhuman powers does have a certain cachet, exclusivity, and a unique social value that puts you in a club that you might eventually forgive your captor for forcibly entering you into?

This is not an unrealistic expectation. As we’ve seen with Nickerson, who after years of hypnotic regression therapy has transitioned from traumatized rape victim to acceptance that he’s part of some system of elevated consciousness (one that just happens to also terrify, mutilate, and traumatize people). 

The Media Environment (1987-1994)

Claims about media available to the Ariel Children at the Time

Appendix B of Abduction gives an “historical & cross cultural perspective on reported encounters”. It is an extensive list of possible UFO related events from biblical times to today and it reads like the show notes for the TV series Ancient Aliens. It stops short of including any film, mass media or science fiction literature as potential drivers of UFO and Aliens culture and folklore.

A few years before the Ariel School events, aliens, alien abduction and UFOs were all the rage. The Style section of the Washington Post declared, 

“Mass curiosity about paranormal freakery has hit its apogee”  

as several publications on the topic hit the book shelves.

The Washington Post went all caps,

“THE ALIENS ARE COMING!
THE ALIENS ARE COMING!”

1994 also saw the April publication of Mack’s Abduction, and two of the best-selling books that year were The Celestine Prophecy. and near-death experience account Embraced By The Light . Aliens were in, as was new-ageism, environmentalism, and a growing rejection of the idea that we should be determined by technology.

But so what? The children of the Ariel School were not exposed to any of this becasue, according to Cynthia Hind:

“People in Africa don’t have television”

Cynthia Hind claimed this with some authority, 

“Now the people in Africa don’t have television, they might have a radio but I can tell you the media don’t deal with UFOs there”.

This exchange also reveals that at least some of the Ariel School children – who attended the most expensive primary school in Zimbabwe – were quite familiar with aliens in the media backdrop.

Note: Ariel School was an expensive fee paying primary school. . Primary school fees had been abolished in Zimbabwe by Robert Mugabe in 1980, but the policy had not yet been fully implimented.

“Another little girl said she called the visitors “Martians”. Where did she get that idea? Mack asked. “Just from watching TV”.

.

But there is also quantitative data which shows that television and radio, although used by fewer people than those in the cities, was still a usual part of rural Zimbabwean life. 

This Demographic and Health Survey for Zimbabwe, 1994,

surveyed 6,128 women age 15-49 and 2,141 men age 15-54 between July and November 1994. It shows that television watching, while lower in rural areas, is still a usual part of life even in the rural province Mashonaland East – the region of Zimbabwe that Ruwa is located in.

Indirect Media Influence

Chocolate-Chip-Charlie 

As a kid in the 1980s my friends and I would dare each other just to look at the back covers of various X rated films in the back room VHS tapes area of our local corner shop. A significant portion of these tapes were gruesome horror movies involving all kinds of body-horror. One in particular was The Stuff .

A lurid green I face screamed on its cover. This was just art, but it was the stills of “real” action from the film on the back cover which triggered our imaginations. 

I probably didn’t watch the film itself until some years later, and when I did I remember thinking it was more silly than scary, (i’m surprised to see that it was actually rated 15, not X, but ratings have been know to change over time). My imagination as an eight year old took over when a report from a friend of a friend who had seen it found its way to me, so that I could “see it” too. Especially a vivid report describing the man “chocolate-chip-Charile” pictured on the back cover spewing white stuff from a hideously distended open mouth.

“Seen it” I would nonchalantly say to anyone who asked.

“The Doctor Was An Alien”

I feel a similar thing may have occurred with this alien abductee’s recounting a gruesome thing she claimed happened to her. Speaking alongside John Mack, Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs on NBC’s The Jane Whitney Show, in 1992 she tells of an horrific injury caused to her by her abductors.

Was this real? Or had she heard about “the film with the eye-slitting scene” and just incorporated images and maybe someone else’s description of it into to her own retelling?

Either somthing like that or we have to believe aliens will do horrible things to us, but make sure that we’re sufficiently healed come the morning.

Could this similar indirect media effect be at play with the children at Ariel School? What were the notable media events that surrounded the Ariel School events?

Dr. Mack’s Wild Alien Abduction Claims

For Budd Hopkins – who introduced Mack to the topic of alien abductions – there are no limits on the Alien’s capacity to abduct humans. 

“An inescapable conclusion to be drawn from all these cases is that anyone could have been abducted, with no memory of it, no conscious recall even of a preliminary event like the sighting of a UFO. It could have happened to any one of us years ago, in childhood, or recently.”

Trickster Aliens and Special Powers

Mack gives credence to outlandish stories about how another intelligence appears to be toying with us. But he did not just bring these up as off-hand conversation fillers in radio or television interivews; he published them in his books.

• “The phenomenon appears to operate in subtle, elusive, even “tricky” ways, as if a mischievous intelligence were at work.”
• “Hopkins tells of a case where two abductees were returned to the wrong cars. As they drove along the highway the drivers recognised each other’s cars. They were “reabducted” and returned to the appropriate vehicles”.
• “The aliens appear to be consummate shape-shifters, often appearing initially to the abductees as animals – owls, eagles, raccoons, and deer are among the creatures the abductees have seen initially – whie the ships themselves may be disguised as helicopters or, as in the case of one of my clients, as a too-tall kangaroo that appeared in a park when the abductee was seven.
• “I heard recently of a case where a number of children were transported into the sky in a small craft that appeared to them initially as a booth at a carnival in which aliens disguised as humans asked if they wanted to go on a journey”.
• “Abductees…sometimes demonstrate strong psychic abilities, including clairvoyance or the ability to perceive at a distance.”
• Mack also claims the aliens are so far advanced that they make implants “along the lines of the body’s own chemistry”  that are undetectable with our scientific instruments.

As well as credulousness Mack, as a trusted Harvard Dr, had considerable influence. Note how he glosses over an incredible instance of failed physical evidence of alien abduction. A woman found,

“two small nodules that appeared on her wrist following an abduction experience” and “She agreed to have these removed by a surgeon colleague of mine, but the pathology laboratory found nothing remarkable about the tissue”

No Physical Evidence, No Problem

Mack’s credulousness was exploited by Donna Lee Rice-Basset the “undercover debunker” and a patient of Mack’s who famously hoaxed him, claiming to be an experiencer and having seen President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev aboard a spaceship. .

Mack’s response to the Bassett issue [from 18:00] followed a familiar pattern. If trickster aliens can disguise themselves and their spaceships as mundane objects, make incisions in human flesh that miraculously heal overnight, float people through walls, insert implants into flesh that were invisible to detection by science, then Donna Basset could also really be an experiencer who lied about lying to him.

“Somehow They Planned It That Way”

Mack brought this credulousness on his visit to Ariel School. While there Mack is quoted saying,

“I find that absolutely fascinating that no adults were there…You could argue it’s just one of those coincidences or you could argue that whatever this intelligence is, that somehow they planned it that way.”

.

International Alien Abductions

Mack’s then research assistant Dominique Callimanopulos writes,

“For two years the Program for Extraordinary Experience Research (PEER), has been researching cross-cultural and international reports of UFO sightings and alien abduction experiences.”

.

Mack also emphasises an international search for abduction accounts.

“The two directions that I want to go in, and which our program is going in, are to look at this phenomenon with increasing rigour, get comparison groups, more sophisticated psychological analysis to see what really is – to nail this whole thing down more fully. The other direction is to study the phenomenon internationally, to see how it shows up in other countries, and among indiginous people, native peoples all over the world, because there is some evidence that suggests this is on a continuum from other experiences of contact beyond the earth from which we’ve cut ourselves off, although, this does seem, they do seem to be knocking at our door more vigorously, perhaps because the earth is on the edge of oblivion, I’m not sure, why but they’re coming in stronger.”

Roy Leonard for WGN Chicago interviewing John Mack (5 May 1994)

Why did Dr. Mack Go To Africa?

These two quotes, both from Passport to the Cosmos are worth looking at side by side because they seem to demonstrate some confusion about what the purpose of the Africa trip was.

“At the recommendation of Cynthia Hind, a respected and experienced UFO investigator in Harare, Timothy Leach, the BBC bureau chief there who had been investigating the story, faxed a number of the children’s drawings to my associate Dominique Callimanopulos and me and asked us to investigate the incident. Allowing for variations in the children’s perceptions and artistic style, the images in the drawings were remarkably consistent. As it happened, we had already scheduled a trip to southern Africa, unrelated to this incident.

“The main purpose of the trip to Africa for Dominique Callimanopulos (my research associate) and me was to investigate the Ariel School incident in Zimbabwe. The stop in South Africa [to visit Credo Mutwa] was something of an afterthought—we did not want to come so far without spending at least a few days there.”

Also,

Questions: It’s not clear what the “already scheduled” trip was for. It was not to interview Credo Mutwa, because that was “an afterthought” and they changed their plans to go to Ariel School rather than it being the main purpose of the trip. So what other reason was there for the trip and why would he publish a remark that the “main purpose” was to go to Ariel School if it wasn’t? Why the confusion?

Dr Mack’s Research Methods

In the 1980s Mack worked on a number of studies of children and adolescents’ views on nuclear weapons and the nuclear arms race. These would be written with an explanation of the research instruments used; typically, structured interviews with an explanation of the wording of each question. These were sometimes followed by open-ended questionnaires.

A general sentiment about nuclear weapons from these young people was that,

“They blame technology gone out of control; the aggressive tendencies in human nature.”

.

Mack was very serious about the threat to the planet from nuclear weapons, and about the lies the US government told.

“American people are being deliberately misled by their government, which is providing false information about the possibility of protection effects of nuclear explosions.”

Hypnosis Used on Children

Later, when researching Alien abduction Mack favoured hypnosis and a narrative case study methodology, both of which are criticised for being porous to researcher bias and difficult if not impossible to replicate. They rely heavily on the individual researcher.  

Speaking about telepathic messages, which abductees were supposedly receiving, he admits this unique positioning of the researcher and the different results that can occur from person to person. (in this case the “material” is about environmental devestation)

“There may be something in my consciousness which creates the possibility that those dimensions of the experience can be brought forth, whereas other investigators might not hear that material. In fact, they don’t hear that material. I think that the receptivity of the investigator has something to do with the material that’s brought forth.”

Mack sometimes refers to hypnosis as “relaxation sessions” . In some cases he believed “hypnosis is better than the waking state” and “more reliable”. and he was keen to dispel the notion that hypnosis causes the zombified state of total suggestibility depicted in cartoons. It was more simply a relaxed state adjacent to our normal state of operation.

“The inducement of a nonordinary state, using even the simplest of relaxation techniques, seems to be highly effective in bringing abductees’ walled-off experiences into consciousness and in discharging their traumatic impact.”

“In addition to standard interviews I use hypnosis, which was Freud’s original “non ordinary” state for investigating the unconscious, modified by the use of breath for centering and deepening the process. In my work with abductees I am fully involved, experiencing and reliving with them the world that they are calling forth from their unconscious. My whole psyche or being is engaged; naturally the reason observing self is always present, shaping, limiting, and protecting the process.”

From Hypnosis Sessions with Experiencers to the Visit at Ariel School

Prior to publishing Abduction, Mack’s research group of alien abductees, or experiencers, was 76 people,

“Ranging in age from two to fifty-seven; forty-seven females and twenty-nine males, including three boys [aged] eight and under”

After hypnosis sessions with this group, follow-up contact would be made with abductees to monitor their reaction to the “Ontological shock” of realising our co-existence with another intelligence. This was done by his research assistant Pam Kasey.

Mack accepts that he, and any other investigator of alien abduction must have a willingness to enter into the co-investigative process – he’s also aware that the subject of the hypnosis session could be changed by his influence, but he takes ownership of this, claiming that a “co-creative” approach was necessary if we’re to make a breakthrough in understanding of our real place in the universe.

Was Ariel a Close-Call With Alien Abduction?

With access to Mack research notes and diary’s Ralph Blumenthal writes,

“Mack wondered if Lisil might be an abductee.”

Did he mean during the event on 16 September 1994 or sometime before? Were the events related? Had “they” come back for her?  Was the same not also true of Salma or Emma since they were reportedly both so close to an alien that day, and found it hard to break the gaze from its big black eyes? Was it a close-call with alien abduction?

In The Ariel Phenomenon [44:34] Mack phrases a question to Emma not as did you want to go with the figure she saw but “did you go with him”. It’s clear he considers it a possibility that Emma could have been abducted during the encounter but not have any recollection of it.

Salma has said that her mother always believed her and that her father was supportive – without explicitly saying that he also believed her. . Is this the reason Mack did not interview her about this extraordinary experience? She says she was not interviewed by him, but remembers meeting him. .

Question: Since Mack and his research assistants would follow-up with Abductees, did they also follow-up with Salma over the weeks, months or years afterwards to ask her about her experience, or to seek a more in-depth interview with her?

New Memories, Old Familiar Descriptions

What do we make of the new details that are emerging from the now adult witnesses. Salma’s adult recollection – not obtained under hypnosis – of a “stiff” and “stoic” creature with a “nude colour”, like a “porcelain statue” is very similar to one in Hopkins’ work, and also to other historical accounts, .

This is a new recollection, from Salma, of an event decades earlier. Again we have to ask what is more likely, that Salma’s account closely matches these words in Hopkins and Hynek’s work because she saw the same kind of being, or that this literature has circulated in the public imaginary since it was published in 1981 and 1972, and its ideas are now being folded – unintentionally – into her new description?

But it is also similar to that of a fibreglass construction puppet seen in my previous post.

Francis – who underwent hypnotic regression – now has a new “clear picture” of spheres, “these spheres were rotating around the craft in an anti-clockwise motion and were glowing bright, bright white…one at a time the spheres shot off in different directions”. Francis now also says the figure he saw was “appearing and disappearing” as it moved.

Question: Are newly discovered memories of this supernatural kind ever retracted? .

The skeptical argument here is that this is just the work of false memories. False memories are well documented and even occur in people with Hyperthymesia – frankly a superhuman-like ability to recall accurate details from any day of their life going back to childhood, (otherwise known as Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory (HSAM) .

A Counter-Argument to False Memories

An argument Mack made about Alien abduction – and which may be applied here – was that memories with a “vital power” and of “central importance” to the witness and which are recalled with an appropriate amount of emotion, are simply real, they cannot be not false memories. He argues “emotionally charged” memories are better memories than those triggered by “laboratory audio-visual stimuli”. “The more a person is involved in an event, the greater the likelihood that the central event is actually remembered over time.” .

“It is hard to imagine how the psyche could generate so intense a level of emotion without some kind of exposure to an extraordinary experience as the template for that emotion.” .

Evidently Mack was not familiar the Stanislovski technique and the movement toward an “art of experiencing” which could produce similarly intense emotional results with only the template of the 7 questions to work with.

Abduction specifics “Not Known in the Culture”

Mack makes an incredible claim about media influence, or lack thereof. In Abduction he writes,

“Most of the specific information that the abductees provided about the means of transport to and from spaceships, the descriptions of the insides of the ships themselves, and the procedures carried out by the aliens during the reported abductions had not been written about or shown in the media.”

He later writes,

“many of the details they [abductees] report are not known in the culture or, at least until recently, reported in the mass media”

Some of these details are things like seeing a blue light, hovering weightlessly, being confined in a small space with curved walls, having strange devices placed over genitals or into orafices, oddly shaped surgical instruments inserted into nostrils, behind one ear, gouges, scoop marks, subcutaneous implants or skin lesions.

All of which have been, in one form or another, depicted in literature, film, or mass media.

Just in cinema alone there is a wealth of material in the science fiction, horror and thriller genres that predates Mack’s involvement with the alien abduction topic (which began in 1990), and which contain components of the typical alien abduction story.

Beyond the obvious science fiction blockbuster franchises, Star Trek, Star Wars, Buck Rogers, Alien, Flash Gordon, etc there are others that contain fantastical voyages to space ships or technological interiors, Forbidden Planet (1959), 2001 Space Odyssey (1968), Flight Of The Navigator (1986). People being transferred through solid matter to spaces with curved walls and blue lights, Tron (1982) Body-horror is particularly well represented – see any David Cronenberg film.

Others contain scenes of capture and examination or torture using unusual looking medical instruments or the forced viewing of images on a screen in order to “reprogrammed”. A Clockwork Orange (1972), Ninteen Eighty Four (1984), Brazil (1985). 

There are graphic depictions of hybrid breeding, the forced impregnation by aliens in XTRO (1982) or artificial intelligence in Demon Seed (1977), telepathy, apocalypse, and the merging of human flesh and technology, Akira (1988).

Just from these few examples it is difficult to believe the claim that these ideas, images, devices, and bodily violations are “not known in the culture”.

But, what does this mean for the Ariel School mystery?

I argue the same is true of the background catalouge of imagery about spaceships and aliens which exists in the culture, that was available to the Ariel School children whether directly or indirectly and most likely influenced their reaction to the events beginning on 16 Sept 1994 and is evident in their descriptions and drawings, and in the interivews they gave.

Telepathy a “co-created” story? 

There were no reports of telepathic messages for seventy seven days, or until Dr. Mack spoke with the children.

Well before Mack had arrived at Ariel School he was writing about human/alien communication.

“Communication between the aliens and humans is experienced mind to mind or thought to thought”

“Alteration of consciousness of the abductees…this information concerns the fate of the earth and human responsibility for the destructive activities that are taking place on it. It is conveyed by the direct mind-to-mind telepathic communication referred to above and through powerful images shown on television monitor-like screens on the ships themselves.”

Investigator Influence?

Both Hopkins and Mack were accused of leading their research subjects toward an alien narrative. Both were accused of leading by providing reading material about the abduction experience to their research subjects, before they took part in hypnotic regression sessions. Both also had subjects who hoaxed them. Jon Mortellaro for Hopkins and Donna Bassett for Mack.

While at Ariel School,

“Mack mentioned he had written a book about UFOs and alien beings.
A girl named Emma perked up.
“how many pages are there?”
About four hundred, Mack said”

.

Without access to the full video archive and transcripts we don’t know the full context of this exchange. We won’t be able to say if this is an example of influencing a subject or not. Did they discuss the content of Mack’s book before Emma’s interview was recorded? 

Surely Emma hearing that a famous professor had written such a long book, “about four hundred pages”, about aliens and UFOs communicated to her that they are real things which are able to be studied and written about?

Mack was well aware of the criticism about possible distortion caused by investigators. He was aware that he might be seen to be leading the witness, but despite the criticism he stands by the method. 

“I consider my work with abductees to be a co-creative process”

“I cannot avoid the fact that a co-creative intuitive process such as this may yield information that is in some sense the product of the intermingling or flowing together of the consciousness of the two (or more) people in the room…. From a traditional dualistic perspective this might be called “distortion”; from a transpersonal point of view the experiencer and I may be participating in an evolution of consciousness.”

Telepathic Themes

As we’ve seen above there is some overlap between Mack’s already published work and the texture of the responses the children give in their interviews, especially when it comes to receiving any kind of wordless, telepathic communication.

The Apocalypse

Before the Ariel School events Mack writes,

“The information that abductees receive is concerned primarily with the fate of the earth in the wake of human destructiveness. Scenes are shown of the planet wasted by nuclear war and especially of the earth’s environment devastated by pollution.”

I’d suggested in my puppet hypothesis post that the visions of environmental disaster could have originated with the puppets, since environmental concern was on the general educational agenda, but it could also be the misremembered combination of several influences. 

If the children did see puppets – which are designed to stare and project a willingness communicate with their “eyes” – they could have been left with an impression that they wanted to communicate something. This much is evident in remarks recorded, around Sept-October, before Mack arrived, when Candice says,

“Maybe they’re trying to communicate with us or trying to tell us something. I think they’re trying to tell us something which is gonna happen.”

But what that thing is would only be given fuller expression two-and-a-half months later and only by 3 of the 12 children Mack interviewed: Emma, Lisil, and Francis. Olivia felt “dizzy when she looked into a being’s eyes” but the available data don’t show that she received a message.

As mentioned Mack was deeply concerned with the nuclear arms race, and was also regularly “co-creating” this kind of apocalyptic vision of the future with his abduction research subjects. Did the same thing happen at Ariel School?

“What I thought was maybe the world’s gonna end, maybe they’re telling us the world’s gonna end…“all the trees will just go down and there will be no air and people will be dying.”

Lisil – in her interview with Mack

“Hmm, I think it’s about something that’s gonna happen…Pollution or something.”

Francis – in his interview with Mack

Fears About Technological Development

Exploring our complicated relationship with technology has a long history in academic literature.

Published in 1964 Jaques Ellul provides a detailed history and future predictions about our relationship with technology.

“The aims of technology, which were clear enough a century and a half ago, have gradually disappeared from view…The further we ad­vance, the more the purpose of our techniques fades out of sight.”

In 1993 Neil Postman – another television friendly academic – author of Amusing Ourselves To Death published his ideas about technology in Technopoly . Postman was concerned about the rise of computers in the classroom and his ideas were widely discussed amongst teachers as we were on the cusp of the digital age in education.

As we’ve seen with Mack’s previous studies with adolescnets “technology” is closely associated with a lack of control, a need to be cautious, and of course, The Bomb.

Love

When seen without any context Lisil’s remarks about aliens and love seem astonishing. However, as we’ve seen with the exchange with Emma above, it is difficult not to wonder what the full conversation was like, especially since her remarks are so similar in their content to passages from Mack’s book that were published prior to his arrival at Ariel School.

Note: Mack had been on local radio and Television in Zimbabwe and given a speech in a local sports hall in Harare about his work before the Ariel School interviews began.

Again, a publically accessible archive of these raw and unedited interviews would be invaluable to clearing up any questions about where these comments originated.

“Aliens…long to enjoy the intense emotionality that comes with our full embodiment. They are fascinated with our sensuality, our warmth, our capacity for eroticism, and deep parental affection, and they seem to respond to openhearted love. They act at times like love-starved children”

.

“The converting principle, the force that expands our consciousness beyond ourselves appears to be love”.

 “Perhaps in space there is no love and down here there is,” she suggested, and “they need love and they’re trying to copy us.”

“They just looked horrible and sad”…“[I] felt sorry for him because I had a feeling they had no love or caring.”

Lisil – in her interview with Mack

Sphere’s of Influence

I suggest aliens, rather than being the direct cause of the telepathic messages, are surplus to requirements. Their sphere of influence not yet having the influence it is attributed by the dominant narrative about the Ariel School mystery.

If an Extraordinary Event Occured, So Why So Little Output?

In his lifetime Mack didn’t produce an academic paper specifically about the Ariel School mystery. He writes about it only briefly In Passport to the Cosmos, and it gets a similar brief treatment in an appendix added to Abduction after its initial publication. He mentions it in various television and radio interviews but only briefly, and only as a way to support his other work on alien abductions.

There are currently no official records publicly available about the research methods he used at Ariel School, which is the reason I’ve had to infer them from his prior work on alien abductions. 

Although Mack has spoken generally about his narrative and case study research method there is no more detail available about whether more standardised methods were used to support them at Ariel School. Was it simply an informal chat with the children that loosely related to his ongoing work with the alien abduction phenomenon?

But there must be more to it than that. According to Ralph Blumenthal there are “104 pages” of interview transcripts , yet these have not seen the light of day in 28 years.  There’s nothing in Mack’s writing about what discussion preceded the filmed interviews with the children or what discussion followed. There is simply too much mystery.

Critique Of The Puppetry Hypothesis

It was a major story, the puppeteers would have known they started a huge news story

What evidence is there for this claim?

As Cynthia Hind already tried to convince us, African’s either don’t have TV or don’t watch it and if they do “TV people” don’t cover UFOs, so without either media coverage or an audience how would it be a major news story, how would news of it get to the puppeteers responsible? 

Even today with it being featured in popular TV UFO programs and films the story isn’t well known. From my experience talking to people outside the bubble of ufology chat rooms and social media, and even with journalists who lived and worked in Africa during that period, the story is completely unknown to them.

If there are television reports (a spot on The Richard and Judy Show is hardly headline news) – and newspaper articles from that period about the Ariel school story they have not been widely seen and to this day evade detection. In fact any media coverage Ariel School recieved made it a side-bar to Mack’s principle work on Alien Abduction.

We would know who the puppeteers were by now

The puppeteers could have been anyone. The workshops referenced trained both locals and internationals. They may not even have been aware that they caused a disturbance or that they are connected to the Ariel School story.

It is insensitive to the children’s trauma

With some 250 children there is going to be a variation in emotional response to any stimulus whether it was a genuine threat or otherwise. 

Inquiring about the exact source of the trauma that was reported seems essential to our proper understanding of the events. Until more witnesses come forward we simply don’t have enough information to know what this source was or how widely it was felt. 

The witnesses recall the media circus that surrounded them.

” It was chaos in terms of the media frenzy that was going on, and us being so young and not even being allowed time to comprehend what we had seen”

Salma reflecting on the events, interivewed in James Fox’s The Phenomenon (2020)

But was it the circus that caused their upset? What effect did Cynthia Hind’s interrogation-style group interviews have? The children were interviewed several times in large groups and then increasingly smaller ones. They were likely asked the same questions multiple times.

When the famous American professor from the television only secured interviews with 12 of the 62 witnesses (out of some 250 present children) did that lead to jealousy about the small club of special children who got to talk about their extraordinary experience for the televions cameras? Did that create a fear of missing out in those not involved? 

What evidence is there for trauma?

“A number of the children had had persistent fears and troubling dreams since the episode”

“We had one child who was very upset by the whole thing. Unfortunately he’s not at the school anymore…”

Headteacher Colin Mackie

It’s not clear what “the episide” or “the whole thing” refer to. Presumably the one person who left the school has since had enough time to reckon with their trauma and might be able to share their recollection of its cause?

Question: Is there better evidence for more witnesses being traumatized or is it a myth which needs to be kept alive to dull any probing skepticism about the event as a whole?

There is better evidence that sentiment about the Friday’s events was positive: 

Salma and Emma, the two children who reportedly got closest (3-4ft or 1m away) don’t report being traumatised by their experience.

As an adult Salma says,

“I don’t want to say I felt like I knew it, but I knew that I didn’t have to be afraid of it”…[sitting next to Emma who immediately responds with] “exactly!”.

Salma, again as an adult,

“I don’t remember feeling fear”

https://youtu.be/1rtJpw_WWDg?t=1124 [18:44].

“I’d love them to come back and we could see them again. Only this time, closer”

“I wasn’t scared a bit…It was all fun to me”

Various children in a group interview with Tineke de Nooij, March 1996 https://youtu.be/4cdQkXNbDvc

Other possible sources for their “trauma”

“the little black man was “coming to eat them” [a reference to the tokoloshe a mythological creature some of the children would have heard stories about]

.

“I dreamed that the same one I saw without hair, he came into my bedroom and he took me from my bed.”

Lisil – Interview with Tineke de Nooij, March 1996

Lisil’s comments above have to be seen in context. She is speaking in an interview 17 months later. By that time the children are clearly repeating many of the alien abduction and alien/hybrid breeding ideas found in both Mack’s work and in science fiction.

More than a year after Mack’s visit to the school there must have been chatter about this world famous academic’s work on alien abductions – his book – which includes graphic accounts of aliens perfoming medical proceedures on abductees – was a bestseller, and he had been prominently featured in broadcast media.

The children must have asked questions about who Dr. Mack was, and why he had come all that way to talk to them. It seems reasonable to assume that some of what he wrote about filtered down to the children who were then repeating the ideas in this group interview, and that some of these ideas may have caused nightmares.

There are other clues to the children being influenced in TV interviews, prior to Mack’s arrival. For example this curious moment with Anna being interviewed by Jill Darke.

Questions: What kind of “spaceship” was Anna shown? Was it one of the other children’s drawings or was it material the journalist brought with her that day? This seems like exactly the kind of misleading post-event information which creates false-memories. 

From prompts like this perhaps some of the children were already doing their own research and creating their own scary stories about ufos and aliens. 

The Children Would Have Known the Figures Were Puppets

Refer back to the section on visualising the scene and consider the distances involved in the sighting and the fact that puppets were made of all different sizes, from hand-puppet size, to human size, to giants two metres tall. 

The figures they saw (with the exception of Salma and Emma) were distant. The figures the children describe look and behave like puppets.

Add to this the fact that puppetry was a novelty in Africa.  

“Curiously, puppetry, or the animation of figures within a narrative context, was never developed into a performance tradition in Africa. Puppetry per se is not indigenous to Africa except for a few West African traditions…”

I suggest puppets were an unexpected sight. The unfamiliarity of seeing puppet figures viewed at a distance could have easily been misinterpreted as animated non-human beings. 

One style of puppet used the puppeteer’s real hands to give expression to a puppet head and body.

Questions & Discussion

Question. Since Ariel was a new school and founded by religious (mainly Catholic) parents and *if* Puppets Against Aids or a similar health education program were involved – could there have been some disagreement about the children seeing puppets talking about sexual promiscuity and contraception? Perhaps the late discovery or miscommunication about the program’s content meant a last-minute cancellation?

If the John E. Mack Institute aren’t able to clarify why the full details of Dr. Mack’s reserch are not publicly available they should be able to answer these simple questions about the research methods used during the study at Ariel School.

Questions for the John E. Mack Institute

• How long was each interview?
• What were the children told was the purpose of Dr. Mack’s interviews?
  • Are there records available of that briefing?
• Were there interviews that were started and which were not completed?
  • If so, how many and for what reason were they incomplete?
• Were the children’s interviews transcribed?
  • If so, by what method? i.e CHILDES or another system?
• Mack preferred a narrative case study methodology. Was this the only research method applied or was there any other structured element to them, a questionnaire for example?

Questions for the Ariel School Witnesses / Parents / Guardians

• After the event of 16 Sept 1994 when did you first hear that Dr Mack would be visiting the school? 
• During that time did you familiarise yourself with (or were you told about) Dr. Mack’s work at PEER?
  • Did the school provide any information about Dr. Mack to you? (his media profile was established, he had been interviewed recently on Charlie Rose (August 15 1994) and The Oprah Winfrey Show (August 18th 1994) and had just published Abduction (in April of 1994) which he spoke about on the South African TV show Agenda immediatly before he arrived. Was any of this shared with you? 
• How did the Ariel school leadership describe the purpose of Dr. Mack’s visit? 
• Was there a reason given for the interview request of you, your child/children? If so, what was that reason?
• Were you asked to sign an interview consent form? 
• If you were interviewed by Dr. Mack, was there follow-up after the interview from him or his research assistant/s?
  • If so, what was the form of and frequency of that follow-up? (i.e. was it a telephone call, or letter etc).
• Was there any discussion of the use of hypnosis in the interviews that were to be conducted?

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

The Abduction of Margaret Keane

References