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“The Phenomenon.”  Directed by James Fox.  Released October 6, 2020.

(The final installment of a three-part post.  For the first two parts, click here and here.)

There are impressive UFO witnesses.  There are not-so-impressive UFO witnesses.  And then there’s Salma Siddick.

She’s a young Black woman from a Muslim family in Zimbabwe, apparently (though it’s not very clear) now living in the United States.  In “The Phenomenon,” she’s introduced as a human rights lawyer.  Around mid-morning on September 16, 1994, she was one of the 60 or so child witnesses to a UFO landing just off the grounds of the Ariel School near Ruwa, Zimbabwe.  She was 11 years old at the time.

On October 18, 2017, Siddick was interviewed by Martin Willis on his “Podcast UFO,” along with Randall Nickerson, whose documentary “Ariel School Phenomenon” still awaits release.  Thanks to Justin Landwehr, who sent me the link to the interview, I watched it a few days ago.  Like nearly everyone else who’s watched Siddick speak about her experience, I was impressed–to put it very mildly.  By her intelligence, her articulateness.  Her conviction that she and dozens of other youngsters underwent an extraordinary and potentially transformative experience in the southern-hemisphere spring of 1994.

She can’t be dismissed, nor can the experience.

But what are we to make of it?

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“The most significant close encounter in modern history,” “The Phenomenon” calls it–qualifying this judgment, however, with “some believe”–and puts it at the climax of the film’s case for UFO reality.  We’re shown videos of the children describing their experience close to the time of the event, interviewed first by a BBC correspondent and then by Harvard psychiatry professor and abduction researcher John Mack, who visited the Ariel School on December 2 and 3.  We’re shown the children’s drawings of the “spaceship” and the grim, frightening creature seen atop or beside it.

Then we see some of the children (Siddick among them) re-united as young adults, looking back from the perspective of 19 1/2 years.  “Our teachers certainly didn’t believe us,” says Siddick; and we’re reminded that not a single adult at the school saw what the children saw.  (Though one of the teachers remembers the children running back to the school in a panic.)  “I wanted to apologize” to the children, Judy Bates, then a teacher at the school and now its headmistress, tells the interviewer.  “I should have taken more notice.  But I didn’t.  I was more concerned about me and not them.”

Asked what took place at the school, Bates says with what seems a rueful laugh: “Aliens visited us.  And that’s about it.  If you believe it, you believe it; if you don’t, well–“

And given that I don’t, then what?

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The first thing that struck me, watching the 9-minute segment on the Ariel School (1 hr. 22′ – 31′), was how closely parallel it was to the Westall High School episode of 1966, not in terms of what was seen but in terms of who saw it and under what circumstances.  In both cases, the witnesses to the landing were children on the cusp of puberty.  In both, a UFO or multiple UFOs–the witnesses didn’t agree on their precise number–landed in a forbidden area off the school grounds.  At Westall, this was a pine grove (“The Grange”) said to have been a favored place for “illicit smoking and steamy liaisons”; at Ariel, it was a wild area (“bush”) just beyond the playground, fenced off from the playground by tree trunks which I assume to have been laid flat on the ground.

The Ariel schoolchildren were forbidden to go into the “bush” for fear of poisonous snakes that might lurk among the tall grasses.  Unlike at Westall, where many of the kids “jumped the fence and went off after” the UFO they thought they’d seen land in The Grange, the Ariel children observed their taboo.  So, on their part, did the UFO beings.  They might approach the tree-trunk boundary from the wilderness side, as the kids did from the playground side, and face each other with no more than a meter separating them.  But neither was willing to cross that border.

There were no teachers? asks Martin Willis, who seems astonished by their absence.  No, says Siddick, they were all at a staff meeting–and I share Willis’s astonishment, that children would be allowed to play without supervision in close proximity and with easy access to a place of significant danger.  The only adult on hand was a woman who ran a “tuckshop,” which I learn is what we’d call a snack bar.  This “tuckshop mistress” turns up also in a report by a Zimbabwean UFOlogist named Cynthia Hind (quoted in a 2014 article), which represents her as having been “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.’”  But the lady herself appears to have seen nothing.

It wasn’t just disks that the children saw.  There were also humanoid entities, menacing in their appearance, with the huge oval eyes that we know from the cover of Whitley Strieber’s Communion.  In the children’s narratives and their drawings, the eyes are emphasized again and again.  John Mack, in his 1999 book Passport to the Cosmos, quotes 11-year-old Emma, who seems to have been a particularly close friend of Siddick:  “I saw this person and it had big eyes.  That’s all I saw about it–the big eyes and a black body. … He was just staring at me.  The eyes didn’t have any pupils or color.”

The eyes, apparently, were vehicles of communication.  Emma, says Mack, “felt a mixture of fear and excitement.  ‘His eyes looked at me as if, “Oh, I want you,” like, “I want you to come with me.”‘ ‘Did you go with him,’ I asked.  ‘Only my eyes went with him–and my feeling,’ she replied.”  Through the beings’ eyes, the children received telepathic messages, which seem to have focused on the warning that human technology had gotten out of hand and was destroying the planet.

Strieber’s Communion, which introduced the now-famous alien face, was published in January 1987 and immediately shot up into the best-seller charts.  It became an international best-seller as well, translated into multiple languages.  The Ariel School is some 21 miles from downtown Harare.  Surely some at least of the Harare bookshops would have stocked Communion, and it could easily have appeared on the bookshelves of some of the students’ parents.  Siddick makes the point, in defense of the reality of what she and the other children saw, that awareness of UFOs in pre-internet Zimbabwe was limited.  Perhaps it was.  But surely some of the Ariel children saw that book cover with its eerie, unforgettable face, and afterward projected their memories of it into the forbidden “bush”?  The close resemblance of their drawings to the Communion cover is hard to explain otherwise.

For there is a decisive point against the reality of the UFOs, of the beings associated with them.  Not only did no adults see them, but some of the children also didn’t.  Siddick had been holding her friend Emma’s hand during the shared experience (during which, she says, she lost all sense of time).  She left Emma to go to the half of the playground used by grades 1-4–she was in 6th grade–to comfort her younger siblings, who she assumed must be terrified.  They had no idea what she was talking about.

No one in the younger grades had seen anything unusual.  Even among the older kids, there were many who saw nothing at all.

(Similarly, during the Gill sightings of 1959, 38 of the Papuans were gathered on Friday evening to watch the UFOs.  But only 25 signed their names as witnesses–suggesting that the other 13, despite their best efforts, couldn’t manage to see what the majority saw.  The detail of the entity standing atop the UFO, like a sailor on the deck of a ship, is also suggestive of the Gill incident.)

There is, I think, no question of the reality of Siddick’s experience, and that of many others.  The reality of the things experienced, by contrast, is doubtful to say the least.

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Then where did the experience come from?

Once again, I think of Westall.  In 2017, Australian UFOlogist Paul Dean published the testimony of a teacher who’d been at Westall at the time of the supposed UFO landing and was adamant: it never happened.

“The most interesting development from the whole episode,” the teacher wrote to Paul, “has been the community’s desire to have a common, significant memory. It was a new migrant community and the real story lies in the success which many of these former students have made of their lives.”  A bit further on she repeated the point, in slightly different words.  “My belief is that the real story is the success of a migrant community and their desire for a common history and the reactions to the UFO story is part of that.”

The Ariel story differs from Westall on a crucial point: we can watch the testimony of the Ariel children at a time close to the incident and not just their recalling it many years afterward, which we can’t do with Westall.  But was there something about the Ariel School that would give the UFO experience there, as at Westall (if this teacher is right), a special function?

Watching the Ariel pupils, in the videos taken in 1994, I’m struck by the easy mingling of Black and white children–Siddick is Black, her close friend Emma white.  Remarkable, in a society that until 1979 was openly and explicitly white supremacist, where even afterward “a racial chasm existed in schools, sports and residences” and private schools were established with the purpose of keeping Blacks out.  The Ariel School was founded at the beginning of 1991 by a group of families, apparently with the opposite intent: to integrate the races and cultures of Zimbabwe.  The school was majority Christian–UFO witness Emily Trim, interviewed by Martin Willis in 2019, describes herself as the daughter of Salvation Army missionaries who were among the founders.  But Siddick was Muslim, and she speaks of the school as having Shona students, who interpreted the UFO encounter in line with their ancestral traditions.  More on this presently.

How well the experiment in integration worked is unclear.  Trim remarks that “Zimbabwe was in chaos at that time,” but she also speaks, not quite consistently, of things having started to go south after 1995.  Those Ariel families who could leave the country apparently did.  In 2014, one of the Ariel children of 20 years earlier told a reporter from the Johannesburg Mail & Guardian that she was the only one left in the country.  “‘Everyone’s fucked off to Canada or the UK,’ she said. ‘Or died.’”  To judge from the school’s website, the student body is now exclusively Black.

So I wonder: was the UFO encounter an unconscious effort by the kids–white and Black, Christian and Muslim and Shona–to pull together the school they loved, even as they felt it unraveling?  Did the UFO beings’ prophecies of ecological doom mirror the impending destruction of the harmonious world of that school, which the children could feel coming but had no way to avert?

Here I take my cue from the Gill sighting, where the mandala-shaped UFOs, manifesting in a quaternity that like the mandala is a Jungian archetype of wholeness and the integration of opposites, seem to have functioned as an attempt (which failed) to unify the Australian Father Gill and his Papuan congregants against the centrifugal forces pulling them apart.  As I wrote in a so far unpublished paper:

“On the nights of June 26 and 27, Gill and the Papuans were bound together by a shared experience of the numinous, which they must have constructed together through overt and subtle communication even while it was happening.  In that act of construction was their most profound communion, which all must on some level have longed for.  Gill brought to the joint project his awareness of the Western UFO myth as it was known in 1959, twelve years after ‘flying saucers’ first irrupted into the Western consciousness.  But the Papuans also had their contributions to make, and if I’m not mistaken theirs outweighed his.

“A belief widespread in the Papuan Highlands held the sky to be inhabited by humanlike ghosts or spirits who sometimes take full human form and descend to earth.  This was the land of the cargo cults, religious movements aimed at manipulating the ancestral sky beings into disgorging plentiful ‘cargo’ for their children on earth, as the Japanese and Americans did for their soldiers during World War II.  In 1981, twenty-two years after the shared experience at Boianai, a Papuan university student … told his Australian professor how he had once seen ‘the heavens open and a group of angels in white clothing high in the sky.  I saw it with my own eyes.’

“Yes.  So did William Booth Gill, Stephen Gill Moi, and some two dozen others.  But they saw it not with the eyes but with the mind, using universal unconscious patterns to shape what they’d acquired from their varied cultural heritages and to turn that into divine vision.”

Now apply these words to the Ariel School and the child experiencers.  The Western UFO myth, represented by the Communion-cover alien face, was one ingredient of their shared vision.  But there were other ingredients, part of the native Zimbabwean culture.  The Shona children, according to Siddick, understood the entities they saw as ancestral beings, presumably benevolent.  Others had a more sinister understanding of their appearance.  “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.”

To a time of crisis, through a process whose details it’s now hardly possible to trace but whose results we can observe in the videos of their interviews, the children of Ariel responded with their shared experience of the numinous, unique in the annals of religious vision.  In that act of construction was their most profound communion.

by David Halperin
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