Puppets

the school did this exercise. It's an English language exercise where schools will present some kind of intriguing mystery and they will have the children view the mystery and then write about it later. I think they did another one previously, which was a detective story. So the kids would arrive at school and they'd go into a classroom and there would be police tape and upturned chair and maybe some documents scattered on the floor or something like. They said

of this kind of crime scene. They'd take the Georgian in, they'd let them view it in a kind of structured way, and then they'd take them away and ask them to write about what they had seen, and to try and kind of infer from what they had seen what they thought might ha happened. The thing that got me thinking about the Aerial School was when they staged this crashed u e volte because it was during the restrictions on Luvelent.

None of the parents, apart from the parents who were in on the hoax, if you like, had seen the actual crash. Side kind of fascinating because I couldn't verify anything of what they were saying, and none of the other parents could tell me about it because no one else knew about it. It It was just something that school did.

It was all very confusing like that. All of the stories that I got back from both of them, because they were slightly different ages six and eight, I saw like a variation in how they reported it back to me. They had all of these stories about this device that had crashed in the school grounds. There was talk about green goop charred like wreck, like a trail where the thing had come into the playground. The younger one, my daughter,

was talking about an alien. Apparently there was like a ruler that there was an alien going around the school, but she hadn't actually seen it. My son give a much more kind of detailed description and drawing, But when I talked to him and asked him to describe it,

I hadn't seen the actual photograph of the object. I'd only found that picture afterwards, and it was interesting to see what he got right about it and what he didn't get right about it, But just got me thinking about how children recall things, like how perceptive they are, like my son's in articulate bride kid, but he still got some things wrong about what he'd seen, and they really just made me think, because I had heard about the Aerial School story previously, and I would read something

about it every now and again, but there wasn't any very good solution. There wasn't very many good arguments about what it was. It just always seemed like too shrouded in mystery. I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals, Episode three Puppets. In season two of Strange Arrivals, we examined how UFO folklore is created through a process involving competing explanations of a UFO event, and it seems to me that the Aerial School encounter is currently in the

early phase of this dynamic. Though the encounter occurred thirty years ago, the details are just now reaching a large audience, mostly through James Fox's twenty twenty film The Phenomenon. They were trying to communicate trying to tell us something. Randal Nick since twenty two film Aerial Phenomenon. This journey is literally to pick up to pieces and put them back

together in any number of podcasts. So as we look at the aerial school students accounts of their encounter, keep in mind that the process of proposing and evaluating alternative explanations for what the student saw is just underway. Basically, what we're trying to do is we're trying to establish a standard of evidence for UFO cases so we can find ones that stand up to scrutiny and separate out

the ones that don't. And this one was among the vast majority of cases that are supported only by horrible, horrible evidence and no decent evidence. I'm Brian Dudding. I'm probably best known as the host of the Skeptoid podcast. Since two thousand and six, you've heard Brian on each of the first two seasons of Strange Arrivals on a Skeptoid podcast. He has covered hundreds of cases of the

mysterious and allegedly paranormal. Generally, the conclusion from the scientists in Africa is that this was one of a very common phenomenon in African schools. Of mass hysteria. And you know, mass hysteria is a very unfortunately named phenomenon because it sounds like it means people running around screaming and waving

their arms and acting hysterically, but it's not. In a twenty eleven article for the Malawi Medical journal Research Psychologists, Demobili Kukota includes the aerial school incident in a list of cases of mass hysteria in African schools. He defines mass hysteria as quote, a situation in which various people

all suffer from similar, unexplained symptoms. He also talks about hysterical contagion, which he writes quote consists of quick dissemination within a collection of people of a symptom or a set of symptoms which no physical explanation can be found. The article lists cases that occurred in South Africa, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Uganda, but there's a difference between the aerial encounter

and the others described in the article. The other occurrences all involve either physical effects such as itching, fainting, or uncontrolled laughing, or strong psychological effects such as aggression and hallucinations. Here's an example, also from Zimbabwe. In two thousand and nine, a suspected case of mass hysteria struck Namanua Primary School in Massavingo, Zimbabwe, where pupils were reportedly screaming wildly and complaining of visions of strange snakelike creatures and lions. Teachers

said on average six pupils were affected every day. Some of the pupils would collapse, scream or tell of visions of snakes, lions, hyenas and crocodiles. Well others would behave as if they were in a trance. The development forced the authorities to dispatch passers to conduct prayer sessions at the school. A reverend involved with this effort blame the hysteria on quote evil spirits and demons and reported that

all had returned to normal. In the case of the aerial school, I'm not entirely convinced by the mass hysteria hypothesis. It really stands out in the articles being quite different from the other examples. The aerial students don't have the same psychological or physical reactions as the children in the other cases. But as we explored last episode, the way that the investigation was conducted into what did happen was

not conducive to getting to the truth. They had some very deeply motivated UFO writers come and do this group story sharing among the kids and sort of form this narrative as a group, and kind of why we have these recorded stories. There's no worse way to collect evidence than to do kind of a group story sharing session where everyone starts bringing up their recollections and then the UFO author was acting as sort of a moderator and

collecting the story and forming it as it went. That's not how you collect evidence to find out what actually happened, and so we're left really only with the UFO author's sort of interpretations and their preferred version of what they think happens to these kits. Dunning points out that who is doing the investigation is also important. With any investigation, the ideal is to have someone who is objective and

interested only in determining the facts of the incident. This was, of course not the case at Aerial School of Cynthia Hind. He says, you would do it by someone who is objective. You certainly wouldn't do it by someone who's actively writing a book about how aliens are visiting the Earth. So I mean They had the worst possible person interviewing the kids, and they did it in the worst possible way. So I mean, really, there's no way to go back and

find out if anything did happen. Another issue that Dunning seizes on is that most of the students on the playground that day did not, in fact see anything unusual. Only sixty three of the more than two hundred students reported seeing the UFO or the strange beings. You never hear about the vast majority of the kids in the playground who said nothing happened, and who wouldn't say that, no, there was no spaceship. I'm sorry, I'm not going to

go on board with that story. Finally, Dunning mentions that some biases and misconceptions about Africa are sometimes used to bolster the case. An element that's often reported is that this is some rural African school and these were poor African children in the middle of the country and they had no prior knowledge of aliens or UFOs or anything like that, and that woudn't be further from the truth at all. Aerial School was, as we have seen, an

expensive private school that largely catered to wealthier Zimbabweans. Many from Harari, which was a large modern African city, and of course they'd seen all the movies with UFOs, and it's been pointed out that that's why the drawings that they made of the spaceship, why they all looked just exactly like the stereotypical flying saucer with the footpads and the little bump on top and the little aliens getting

out and standing on it. The pictures all look very stereotypical, and that's because these kids had the same modern experience as anyone else with UFOs and aliens in the media. So if we agree with dunning strong misgivings about the investigation and have doubts that the aerial students saw an

actual alien craft, what did they see? As I said before, UFO researchers are still in the early stages of developing alternative theories about what happened, But an especially interesting theory has been put forward by researcher and writer Gideon Reid, who you heard of the opening of this episode, and it involves puppets. Trust me, it's more compelling than it sounds. After the break, strange arrivals will return in a moment.

It's a very difficult encounter to kind of unpack, And what I was trying to do was to look at what the most spontaneous things were that are in the testimony and try and see them as clearly as possible through all of the confusion and possible outside bias from the people that were interviewing the children, and to just try and imagine in a way while they could have been, and then to try and find a real world clausibility. This is Gideon Read on his blog gideer one dot com.

He's put forth a theory about the truth behind the aerial school encounter that is both unusual and compelling. So you know, I'm not saying that I think that this is definitely what happened, but I found it really interesting that when I was researching this, it seemed like a fairly novel idea that no one else had really gone down the root of the same degree that I had. Unlike Brian Dunning and Demobili Kakoda, Read starts with the assumption that the students did in fact see something, that

this was not simply a case of mass hysteria. They all seemed really bright, really articulate, really self possessed, really truthful. There's nothing in what I could see of those entries that indicates any kind of prank they're playing, and it he just got me thinking, what is it that these kids saw them? Because they obviously saw something, but I think the narrative or the interpretation of what they had seen has been affected by outside voices, if you like.

Reid was doing his research while England and the rest of the world was under COVID restrictions. During this time, he became interested in making puppets for his kids to play with, so he was doing research into puppet making and watching them engage in creative play with the puppets. At the same time, he was also thinking about Aerial

school and what could explain what happened there. Just all of a sudden, these two things kind of connected in a funny kind of way, Like I was thinking about aerial school in the background, I was thinking about the hoax thing and my kids primary school. I was thinking about in the back of my head, like what these

kids could have seen. And then I started to listen more intently to the Georgian denities, and I thought, there are things in the gaps they say that are intriguing, and there are specific parts of the descriptions of what they saw which just seemed completely spontaneous to come out of nowhere, Like I think Emily mentions that they had stiff necks. Salas said that she didn't see any facial

expression movement on the face. There are other kids talking about, you know, the whole thing about the figures moving in slow motion or having strange jerky movements, or appearing disappearing. All of those things just seemed to kind of map on to the idea that maybe what they had seen from a distance, because from why you understand, the observation that they made was from at least a hundred meters away.

So those things just all side to kind of map on to the idea that what these children might have seen were puppets. That was like my original hunch, this is all fining good, But why would there be puppets across the field from aerial school and why would the kids confuse them for aliens? Well, to start off with, it turns out that during that time there were puppet programs cropping up in many places in Southern Africa. I also came across Gary Friedman's work with Public Against Days

and the Southern African country. Is this kind of huge, rich program of workshops that he put together, and he had all these people kind of traveling around all Africa doing these One must have been quite difficult shows to do it just going to rural community is talking about public health. Here's Gary Friedman talking about his program to raise AIDS awareness in the documentary Puppets in Prison. Puppets in Prison is a short slice of life encapsulating eight

weeks of working with these young people. Our group have really opened themselves up and exposed parts of their lives which are very intimate and personal to them. We've taken these parts and these mesages and transform them into short performances. Freedman's program provided workshops so that local people could create their own puppets and put on a public health show about the AIDS crisis. Across Southern Africa. A slew of puppets were being made. You can find pictures on the internet.

Some are the size of hand puppets or slightly larger. Some are simply enormous heads with distinct faces and unblinking eyes that were worn by people both in programs and in public to draw attention to the show. The puppets that are put together. As far as I've been able to kind of find out by research, they have just like a number of similarities to some of the children's descriptions, both how the children describe the figures that they saw and the drawings that they made. As in a lot

of puppetry you get. Most puppets, it seems, are a lot of puppets have large eyes, because eyes are how characters get to communicate with the audiences. A lot of the pub is that they happened to make just have kind of large, compelling eyes and gray skin, and this is consistent with the testimony of the aerial students. And it was all black and they had big black eyes. I only remember that his eyes were quite big. A black man. He was just a black and he had

big eyes. He had a big head and big black eyes, and it was raised in a black body. There was a huge variation in how the children describe what they saw, and it goes some short, potbellied creatures. It almost looked like a real person, except it was really plump. It's like a tall, thin stick figure. I don't know what it was, but it was rat And all I saw was like a long thing, and he was very, very very thick, you know. I was simultaneously like looking at

the puppetry workshops. All of these descriptions kind of funnel into or can be mapped onto this idea of a puppetry workshop. It makes Gideon wonder, what is more likely that a group of unusual looking aliens happened to land in this field, or that's something that's certainly out of the ordinary but definitely earthly, is what the students saw. There are the things that I found really interesting. In particular,

I think Salma's drawing. It's fascinating because she said in her interviews that this is the one of the kind of disembodied head amongst the little grass and the trees, and she said in subsequent interviews that that's exactly what

she saw. And I'm looking at that, and then I come across one of the larger puppets that are rap made, which I think Thomas Richiocano in his article which I quote in my first post, he nicknames the Gray Giants who wrote this brilliant article about a rap where he wrote this britty and kind of literary description of these teheet total puppets wandering around the streets, kind of staring up a crowd in order for them to come and see the show that a rap we're about to put on.

Here is part of that quote. Shoeless children in tattered clothes, scattered helter skelter, running down compact, unpaved, and garbage stone streets. Their screaming was a blend of fear and excitement, their faces going from shock to beaming smiles as they turned their runs, alternating between flight and leaps of playfulness. Infants wailed in spasms of tears. Adults stood curious, amazed, and bemused.

All of the action on the street came to a halt as an eight foot tall figure with an enormous, cartoon like gray head shopped the grim reality of the slum into surreal with a perfect equatorial blue sky as a backdrop. So Richio gives a description of the public reaction to this kind of puppet in a setting where it is clear that what they are seeing is a puppet. Despite this knowledge, there is a strong and varied reaction

from both children and adults. It's not hard to extrapolate this to a group of children at a distance, not knowing what they were looking at. Then add the UFO reported over Southern Africa just two days before an adults asking if what they saw were aliens, and you very possibly end up with what we see with the aerial school students. As Gideon said at the beginning of this segment, he is not himself completely convinced that this theory is

one hundred percent correct. He's offering it for others to evaluate, and he is aware that it may be affected by his own biases. I really kind of tried to think about how I might be kind of falling into a trap of just, oh, delaying all of these coincidenial elements

of puppetry at this encounter. In a way, it fits perhaps my bias, which is that I don't particularly think that it's likely that they saw something that's out this world, so very aware that what I might be doing is kind of fitting things to a pattern that already exists.

But I think that that is something that is done frequently suddenly in uphology, where people are looking at different encounters around the world and saying, well, that's just like this, and that's just like this, so they must be the

same thing. We saw this in the previous episode with Cynthia Hind's predisposition to find UFOs and aliens, and we saw when John Mac arrived and interviewed the students to find that the aliens seemed to be communicating telepathically with them, giving them a message that just happened to dovetail with

Max's own strongly held beliefs. Indeed, Mac had been at the forefront of alien abduction research, and it theorized that the phenomenon was also a called to humankind to evolve spiritually and embrace environmentalism and peace, just as Mac had in his own life. Not only that, but Mac had developed a framework for abductions that literally transcended the boundaries of reality next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild from Aaron Manky.

This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by rima Il Kayali, Jesse Funk, and Nawami Griffin, with executive producers Alexander Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Mankey and supervising producer Josh Thame, with voice acting by rima Ilkayali and Zachary Volbel. Learn more about the show at Grimm and mild dot com slash Strange Arrivals. And find more podcasts from iHeartRadio by visiting the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.