Talk:Ariel School UFO incident

Terrible, Terrible Article!

As I understand it, you have two main priorities. Firstly, to inform your readers of the facts. And secondly, to do so impartially, presenting the facts objectively rather than subjectively. This article is very partial indeed, and heavily slanted towards presenting this event as proof that aliens from other planets are visiting Earth. Well, perhaps they are. But if this case is the best evidence for it, I'm about as likely to meet one as I am to be eaten by a dragon.

To begin with, we're told that 62 children - a very precise number - witnessed the spacecraft, the aliens, or whatever. We're then told that "not all the children at the school that day claimed that they say something". The claim being made here is that a flying saucer descended from the sky in broad daylight and landed a couple of hundred yards away in plain view of all the children, so it would be very remarkable indeed if not all of them noticed the big shiny alien starship next to the playground. Therefore the numbers matter. And buried in the footnotes where most people aren't going to bother looking, we find an actual number:

The Mail & Guardian article linked says that there were "more than 110 children and staff" at the school that day. The Brian Dunning article says "250 schoolchildren were all outside playing at the Ariel School".

Oh no, wait, that's two numbers, one of which is more than twice as big as the other! So which is it? The one given by a tabloid journalist writing in 2014 about an alleged UFO sighting in 1994, or the one from a rabid anti-paranormalist's blog? I've seen 200 or 210 or thereabouts quoted elsewhere, so maybe the overenthusiastic Mr Dunning exaggerated a little. As for 110, it's by far the lowest estimate I've seen anywhere, and suggests the journalist misread 210 as 110. Either way, it seems that somewhere between almost half and three-quarters of the potential witnesses somehow didn't notice the equivalent of an elephant in the room, only more so, since if you live in Zimbabwe you've probably seen more elephants than most people ever do, but not that many extraterrestrial spacecraft.

So why is such an important number in the footnotes rather than the body of the article? It's almost as if the writer is hoping the reader won't notice it down there, and will be left with the impression that "not all" means "nearly all". Which puts an entirely different perspective on the matter, since it's perfectly plausible that a few of the kids had gone to the toilet or something, but 50 or 150 or 190 of them, not so much! And of the two figures quoted, one is the by far the lowest given by any reasonably reliable source I've seen, and the other is from a controversial self-appointed crusader against all things paranormal who has no scientific qualifications and was recently imprisoned for fraud.

Which brings us to another important point. Whenever anything favourable to the notion that this really was an encounter with aliens is referenced, the source is a newspaper, or the BBC, or at any rate some fairly significant institution or media outlet. Yet practically every point against this hypothesis is sourced to Brian Dunning and him alone, usually with qualifiers such as "according to sceptic Brian Dunning" or "Dunning says that", as if it's purely his personal opinion, and if you choose not to trust him you can throw it out of the window.

One very important aspect of this case is that, two days previously, numerous people in Zimbabwe had seen a truly spectacular fireball accompanied by a sonic boom which could in the literal sense of the word be described as a UFO, since it was certainly an object, certainly flying, and it was a while before it was conclusively identified as debris from a satellite launch about which the Russians hadn't been very forthcoming because it involved top secret military hardware. Therefore the Zimbabwean media was abuzz with speculation about flying saucers and all the usual nonsense. Less than 48 hours later, a group of excited children between the ages of 6 and 12 became convinced they've seen a flying saucer land next to their school. As they stand, the facts strongly favour the mass hysteria hypothesis. I suppose a real alien spacecraft might just happen to arrive at the precise moment when the local population were in a flap over another thing they wrongly thought was an alien spacecraft, but it would be one hell of a coincidence! An important point, no? This is how your article handles it:

Two days prior to the incident at Ariel there had been a number of UFO sightings throughout southern Africa.[1][2][5] There had been numerous reports of a bright fireball passing through the sky at night.[2][5] Many people answered ZBC Radio's request to call-in and describe what they had seen.[2] Although some witnesses interpreted the fireball as a comet or meteor,[1][5] it resulted in a wave of UFO mania in Zimbabwe at the time.[2][7] According to sceptic Brian Dunning the fireball “had been the re-entry of the Zenit-2 rocket from the Cosmos 2290 satellite launch. The booster broke up into burning streaks as it moved silently across the sky, giving an impressive light show to millions of Africans.”[2] Local UFO researcher Cynthia Hind recorded other alien sightings at this time including a daylight sighting by a young boy and his mother and a report of alien beings on a road by a trucker.[1]

If I knew nothing at all about the incident, I'd probably interpret that paragraph to mean that the UFO had never been conclusively identified - "some witnesses interpreted the fireball as a comet or meteor" - and the best evidence that it was in fact a specific piece of Russian space debris is the word of a man who, if I click the link to your own page about him, I discover to be a smug know-it-all with no expertise in rocket science, though he does have a criminal conviction for telling lies. Therefore I could reasonably assume that, as your article implies, the fireball might very possibly have been something other than a Russian rocket, including an alien spaceship, presumably the same one the children saw shortly afterwards, and also the same one as various other people supposedly encountered at round about the same time, according to Cynthia Hind.

So here's the question a real encyclopedia written by grown-ups ought to be asking itself: is the most reliable source for the claim that the fireball resulted from a Russian satellite launch really Brian Dunning, or is it perhaps NASA? Of course, if NASA aren't terribly sure what it was and Russian space junk is merely their best guess, or they have no opinion at all and Brian Dunning is clutching at straws, or they say categorically that it wasn't from Russia therefore Brian Dunning is lying, you should print that because it's the truth, and if the sceptics don't like it they can lump it. But I was under the impression that NASA and other space agencies around the world routinely track all this stuff, so it might be worth having a look in their database, don't you think?

And so on. Throughout this short article I'm constantly seeing deceptive or weasly wording which in every case strives to make the case for the aliens being real a lot stronger than it truly is. "Some children in the school claimed that they had not seen anything unusual that day", another quote sourced to Brian Dunning. "Some children" meaning "at least 50 and possibly 190 children", which is a wee bit different! And of course "claimed" is a very loaded word. The implication seems to be that kids with an average age of 9 couldn't possibly lie about seeing a flying saucer, but they might very well lie about NOT seeing a flying saucer when in fact there was one!

Likewise, attributing every little bit of nay-saying to the obviously untrustworthy Brian Dunning allows almost any awkward detail to be brushed under the rug. "He challenged the often-repeated claim that as rural schoolchildren in Zimbabwe, the witnesses would have not have had exposure to modern media and so would not have been familiar with the concept of UFOs and alien visitors." If this claim is "often-repeated" yet challenged only by Brian Dunning, it's reasonable to argue that it's probably true. But click the link to the picture gallery at the bottom of this very article, and you will see that one child has drawn a flying saucer with "UFO" written on it. Furthermore, a very detailed drawing signed "Fungei Merengere", who I presume from the name to be one of the black children who supposedly knew nothing at all about UFOs and believed the "aliens" to be dreaded child-eating goblins from African folklore, shows what is unmistakably the flying saucer from the TV series "The Invaders"! I think one or two of the children might possibly have been exposed to modern media at some point, don't you?

And while we're on the subject of that "often-repeated" claim, let's have a look at one of the sources that repeat it. "Skeptics have described the incident as one of mass hysteria", says your article, quoting two sources, one of which is of course Brian Dunning. The other is "Episodes of mass hysteria in African schools: a study of the literature" by one Demobly Kokota, writing in the Malawai Medical Journal. Well, that sounds properly scholarly, doesn't it? Let's see what the good Dr Kokota has to say regarding the not entirely trivial question of whether it was proper space aliens or all down to childish overexcitement:

"In 1994, 62 school children all reported seeing an alien craft land and extraterrestrial creatures emerge. Virtually every single one of the 62 children iterated the exact same story with same details and none of them had gone against his/her story. Many dismissed the 1994 incident as mass hysteria affecting the children. But when the children were found to not have much prior knowledge to UFOS or popular UFO perceptions, many other people believed that what the children witnessed could have been real. The children were asked to draw what they have encountered the day prior."

That's the case for mass hysteria, in its entirety. You will observe that Dr Kokota leans heavily towards admitting that this was an actual alien encounter and not mass hysteria at all, an attitude he doesn't take towards any of the other cases he describes, none of which involve UFOs. But then, as the title of the paper makes plain, Dr Kokota didn't personally research any of these cases. He is merely quoting the literature, which he takes at face value. Most of the authors he quotes are medical professionals. His sources for the Ariel School incident? He cites precisely one: Cynthia Hind.

She is of course the amateur UFO investigator who brought the afair to the world's attention, and accidentally managed to get the vastly more famous John Mack involved (mainly because he'd already scheduled a trip to South Africa to meet the extremely weird Credo Mutwa). Is she a reliable source? Not really. The entire run of her self-published 'zine UFO Afrinews can be found online, and it's obvious that she uncritically believed just about anything told to her by anyone about UFOs and aliens, as well as the claims of fifties Space Brother contactees, wacky UFO cult leaders, and other oddballs even the mainstream UFO crowd consider fringe at best. If you want to read what she said about this case, see issues 11 and 12.

See also the YouTube video of Cynthia Hind's intial interview with a few of the witnesses, which, brief though it is, seems to comprise about half of her entire "investigation", along with another interview conducted months later after John Mack had become involved. The video might usefully be linked with this article, since it provides a helpful snapshot of what this case was all about before John Mack later encouraged the children to invent stories that fitted his own belief-system and then explained to them that what they'd just invented was in some magical way literally true, and what they'd previously remembered as having happened wasn't.

Yet another objection which this dismal article tries to duck with the "Brian Dunning personally believes this so it's only true if you trust him" excuse that covers everything is the claim that nobody said anything about cosmic space telepathy, or indeed communication of any kind with the aliens, until John Mack came along and put those ideas into the children's heads. What Cynthia Hind herself wrote, and what she and the children said on camera days after the event and weeks before Mack got involved, makes what Brian Dunning does or does not personally believe irrelevant, because it's an objectively true fact that at this point in the story nobody said a word about telepathic close encounters, or even claimed to have been closer to the aliens than a hundred yards at best. In fact, it's striking to learn how little they initially claimed to have seen. One boy had a momentary glimpse of sunlight reflecting off something, which he ignored because it didn't seem important at the time. And there's the girl who admits on camera that she initially believed the strange figure she saw to be the school gardener, then decided it was an alien, and finally changed her mind yet again and concluded it was the gardener after all! Strangely, when Hind quotes this girl in her write-up of the case, she leaves out that last bit.

Basically, if you present the case in chronological order, stick to the actual facts, and leave out all the stuff implying "you can believe 62 children about the aliens being real, or one convicted fraudster about it being nonsense, there are no other choices", you've got a scenario consistent with children who were already worked up about UFOs squinting into a heat-haze (the sighting took place close to midday in Africa during a drought) at a blurred shiny object which more than one child described as being painted green apart from the shiny bits that moved along beside the power-lines more or less at ground level, perhaps a little higher but never above the height of the trees it was partly obscured by, but which none of them (except one - there's always one) actually saw high up in the sky, and presently departed in some strange manner, disappearing rather than flying away (though Cynthia Hind unsuccessfully tried, on camera, to persuade one little girl that she saw it fly away because it must have done). And in the meantime, a person in dark clothing with pale skin and long dark hair (or no hair at all - the accounts are nowhere near as consistent as some people would have you believe) and huge black eyes got out, looked at the children for a few moments, and got back in.

Or in other words, a long-haired white woman wearing dark clothing and sunglasses drove along the dirt track beside the power line in a landrover. She stopped for a few moments, gazed with idle curiosity at the children, and drove off again. Seen through an intense heat-haze, with a partial mirage effect tending to make everything distorted and shiny, that could account for just about everything the children described or depicted (except maybe Fungei Merengere, who apparently had an extremely clear view of a fictional spaceship off the telly - I notice that a boy identified only as "Fungei" was one of John Mack's most helpful witnesses) from the moment they actually saw it until six weeks later, when John Mack arrived and explained, rather more subtly and persuasively than the blundering, hopelessly dim-witted Cynthia Hind, that up till now they'd got it all wrong, but he knew what really happened and would be delighted to help them remember it properly.

I admit that's a neither neutral nor objective description of this peculiar incident. But it's less biased and considerably more factually accurate than the one you've currently got. This event is often touted as one of the best proofs, if not THE best, that visitors from outer space are here. Perhaps it deserves an article which would give people who know nothing about it a clear picture of what actually happened? If Brian Dunning is a primary source, by all means use him as a reference, but not if he's a secondary source and the actual data was supplied by NASA. If Cynthia Hind didn't say or write one word about telepathic space messages until John Mack turned up six weeks later, and neither did anybody else, including the actual witnesses, then it's an objective fact and should be stated as such, and Brian Dunning's personal opinion is irrelevant. And so on.

If, on the other hand, you think this is a load of silly nonsense unworthy of your time and effort, then no article at all would be better than one which is far more concerned with promoting a rather weird belief-system than getting the facts right, the way it would be required to if it was an article in a real encyclopedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.143.52.255 (talk) 21:40, 16 May 2022 (UTC)

My brother in Christ, anybody can edit this article. If you have improvements to make go ahead and make them. EricthePinko (talk) 11:56, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

The point of the article is to relate the story as accurately as possible, faithful to the children's experiences. The children largely experienced it as "aliens" although some thought it was a spiritual experience with spirit beings. I don't happen to believed UFOs generally represent interplanetary travel. But it's not my story. I think it was told in much the same vein as a description of, for example, The Miracle of the Sun. IOW,neutral.journalistic. There is not enough data for a scientific study, so let's keep it at the experiential level. 2603:8080:E600:1889:7380:C46B:7421:248A (talk) 01:19, 20 June 2023 (UTC)

Frankly, that makes no sense. The point of the article can not be to present the story accurately to the children's experience. It should be to provide as close as possible a description of what actually happened. It should be limited to actual facts, as far as that goes, and then you could add a section for the accounts of the children.

Otherwise, this really has no place at all in an encyclopedia.

To clarify what I mean, if we were to, for example, write an article about riots at a football/soccer game, wouldn't we first present an accurate description of the facts, and only then maybe refer to some eyewitnesses? I mean, what could seriously be the sense in describing ANY event through the eyes of someone who was there at that moment?

That is something for a film, a documentary, a book, a scientific study might involve full accounts of eyewitnesses, but that's not what an encyclopedia is for.

And I also agree with the initial assessment of the article being quite loaded and opinionated in regard to language and presentation.

For example, what exactly has Brian Dunning being guilty of wire fraud has to do with his investigation into this?

Don't get me wrong, by all means, point out that he is a fanatic and not objective (with sources, of course), but the way this is presented here it absolutely feels as if it is just used to completely disregard his points due to him being a convicted fraudster for something not at all related with the topic. Die-yng (talk) 23:26, 23 January 2024 (UTC)