The Ariel School, Zimbabwe UFO sighting - has it ever been debunked?

[JJB]

It's here, in the "about" section:
https://www.metabunk.org/members/todd-feinman.16093/#about

I went back and checked out the three sightings you described, because I wanted to understand what you meant when you said you had corroboration for the first one. I'm not dismissing your experiences, but there's a pretty big difference between finding other reports that sound similar and having independent corroboration of your actual sighting.

People see lights in the sky they can't identify all the time. Distance, perspective, atmospheric conditions, lack of reference points, and the simple difficulty of judging an unfamiliar object in the sky can make ordinary things difficult to identify. So finding other people who also reported unidentified lights doesn't automatically make the reports extraordinary.

The later NUFORC reports you point to are interesting, but one was roughly five months later and about 250 miles away. There's no way to establish that those witnesses saw the same "objects" you did, so calling that corroboration is stretching the term. At most, it shows that other people reported something similar.

And even if we grant all of that, where exactly does ET enter the picture? That's the leap I fail to understand.

 

[Ann K]

If you are trying to understand a phenomenon, it just makes sense (be it a possible unknown natural phenomenon, or some unknown medical condition or disease) too study witness and patient accounts and look for similarities and patterns in the reports

You refer to "a phenomenon" as if all reports were similar, but (for example) your reported event is entirely different from that of @Fin and others. Yes, the term "unexplained" can be used for many of these, but that doesn't mean they were similar in any way or that they referred to "the same phenomenon". The more DIFFERENT things that are reported, the less likely there is to be anything factual to be studied, because they are all single events and cannot possibly all refer to the same physical cause. An incursion into our atmosphere of one extraterrestrial vessel is vastly improbable; the laws of physics show that. To claim that it's happened again and again with different kinds of craft, that is, multiplying an improbability by many, takes it out of the improbable category into the "surely you can't expect anybody to believe THAT!" category.

I said "physical" causes, but such a wide variety of sightings could be produced by gullibility, hoaxes, misconceptions, intoxication, or any of the multiple causes for hallucinations or dreams. The viewer might not recognize what has happened and may honestly believe he is reporting something that actually happened. There are also occasions (some of which have been debunked here) in which strange atmospheric inversions cause things to be "seen" here when they happened far away, things such as advertising spotlights or holiday displays shining on clouds, and (as might be the case in your proximity to the McMinnville UFO celebrations) things displayed that are seen as just part of the party to the attendees but are strange phenomena to those on the outside. Wedding lanterns would also fall in that category, things that it's possible for more than one person to see, but also possible for all the outsiders to misinterpret.

 

[Todd Feinman]

I don't know that UFOs are extraterrestrial vessels coming from somewhere else with bug-eyed aliens in them. What I saw could be some kind of persistent non-human technology, or something else. Fin's sighting has some similarities but also some differences. He saw glowing spheres too, but also saw triangular objects in the sky.
We both have seen wonders a couple of times. We both share a lot of similar approaches to telling people just how strange what we've seen is. Being cautious at first.
He became interested in UFOs right before his sightings began; I had checked out a book that turned out to have a sighting in it that matched what I saw.
Fin's sightings are like other sightings, and he has corroboration for his sightings; so do I.
All of the things we've seen fit into particular categories of anomalous objects that have been reported in the past, and reported in recent times too.

 

[JMartJr]

We seem to be wandering a bit off topic here, friends.

Perhaps a tread about "Members' Sightings of UFOs" should be started, if we want to discuss them? But unless some of us were at teh Ariel School, I'd guess it does not belong here.

 

[Mauro]

But I don't think that is what many sceptics think. It is a characterisation repeated by some UFO enthusiasts, implying that sceptics think claimants are lying.
Most sceptics who have any familiarity with UFO reports probably believe (in fairness I can't quote figures) that the majority are honest misidentifications made by essentially honest, reliable people. A small number may be due to other factors (e.g. the 1979 Dechmont Woods UFO) but nonetheless the claimants are honestly reporting what they experienced or remember.
With Ariel school, I suspect that a number of factors were important, but reported sightings were largely due to social/ behavioral factors in the context of the preceding fireball over southern Africa and the chance classroom discussion about UFOs earlier in the week, and the way teachers reacted to some of the younger children (who are not recorded as seeing anything themselves) being upset after a period of unsupervised play.

You are right, honest misidentifications are the most likely explanation. However, in my understanding the term 'confabulations' includes this kind of happenstance (of course, they're not at the level of pyschiatric confabulations, 'normal confabulations'?), when one convinces himself.

 

[John J.]

...honest misidentifications are the most likely explanation. However, in my understanding the term 'confabulations' includes this kind of happenstance

I think there's a difference between a misidentification, which might include accurate descriptions of what was perceived, and a confabulation (when that term is applied to a recalled account of something). "Confabulation" is also sometimes used to mean chit-chat or conversation generally, but I don't think we use it in that way when discussing confabulation in the context of UFO sightings.