There are unfortunately
several mentions by Jesse and Grusch of the Ariel school (1994) encounter. Ariel is something of a benchmark for me when I consider "grades" of believers, because it's a complicated psychological case. Believing that the cute earnest children are accurately reporting what they perceived (because kids don't lie and they know what they saw - this being the only "evidence" we have really) is bottom-of-the-barrel analysis. So it's disappointing, to say the least, that Grusch and the other guys believe it and keep using it in their examples.
Here are the mentions:
[30:35]
the nuclear UFO connection is deeper and more bizarre than you can ever imagine
Jesse is about to make a tortuous connection between a tiny Japanese town obsessed with UFOs, a reactor meltdown caused by an earthquake, and Ariel...
Remember that Vice story that ran in 2022 about a town in Japan that's obsessed with UFOs well it's a place called Iino and it's right next to Fukushima where a 2011 earthquake triggered a famous nuclear power meltdown [Jesse]
[30:42]
Iino is indeed right next to Fukushima (9km) but the reactor that melted down is 53km away (as the crow/radiation flies).
The meltdown was caused by a natural disaster in 2011. Iino has been having UFO sightings since the 1970s:
Stories of alien sightings and landings of mysterious aircraft have emerged from Iino as far back as the 1970s.
Source:
Vice, 2022
I'm failing to see what connection he's trying to make. The UFOs caused an earthquake to make the reactor melt down? Are all earthquakes caused by UFOs? How mean is that.
Then he links all this to Ariel as there is supposedly a uranium mine near the school. Not a reactor or even a melted down reactor, but an unspecified unlocated "as far as I understand" mine:
[30:59]
Jesse: Or take this incident in 1994. 62 elementary school kids at the Ariel International School in Zimbabwe said that they saw a silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school. Well, guess where the Ariel school was?
Other guy: And you know in Ariel school, that was near a uranium mining site.
Grusch: That is right, as far as I understand.
By the way, zero witnesses at Ariel described a craft descending from the sky and landing. They did report men running around outside the craft, which I suppose now has something to do with a "nuclear UFO connection".
Another reference to Ariel:
[1:16:57]
Jesse: I think that the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis is actually more far-fetched - I think the idea that another species would evolutionarily converge to be bipedal, to have kind of the symmetric bilateral symmetry -
Grusch: Yeah cuz if we look at like the Ariel School event, if we believe the hundred school children that saw bipedal hominid looking kind of NHI, that seems pretty rare to have the same development where they're gonna - it's either extraterrestrial and we're seeing bioengineered beings... that they were engineered specifically to look like that.
He picks Ariel school to illustrate the typical alien grey. There are so many other cases he could've picked (including a generalized pop culture alien grey) that are more vague and therefore more "believable", but since he believes in Ariel it works for him.
Jesse continues with the
less far-fetched theory - that aliens are future humans:
I like this sort of you know beings from the future hypothesis, for a few reasons. So there's actually a concept in evolutionary biology called neoteny where your distant offspring looks like your kids currently... the beings are sort of childlike in nature.
Grusch's use of "NHI" in interviews, in preference to alien/ET, is presumably because he likes the future human idea (he's nodding along here) - but aren't future humans by definition
not NHI?
Neoteny aside, I can make an argument that alien greys are more like elderly frail lanky bald humans than chubby rosy-cheeked hyperactive emotionally immature children. I think it's a less creepy argument given they are obsessed with breeding with us.
Ariel is again mentioned when the guys get spiritual. One of them was moved by something witness Lisel told John Mack:
[1:48:38]
...he's trying to understand how the telepathy was working and then she goes out of nowhere. "I think in space there is no love but down here there is."
which prompts Grusch to talk about NDEs and Dr Eben Alexander's "scientific outlook" on the subject.
That was like this like overarching like loving energy, something when he ascended to this - sounded like dimensional plane, if you will... he miraculously came back and he was totally fine, but all this knowledge and all this stuff he experienced.
We are in full-on woo mode now. It's a clue to Grusch's worldview, in the sense of what he accepts as evidence when he can speculate so freely about evidence-free subjects. It makes me wonder how his worldview affected his analysis of the information people were bringing him about reverse-engineering SAPs, which it would seem requires 100% rationality and 0% religion. Anyway, Jesse links it to Ariel for all the wrong reasons:
That's a super common thing in alien abduction experiences, whether it's the Ariel School or Commander George Hoover of the Navy actually talked about this. Aliens often come down and they say, "You don't know how powerful you are, you don't know how how amazing and powerful you are."
Well, there was no alien abduction at Ariel, and of the three kids John Mack extracted telepathic messages from, none were "You don't know how powerful you are". The messages were exactly what you'd expect to get from schoolkids in the 90s: Stop polluting the Earth.
Finally Grusch uses Ariel as an example of how the phenomenon is global [1:35:56], when he cites that case along with "Russia". If he or the show's editor are geographically challenged he may be referring to the Ukrainian UFO earlier this year, since the photo flashed on screen, a circle of lights in the sky, is the same one used to illustrate three news articles on that incident (do a Google Images search to find them.) The picture is of a building in Liverpool UK [h/t Gideon Reid].
Oh well, can't win 'em all.
