Post by swamprat on Jun 19, 2018 14:52:59 GMT
Remembering Zimbabwe's great alien invasion
Sean Christie, 05 Sep 2014
Tracking down one of the Ariel School experiencers took some doing, but eventually I connected with Sarah* in what she referred to as “a most stubborn old Rhodie [white Rhodesian] bar” in downtown Harare.
Of the more than 110 children and staff who had been at the school, which sits just outside the small agricultural centre of Ruwa, when the aliens landed in 1994, she thought she was probably the only one still in the country.
“Everyone’s off to Canada or the UK,” she said. “Or died.”
When it became clear to her drinking buddies that we were going to talk UFOs, eyes began to roll.
“Christ, Sê, not ET again,” someone muttered.
She ignored him.
“Whaddya wanna know? Actually, it’ll be simpler if I just shoot. It happened, OK. Sixty-two kids between the ages of about six and 12 saw the aliens land and get out of their little ships. When the kids returned to class they were completely freaked and couldn’t stop nattering about little men who looked a bit like Michael Jackson. The teachers told them to shut up, as teachers are wont to do, and classes proceeded.
“But the next day the school received a bunch of calls from parents wanting to know why their kids were spooked. It got so that the teachers started to freak out, too, and a local UFO expert called Cynthia Hind was invited to speak to everyone. It was via her, I think, that we heard about a famous shrink who was coming from the US to assess the children. What was his name now … Mack, Dr John Mack, who I heard was killed by a drunk driver a few years back.”
Dedicated investigator
Hind, who died in 2000, had publicly acknowledged her own experiences with otherwordly beings in the past, and had dedicated the past decade and a half of her life to investigating UFO sightings on the African continent on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network, and then publishing her findings in the very collectable newsletter, UFO Afrinews.
I had brought along a printout of Issue 11, which I opened on the bar counter before Sarah on Hind’s article “UFO flap in Zimbabwe: Case No 95”. It begins:
“Wednesday, 14th September, 1994, was an exciting night for Southern Africa. Round about 20:50 to 21:05 hours, a pyrotechnic display of some magnificence appeared in the almost clear night skies of this part of the continent.”
Astronomers across the region soon reported that the “pyrotechnic display”, seen as far afield as Zambia and Botswana, had been a meteor shower. Hind, though, recorded receiving dozens of reports of a capsule-like fireball, trailing fire and flanked by two smaller capsules.
She also received several reports of alien sightings around the same time: a young boy and his mother reported a daylight sighting; a trucker who had seen strange beings on the road at night. And then, on September 16, Hind received the report from Ariel School, which she records as Case 96, and describes as “one of the most exciting UFO stories of this or any year”.
Childhood recollection
Hind’s narrative closely mirrors Sarah’s recollection. At 10am, Hind writes, on a hot day, the children were let out for their mid-morning break. They were drawn to an area beyond their playing field of “long grass with thorn and other indigenous bushes, trees growing higgledy-piggledy fashion, and undergrowth thick and heavy enough to hide a child should he venture there”.
The teachers had all entered the staff room for a meeting and the only adult outdoors was the tuckshop mistress, who was soon swamped by children claiming they had seen “three or four objects coming into the rough bush area … disc-like objects coming in along the power lines and finally landing in the rough, among the trees. The children were a little bit afraid, although they were also curious.”
The UFO investigator goes on to record the testimonies of several of the children, who she says represented “a cross-section of Zimbabweans: black African children from several tribes, coloured children (a cross-breeding of black and white), Asian children (whose grandparents were from India) and white children, mostly Zimbabwean-born, but whose parents were either from South Africa or Britain”.
Although they all came from wealthy families (tuition at Ariel School was expensive), Hind believed their cultural differences gave rise to differing interpretations of the event, and that the differences in interpretation made the details that were common to all accounts very compelling indeed.
One of the white students, for example, “thought at first that the little man in black might have been Mrs Stevens’ gardener, but then he saw that the figure had long, straight black hair, ‘not really like black [person’s] hair’, so he realised he had made a mistake!”
Some of the black children thought the short little beings were zvikwambo, or tokoloshes – the evil goblins of Shona and Ndebele folklore – and burst into tears, fearing they would be eaten.
Guy G said: “ could see the little man (about a metre tall) was dressed in a black, shiny suit; that he had long black hair and his eyes, which seemed lower on the cheek than our eyes, were large and elongated. The mouth was just a slit and the ears were hardly discernible.”
Parent’s disbelief
Hind’s account ends with her outrage at the disbelief of the children’s’ parents.
“What a frightening indictment of our society that when we are confronted by something we don’t understand, we don’t even attempt to open our minds to the event.”
After reading the article, Sarah ordered another Castle and said: “To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you would be here talking to me now if it wasn’t for that woman [Hind].
“What happened at Ariel was certainly weird, so many kids coming back from break with such similar stories, but I doubt many people would have heard about it if Hind hadn’t made such a fuss. She was the first person to interview the kids, and got the news out to all sorts of important people, Mack included, as if, you know, finally here was some vindication.”
Hind’s descriptions of Mack from this time do indeed suggest she regarded him as something of a redeemer figure, a man who was “not only open-minded and prepared to listen, but an academic of some standing. And one who has risked his credibility with his colleagues to come out and say he believes the experiences of abductees are very real indeed.”
Who was this man, Mack, whose interest transformed a local curiosity into a study that continues to animate UFO chat rooms to this day?
I’d been told a little of his biography by a relative of mine called Nicky Carter, who after hearing of the incident from a brother at Ariel School had been the first media respondent, covering it as a producer for an SABC current affairs program called Agenda.
Prize-winning author
Dr John E Mack, she said, had been a Pulitzer prize-winning author (awarded for his 1977 study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of TE Lawrence) and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.
Highly regarded, Mack had nevertheless been having a tough year professionally when Carter met him. His problems stemmed from his interest in the alien abduction phenomenon, which he had begun researching in the early 1990s and about which he had written the bestselling book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.
Carter sent me Mack’s own account of the fallout. “In the spring of 1994,” he writes in his second book on the alien abduction phenomenon, Passport to the Cosmos, “one of the deans at the Harvard Medical School handed me a letter that called for the establishment of a small committee to investigate my work [on the alien abduction phenomenon].
“After explaining vaguely that ‘concerns’ had been expressed to the university about what I was doing (although he told of no specific complaint, nor was any offered in the letter), he added pleasantly – for he had been a friend and colleague – that I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the book [Abduction] that my findings might require a change in our view of reality, rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.”
Another peer, Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School, was less delicate, describing Mack in the Los Angeles Times as “a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he’s lost it big time”.
Mack’s standard rejoinder was to point out that, although alien encounters were “not possible according to the science of the times”, they might nevertheless “turn out to be real in some way that we do not yet understand … as the bizarre reports of rocks we now call meteorites falling from the sky seemed [impossible] in the 18th century.”
Sean Christie, 05 Sep 2014
Tracking down one of the Ariel School experiencers took some doing, but eventually I connected with Sarah* in what she referred to as “a most stubborn old Rhodie [white Rhodesian] bar” in downtown Harare.
Of the more than 110 children and staff who had been at the school, which sits just outside the small agricultural centre of Ruwa, when the aliens landed in 1994, she thought she was probably the only one still in the country.
“Everyone’s off to Canada or the UK,” she said. “Or died.”
When it became clear to her drinking buddies that we were going to talk UFOs, eyes began to roll.
“Christ, Sê, not ET again,” someone muttered.
She ignored him.
“Whaddya wanna know? Actually, it’ll be simpler if I just shoot. It happened, OK. Sixty-two kids between the ages of about six and 12 saw the aliens land and get out of their little ships. When the kids returned to class they were completely freaked and couldn’t stop nattering about little men who looked a bit like Michael Jackson. The teachers told them to shut up, as teachers are wont to do, and classes proceeded.
“But the next day the school received a bunch of calls from parents wanting to know why their kids were spooked. It got so that the teachers started to freak out, too, and a local UFO expert called Cynthia Hind was invited to speak to everyone. It was via her, I think, that we heard about a famous shrink who was coming from the US to assess the children. What was his name now … Mack, Dr John Mack, who I heard was killed by a drunk driver a few years back.”
Dedicated investigator
Hind, who died in 2000, had publicly acknowledged her own experiences with otherwordly beings in the past, and had dedicated the past decade and a half of her life to investigating UFO sightings on the African continent on behalf of the Mutual UFO Network, and then publishing her findings in the very collectable newsletter, UFO Afrinews.
I had brought along a printout of Issue 11, which I opened on the bar counter before Sarah on Hind’s article “UFO flap in Zimbabwe: Case No 95”. It begins:
“Wednesday, 14th September, 1994, was an exciting night for Southern Africa. Round about 20:50 to 21:05 hours, a pyrotechnic display of some magnificence appeared in the almost clear night skies of this part of the continent.”
Astronomers across the region soon reported that the “pyrotechnic display”, seen as far afield as Zambia and Botswana, had been a meteor shower. Hind, though, recorded receiving dozens of reports of a capsule-like fireball, trailing fire and flanked by two smaller capsules.
She also received several reports of alien sightings around the same time: a young boy and his mother reported a daylight sighting; a trucker who had seen strange beings on the road at night. And then, on September 16, Hind received the report from Ariel School, which she records as Case 96, and describes as “one of the most exciting UFO stories of this or any year”.
Childhood recollection
Hind’s narrative closely mirrors Sarah’s recollection. At 10am, Hind writes, on a hot day, the children were let out for their mid-morning break. They were drawn to an area beyond their playing field of “long grass with thorn and other indigenous bushes, trees growing higgledy-piggledy fashion, and undergrowth thick and heavy enough to hide a child should he venture there”.
The teachers had all entered the staff room for a meeting and the only adult outdoors was the tuckshop mistress, who was soon swamped by children claiming they had seen “three or four objects coming into the rough bush area … disc-like objects coming in along the power lines and finally landing in the rough, among the trees. The children were a little bit afraid, although they were also curious.”
The UFO investigator goes on to record the testimonies of several of the children, who she says represented “a cross-section of Zimbabweans: black African children from several tribes, coloured children (a cross-breeding of black and white), Asian children (whose grandparents were from India) and white children, mostly Zimbabwean-born, but whose parents were either from South Africa or Britain”.
Although they all came from wealthy families (tuition at Ariel School was expensive), Hind believed their cultural differences gave rise to differing interpretations of the event, and that the differences in interpretation made the details that were common to all accounts very compelling indeed.
One of the white students, for example, “thought at first that the little man in black might have been Mrs Stevens’ gardener, but then he saw that the figure had long, straight black hair, ‘not really like black [person’s] hair’, so he realised he had made a mistake!”
Some of the black children thought the short little beings were zvikwambo, or tokoloshes – the evil goblins of Shona and Ndebele folklore – and burst into tears, fearing they would be eaten.
Guy G said: “ could see the little man (about a metre tall) was dressed in a black, shiny suit; that he had long black hair and his eyes, which seemed lower on the cheek than our eyes, were large and elongated. The mouth was just a slit and the ears were hardly discernible.”
Parent’s disbelief
Hind’s account ends with her outrage at the disbelief of the children’s’ parents.
“What a frightening indictment of our society that when we are confronted by something we don’t understand, we don’t even attempt to open our minds to the event.”
After reading the article, Sarah ordered another Castle and said: “To be perfectly honest, I don’t think you would be here talking to me now if it wasn’t for that woman [Hind].
“What happened at Ariel was certainly weird, so many kids coming back from break with such similar stories, but I doubt many people would have heard about it if Hind hadn’t made such a fuss. She was the first person to interview the kids, and got the news out to all sorts of important people, Mack included, as if, you know, finally here was some vindication.”
Hind’s descriptions of Mack from this time do indeed suggest she regarded him as something of a redeemer figure, a man who was “not only open-minded and prepared to listen, but an academic of some standing. And one who has risked his credibility with his colleagues to come out and say he believes the experiences of abductees are very real indeed.”
Who was this man, Mack, whose interest transformed a local curiosity into a study that continues to animate UFO chat rooms to this day?
I’d been told a little of his biography by a relative of mine called Nicky Carter, who after hearing of the incident from a brother at Ariel School had been the first media respondent, covering it as a producer for an SABC current affairs program called Agenda.
Prize-winning author
Dr John E Mack, she said, had been a Pulitzer prize-winning author (awarded for his 1977 study of Lawrence of Arabia, A Prince of Our Disorder: The Life of TE Lawrence) and a professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.
Highly regarded, Mack had nevertheless been having a tough year professionally when Carter met him. His problems stemmed from his interest in the alien abduction phenomenon, which he had begun researching in the early 1990s and about which he had written the bestselling book Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens.
Carter sent me Mack’s own account of the fallout. “In the spring of 1994,” he writes in his second book on the alien abduction phenomenon, Passport to the Cosmos, “one of the deans at the Harvard Medical School handed me a letter that called for the establishment of a small committee to investigate my work [on the alien abduction phenomenon].
“After explaining vaguely that ‘concerns’ had been expressed to the university about what I was doing (although he told of no specific complaint, nor was any offered in the letter), he added pleasantly – for he had been a friend and colleague – that I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the book [Abduction] that my findings might require a change in our view of reality, rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.”
Another peer, Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School, was less delicate, describing Mack in the Los Angeles Times as “a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he’s lost it big time”.
Mack’s standard rejoinder was to point out that, although alien encounters were “not possible according to the science of the times”, they might nevertheless “turn out to be real in some way that we do not yet understand … as the bizarre reports of rocks we now call meteorites falling from the sky seemed [impossible] in the 18th century.”
See next post for page 2
