Speaker 1: Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heard Radio and
Speaker 1: Grim and Mild from Aaron Mackey. For the best experience,
Speaker 1: listen with headphones. It's around a year and a half
Speaker 1: ago now. My kids at the time were six and eight,
Speaker 1: and this was during the lockdown restrictions in the UK,
Speaker 1: so no parents could go into school grounds. Coincidentally, at
Speaker 1: the school did this exercise. It's an English language exercise
Speaker 1: where schools will present some kind of intriguing mystery and
Speaker 1: they will have the children view the mystery and then
Speaker 1: write about it later. I think they did another one previously,
Speaker 1: which was a detective story. So the kids would arrive
Speaker 1: at school and they'd go into a classroom and there
Speaker 1: would be police tape and upturned chair and maybe some
Speaker 1: documents scattered on the floor or something like. They said
Speaker 1: of this kind of crime scene. They'd take the Georgian in,
Speaker 1: they'd let them view it in a kind of structured way,
Speaker 1: and then they'd take them away and ask them to
Speaker 1: write about what they had seen, and to try and
Speaker 1: kind of infer from what they had seen what they
Speaker 1: thought might ha happened. The thing that got me thinking
Speaker 1: about the Aerial School was when they staged this crashed
Speaker 1: u e volte because it was during the restrictions on Luvelent.
Speaker 1: None of the parents, apart from the parents who were
Speaker 1: in on the hoax, if you like, had seen the
Speaker 1: actual crash. Side kind of fascinating because I couldn't verify
Speaker 1: anything of what they were saying, and none of the
Speaker 1: other parents could tell me about it because no one
Speaker 1: else knew about it. It It was just something that school did.
Speaker 1: It was all very confusing like that. All of the
Speaker 1: stories that I got back from both of them, because
Speaker 1: they were slightly different ages six and eight, I saw
Speaker 1: like a variation in how they reported it back to me.
Speaker 1: They had all of these stories about this device that
Speaker 1: had crashed in the school grounds. There was talk about
Speaker 1: green goop charred like wreck, like a trail where the
Speaker 1: thing had come into the playground. The younger one, my daughter,
Speaker 1: was talking about an alien. Apparently there was like a
Speaker 1: ruler that there was an alien going around the school,
Speaker 1: but she hadn't actually seen it. My son give a
Speaker 1: much more kind of detailed description and drawing, But when
Speaker 1: I talked to him and asked him to describe it,
Speaker 1: I hadn't seen the actual photograph of the object. I'd
Speaker 1: only found that picture afterwards, and it was interesting to
Speaker 1: see what he got right about it and what he
Speaker 1: didn't get right about it, But just got me thinking
Speaker 1: about how children recall things, like how perceptive they are,
Speaker 1: like my son's in articulate bride kid, but he still
Speaker 1: got some things wrong about what he'd seen, and they
Speaker 1: really just made me think, because I had heard about
Speaker 1: the Aerial School story previously, and I would read something
Speaker 1: about it every now and again, but there wasn't any
Speaker 1: very good solution. There wasn't very many good arguments about
Speaker 1: what it was. It just always seemed like too shrouded
Speaker 1: in mystery. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals,
Speaker 1: Episode three Puppets. In season two of Strange Arrivals, we
Speaker 1: examined how UFO folklore is created through a process involving
Speaker 1: competing explanations of a UFO event, and it seems to
Speaker 1: me that the Aerial School encounter is currently in the
Speaker 1: early phase of this dynamic. Though the encounter occurred thirty
Speaker 1: years ago, the details are just now reaching a large audience,
Speaker 1: mostly through James Fox's twenty twenty film The Phenomenon. They
Speaker 1: were trying to communicate trying to tell us something. Randal
Speaker 1: Nick since twenty two film Aerial Phenomenon. This journey is
Speaker 1: literally to pick up to pieces and put them back
Speaker 1: together in any number of podcasts. So as we look
Speaker 1: at the aerial school students accounts of their encounter, keep
Speaker 1: in mind that the process of proposing and evaluating alternative
Speaker 1: explanations for what the student saw is just underway. Basically,
Speaker 1: what we're trying to do is we're trying to establish
Speaker 1: a standard of evidence for UFO cases so we can
Speaker 1: find ones that stand up to scrutiny and separate out
Speaker 1: the ones that don't. And this one was among the
Speaker 1: vast majority of cases that are supported only by horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible evidence and no decent evidence. I'm Brian Dudding. I'm
Speaker 1: probably best known as the host of the Skeptoid podcast.
Speaker 1: Since two thousand and six, you've heard Brian on each
Speaker 1: of the first two seasons of Strange Arrivals on a
Speaker 1: Skeptoid podcast. He has covered hundreds of cases of the
Speaker 1: mysterious and allegedly paranormal. Generally, the conclusion from the scientists
Speaker 1: in Africa is that this was one of a very
Speaker 1: common phenomenon in African schools. Of mass hysteria. And you know,
Speaker 1: mass hysteria is a very unfortunately named phenomenon because it
Speaker 1: sounds like it means people running around screaming and waving
Speaker 1: their arms and acting hysterically, but it's not. In a
Speaker 1: twenty eleven article for the Malawi Medical journal Research Psychologists,
Speaker 1: Demobili Kukota includes the aerial school incident in a list
Speaker 1: of cases of mass hysteria in African schools. He defines
Speaker 1: mass hysteria as quote, a situation in which various people
Speaker 1: all suffer from similar, unexplained symptoms. He also talks about
Speaker 1: hysterical contagion, which he writes quote consists of quick dissemination
Speaker 1: within a collection of people of a symptom or a
Speaker 1: set of symptoms which no physical explanation can be found.
Speaker 1: The article lists cases that occurred in South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia,
Speaker 1: and Uganda, but there's a difference between the aerial encounter
Speaker 1: and the others described in the article. The other occurrences
Speaker 1: all involve either physical effects such as itching, fainting, or
Speaker 1: uncontrolled laughing, or strong psychological effects such as aggression and hallucinations.
Speaker 1: Here's an example, also from Zimbabwe. In two thousand and nine,
Speaker 1: a suspected case of mass hysteria struck Namanua Primary School
Speaker 1: in Massavingo, Zimbabwe, where pupils were reportedly screaming wildly and
Speaker 1: complaining of visions of strange snakelike creatures and lions. Teachers
Speaker 1: said on average six pupils were affected every day. Some
Speaker 1: of the pupils would collapse, scream or tell of visions
Speaker 1: of snakes, lions, hyenas and crocodiles. Well others would behave
Speaker 1: as if they were in a trance. The development forced
Speaker 1: the authorities to dispatch passers to conduct prayer sessions at
Speaker 1: the school. A reverend involved with this effort blame the
Speaker 1: hysteria on quote evil spirits and demons and reported that
Speaker 1: all had returned to normal. In the case of the
Speaker 1: aerial school, I'm not entirely convinced by the mass hysteria hypothesis.
Speaker 1: It really stands out in the articles being quite different
Speaker 1: from the other examples. The aerial students don't have the
Speaker 1: same psychological or physical reactions as the children in the
Speaker 1: other cases. But as we explored last episode, the way
Speaker 1: that the investigation was conducted into what did happen was
Speaker 1: not conducive to getting to the truth. They had some
Speaker 1: very deeply motivated UFO writers come and do this group
Speaker 1: story sharing among the kids and sort of form this
Speaker 1: narrative as a group, and kind of why we have
Speaker 1: these recorded stories. There's no worse way to collect evidence
Speaker 1: than to do kind of a group story sharing session
Speaker 1: where everyone starts bringing up their recollections and then the
Speaker 1: UFO author was acting as sort of a moderator and
Speaker 1: collecting the story and forming it as it went. That's
Speaker 1: not how you collect evidence to find out what actually happened,
Speaker 1: and so we're left really only with the UFO author's
Speaker 1: sort of interpretations and their preferred version of what they
Speaker 1: think happens to these kits. Dunning points out that who
Speaker 1: is doing the investigation is also important. With any investigation,
Speaker 1: the ideal is to have someone who is objective and
Speaker 1: interested only in determining the facts of the incident. This was,
Speaker 1: of course not the case at Aerial School of Cynthia Hind.
Speaker 1: He says, you would do it by someone who is objective.
Speaker 1: You certainly wouldn't do it by someone who's actively writing
Speaker 1: a book about how aliens are visiting the Earth. So
Speaker 1: I mean They had the worst possible person interviewing the kids,
Speaker 1: and they did it in the worst possible way. So
Speaker 1: I mean, really, there's no way to go back and
Speaker 1: find out if anything did happen. Another issue that Dunning
Speaker 1: seizes on is that most of the students on the
Speaker 1: playground that day did not, in fact see anything unusual.
Speaker 1: Only sixty three of the more than two hundred students
Speaker 1: reported seeing the UFO or the strange beings. You never
Speaker 1: hear about the vast majority of the kids in the
Speaker 1: playground who said nothing happened, and who wouldn't say that, no,
Speaker 1: there was no spaceship. I'm sorry, I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go on board with that story. Finally, Dunning mentions that
Speaker 1: some biases and misconceptions about Africa are sometimes used to
Speaker 1: bolster the case. An element that's often reported is that
Speaker 1: this is some rural African school and these were poor
Speaker 1: African children in the middle of the country and they
Speaker 1: had no prior knowledge of aliens or UFOs or anything
Speaker 1: like that, and that woudn't be further from the truth
Speaker 1: at all. Aerial School was, as we have seen, an
Speaker 1: expensive private school that largely catered to wealthier Zimbabweans. Many
Speaker 1: from Harari, which was a large modern African city, and
Speaker 1: of course they'd seen all the movies with UFOs, and
Speaker 1: it's been pointed out that that's why the drawings that
Speaker 1: they made of the spaceship, why they all looked just
Speaker 1: exactly like the stereotypical flying saucer with the footpads and
Speaker 1: the little bump on top and the little aliens getting
Speaker 1: out and standing on it. The pictures all look very stereotypical,
Speaker 1: and that's because these kids had the same modern experience
Speaker 1: as anyone else with UFOs and aliens in the media.
Speaker 1: So if we agree with dunning strong misgivings about the
Speaker 1: investigation and have doubts that the aerial students saw an
Speaker 1: actual alien craft, what did they see? As I said before,
Speaker 1: UFO researchers are still in the early stages of developing
Speaker 1: alternative theories about what happened, But an especially interesting theory
Speaker 1: has been put forward by researcher and writer Gideon Reid,
Speaker 1: who you heard of the opening of this episode, and
Speaker 1: it involves puppets. Trust me, it's more compelling than it sounds.
Speaker 1: After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment.
Speaker 1: It's a very difficult encounter to kind of unpack, And
Speaker 1: what I was trying to do was to look at
Speaker 1: what the most spontaneous things were that are in the
Speaker 1: testimony and try and see them as clearly as possible
Speaker 1: through all of the confusion and possible outside bias from
Speaker 1: the people that were interviewing the children, and to just
Speaker 1: try and imagine in a way while they could have been,
Speaker 1: and then to try and find a real world clausibility.
Speaker 1: This is Gideon Read on his blog gideer one dot com.
Speaker 1: He's put forth a theory about the truth behind the
Speaker 1: aerial school encounter that is both unusual and compelling. So
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not saying that I think that this
Speaker 1: is definitely what happened, but I found it really interesting
Speaker 1: that when I was researching this, it seemed like a
Speaker 1: fairly novel idea that no one else had really gone
Speaker 1: down the root of the same degree that I had.
Speaker 1: Unlike Brian Dunning and Demobili Kakoda, Read starts with the
Speaker 1: assumption that the students did in fact see something, that
Speaker 1: this was not simply a case of mass hysteria. They
Speaker 1: all seemed really bright, really articulate, really self possessed, really truthful.
Speaker 1: There's nothing in what I could see of those entries
Speaker 1: that indicates any kind of prank they're playing, and it
Speaker 1: he just got me thinking, what is it that these
Speaker 1: kids saw them? Because they obviously saw something, but I
Speaker 1: think the narrative or the interpretation of what they had
Speaker 1: seen has been affected by outside voices, if you like.
Speaker 1: Reid was doing his research while England and the rest
Speaker 1: of the world was under COVID restrictions. During this time,
Speaker 1: he became interested in making puppets for his kids to
Speaker 1: play with, so he was doing research into puppet making
Speaker 1: and watching them engage in creative play with the puppets.
Speaker 1: At the same time, he was also thinking about Aerial
Speaker 1: school and what could explain what happened there. Just all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, these two things kind of connected in
Speaker 1: a funny kind of way, Like I was thinking about
Speaker 1: aerial school in the background, I was thinking about the
Speaker 1: hoax thing and my kids primary school. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about in the back of my head, like what these
Speaker 1: kids could have seen. And then I started to listen
Speaker 1: more intently to the Georgian denities, and I thought, there
Speaker 1: are things in the gaps they say that are intriguing,
Speaker 1: and there are specific parts of the descriptions of what
Speaker 1: they saw which just seemed completely spontaneous to come out
Speaker 1: of nowhere, Like I think Emily mentions that they had
Speaker 1: stiff necks. Salas said that she didn't see any facial
Speaker 1: expression movement on the face. There are other kids talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, the whole thing about the figures moving in
Speaker 1: slow motion or having strange jerky movements, or appearing disappearing.
Speaker 1: All of those things just seemed to kind of map
Speaker 1: on to the idea that maybe what they had seen
Speaker 1: from a distance, because from why you understand, the observation
Speaker 1: that they made was from at least a hundred meters away.
Speaker 1: So those things just all side to kind of map
Speaker 1: on to the idea that what these children might have
Speaker 1: seen were puppets. That was like my original hunch, this
Speaker 1: is all fining good, But why would there be puppets
Speaker 1: across the field from aerial school and why would the
Speaker 1: kids confuse them for aliens? Well, to start off with,
Speaker 1: it turns out that during that time there were puppet
Speaker 1: programs cropping up in many places in Southern Africa. I
Speaker 1: also came across Gary Friedman's work with Public Against Days
Speaker 1: and the Southern African country. Is this kind of huge,
Speaker 1: rich program of workshops that he put together, and he
Speaker 1: had all these people kind of traveling around all Africa
Speaker 1: doing these One must have been quite difficult shows to
Speaker 1: do it just going to rural community is talking about
Speaker 1: public health. Here's Gary Friedman talking about his program to
Speaker 1: raise AIDS awareness in the documentary Puppets in Prison. Puppets
Speaker 1: in Prison is a short slice of life encapsulating eight
Speaker 1: weeks of working with these young people. Our group have
Speaker 1: really opened themselves up and exposed parts of their lives
Speaker 1: which are very intimate and personal to them. We've taken
Speaker 1: these parts and these mesages and transform them into short performances.
Speaker 1: Freedman's program provided workshops so that local people could create
Speaker 1: their own puppets and put on a public health show
Speaker 1: about the AIDS crisis. Across Southern Africa. A slew of
Speaker 1: puppets were being made. You can find pictures on the internet.
Speaker 1: Some are the size of hand puppets or slightly larger.
Speaker 1: Some are simply enormous heads with distinct faces and unblinking
Speaker 1: eyes that were worn by people both in programs and
Speaker 1: in public to draw attention to the show. The puppets
Speaker 1: that are put together. As far as I've been able
Speaker 1: to kind of find out by research, they have just
Speaker 1: like a number of similarities to some of the children's descriptions,
Speaker 1: both how the children describe the figures that they saw
Speaker 1: and the drawings that they made. As in a lot
Speaker 1: of puppetry you get. Most puppets, it seems, are a
Speaker 1: lot of puppets have large eyes, because eyes are how
Speaker 1: characters get to communicate with the audiences. A lot of
Speaker 1: the pub is that they happened to make just have
Speaker 1: kind of large, compelling eyes and gray skin, and this
Speaker 1: is consistent with the testimony of the aerial students. And
Speaker 1: it was all black and they had big black eyes.
Speaker 1: I only remember that his eyes were quite big. A
Speaker 1: black man. He was just a black and he had
Speaker 1: big eyes. He had a big head and big black eyes,
Speaker 1: and it was raised in a black body. There was
Speaker 1: a huge variation in how the children describe what they saw,
Speaker 1: and it goes some short, potbellied creatures. It almost looked
Speaker 1: like a real person, except it was really plump. It's
Speaker 1: like a tall, thin stick figure. I don't know what
Speaker 1: it was, but it was rat And all I saw
Speaker 1: was like a long thing, and he was very, very
Speaker 1: very thick, you know. I was simultaneously like looking at
Speaker 1: the puppetry workshops. All of these descriptions kind of funnel
Speaker 1: into or can be mapped onto this idea of a
Speaker 1: puppetry workshop. It makes Gideon wonder, what is more likely
Speaker 1: that a group of unusual looking aliens happened to land
Speaker 1: in this field, or that's something that's certainly out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary but definitely earthly, is what the students saw.
Speaker 1: There are the things that I found really interesting. In particular,
Speaker 1: I think Salma's drawing. It's fascinating because she said in
Speaker 1: her interviews that this is the one of the kind
Speaker 1: of disembodied head amongst the little grass and the trees,
Speaker 1: and she said in subsequent interviews that that's exactly what
Speaker 1: she saw. And I'm looking at that, and then I
Speaker 1: come across one of the larger puppets that are rap made,
Speaker 1: which I think Thomas Richiocano in his article which I
Speaker 1: quote in my first post, he nicknames the Gray Giants
Speaker 1: who wrote this brilliant article about a rap where he
Speaker 1: wrote this britty and kind of literary description of these
Speaker 1: teheet total puppets wandering around the streets, kind of staring
Speaker 1: up a crowd in order for them to come and
Speaker 1: see the show that a rap we're about to put on.
Speaker 1: Here is part of that quote. Shoeless children in tattered clothes,
Speaker 1: scattered helter skelter, running down compact, unpaved, and garbage stone streets.
Speaker 1: Their screaming was a blend of fear and excitement, their
Speaker 1: faces going from shock to beaming smiles as they turned
Speaker 1: their runs, alternating between flight and leaps of playfulness. Infants
Speaker 1: wailed in spasms of tears. Adults stood curious, amazed, and bemused.
Speaker 1: All of the action on the street came to a
Speaker 1: halt as an eight foot tall figure with an enormous,
Speaker 1: cartoon like gray head shopped the grim reality of the
Speaker 1: slum into surreal with a perfect equatorial blue sky as
Speaker 1: a backdrop. So Richio gives a description of the public
Speaker 1: reaction to this kind of puppet in a setting where
Speaker 1: it is clear that what they are seeing is a puppet.
Speaker 1: Despite this knowledge, there is a strong and varied reaction
Speaker 1: from both children and adults. It's not hard to extrapolate
Speaker 1: this to a group of children at a distance, not
Speaker 1: knowing what they were looking at. Then add the UFO
Speaker 1: reported over Southern Africa just two days before an adults
Speaker 1: asking if what they saw were aliens, and you very
Speaker 1: possibly end up with what we see with the aerial
Speaker 1: school students. As Gideon said at the beginning of this segment,
Speaker 1: he is not himself completely convinced that this theory is
Speaker 1: one hundred percent correct. He's offering it for others to evaluate,
Speaker 1: and he is aware that it may be affected by
Speaker 1: his own biases. I really kind of tried to think
Speaker 1: about how I might be kind of falling into a
Speaker 1: trap of just, oh, delaying all of these coincidenial elements
Speaker 1: of puppetry at this encounter. In a way, it fits
Speaker 1: perhaps my bias, which is that I don't particularly think
Speaker 1: that it's likely that they saw something that's out this world,
Speaker 1: so very aware that what I might be doing is
Speaker 1: kind of fitting things to a pattern that already exists.
Speaker 1: But I think that that is something that is done
Speaker 1: frequently suddenly in uphology, where people are looking at different
Speaker 1: encounters around the world and saying, well, that's just like this,
Speaker 1: and that's just like this, so they must be the
Speaker 1: same thing. We saw this in the previous episode with
Speaker 1: Cynthia Hind's predisposition to find UFOs and aliens, and we
Speaker 1: saw when John Mac arrived and interviewed the students to
Speaker 1: find that the aliens seemed to be communicating telepathically with them,
Speaker 1: giving them a message that just happened to dovetail with
Speaker 1: Max's own strongly held beliefs. Indeed, Mac had been at
Speaker 1: the forefront of alien abduction research, and it theorized that
Speaker 1: the phenomenon was also a called to humankind to evolve
Speaker 1: spiritually and embrace environmentalism and peace, just as Mac had
Speaker 1: in his own life. Not only that, but Mac had
Speaker 1: developed a framework for abductions that literally transcended the boundaries
Speaker 1: of reality next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is
Speaker 1: a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and
Speaker 1: produced by rima Il Kayali, Jesse Funk, and Nawami Griffin,
Speaker 1: with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey
Speaker 1: and supervising producer Josh Thame, with voice acting by rima
Speaker 1: Ilkayali and Zachary Volbel. Learn more about the show at
Speaker 1: Grimm and mild dot com slash Strange Arrivals. And find
Speaker 1: more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.