the fact that all the kids report pretty much the same thing
But they don't report the same thing; even the 15 reports (out of supposedly, 62) selected by Cynthia Hind and, later, John Mack, are massively divergent. Most of the children in the same playground saw nothing unusual at all.
A fellow Metabunker has made a table, elsewhere, of the numbers of children who reported specific things in the Ariel Primary School event; I won't cite it without permission but suffice to say
very few children gave even broad descriptions in common with each other.
Local UFO investigator Cynthia Hind documented some of the children's reports,
I've attached PDFs of the relevant 2 issues of Hind's newsletter/ magazine, UFO Afrinews, below.
External Quote:
A fascinating array of drawings appeared and there were many differences in the craft.
-Cynthia Hind,
UFO Afrinews 11, Feb. 1995
Of those who claimed to see something land, some reported one UFO, some say there were 2 or 3 others. It was golden in colour, or silver, or it was striped black and green, or black, green and silver. It landed- then vanished. Or an occupant, or several occupants, got out; later the craft ascended a short way before vanishing- or else it flew down into a valley beyond the school grounds.
One girl said there were 3 visitors, one dressed in red, one in white, one in black. Most of the (few) children who described UFO occupants said they (or it) wore black, shiny clothes. Several refer to large, sometimes ovoid eyes. One said the eyes were low on the face.
The occupant was "...thin and skinny", "...it was quite plump". It wore a headband, some children said it had long black hair,
"...almost like a hippy's hair".
A child thought it was the gardener- before seeing the long straight hair, not like a local African man's hair.
Note, whatever the figure he saw was wearing, or its facial features/ stature,
or the immediate presence of a landed craft,
the boy realised the visitor wasn't the gardener
because of its long straight hair!
Another child thought the figure was an alien,
then thought it was the gardener.
(Quotes/ descriptions from Cynthia Hind's
UFO Afrinews issues 11 and 12, link to PDFs as above).
The children's drawings do not seem to corelate with their descriptions.
"When the kids returned to class they were completely freaked and couldn't stop nattering about little men who looked a bit like Michael Jackson."
-Sarah (pseudonym), who as a child had been one of the witnesses, talking to Sean Christie,
"Remembering Zimbabwe's great alien invasion",
Mail & Guardian (South Africa) 04 September 2014
https://web.archive.org/web/2021091...4-remembering-zimbabwes-great-alien-invasion/.
(I think I read witness Guy N. also compared the occupant to Michael Jackson, but I could be mistaken).
Cynthia Hind, in
UFO Afrinews 11:
External Quote:
Where the drawings were most consistent were in the descriptions of the small entity the children had seen emerge from the craft.
He was approximately one metre tall, dressed in a shiny one-piece black suit similar to a wet suit. He had long black hair and a large head. One girl interviewed by the SATV, said he had arms and legs like a human being, but his head was larger than a normal head. Also he had these big, black, slanting eyes.
But Hind's description is like a portmanteau or montage; it combines elements from different accounts.
None of the drawings by Ariel schoolchildren show a figure with the features that Hind describes. Some of the drawings show apparently bald or short-haired aliens, some show very long hair. Some have large, ovoid eyes, some don't, one drawing (as we've seen) has no facial features. Same with the descriptions; long dark hair is described by some, so why did others draw (but not
describe) bald aliens?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Just a couple of examples of Giddierone's trope used on-screen,
the 1949 film
Follow Me Quietly had a detective make a faceless figure for police line-ups/ identity parades because witnesses hadn't been able to see the villain's face- not paranormal or alien, but definitely odd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Follow_Me_Quietly
I've not seen the film, but the Wiki article makes me wonder if the film's villain, and maybe the faceless mannequin, served as an inspiration for the character Rorschach in the 1986 comic book/ graphic novel/ 2009 film
Watchmen.
The 1980's UK ITV series
Sapphire and Steel,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapphire_&_Steel, starring David McCallum (recently passed away) and Joanna Lumley had this spectral figure in the second series, 1981 (second series but 4th multi-episode storyline):
-I thought Sapphire and Steel was genuinely spooky, but the show's opening credits, where a voiceover implied that the "operators" (e.g. Sapphire and Steel) were named after elements, undermined the suspension of disbelief for me; I was old enough to realise sapphire, and steel, aren't elements.
A letter in
Fortean Times was printed in response to an earlier article or letter in that magazine about encounters with "faceless" individuals (in the last 2 or 3 years I think; I tried a search which returned other "FT" items about faceless entities but not the relevant letter).
The writer stated that men who had sustained disfiguring facial injuries in wartime (WW1/ WW2) sometimes wore veils or masks of fine muslin to hide their appearance, which could give them a disconcertingly "faceless" aspect in some viewing conditions. I couldn't find any supporting evidence for this, but it seems plausible to me.
It was common for British men to routinely wear hats until at least the early 60s, some older men persisted for much longer; combined with a veil a disfigured man's face might have been hard to see.
In Britain the New Zealand surgeon Archibald McIndoe revolutionised plastic surgery for servicemen with facial injuries in World War Two, and stressed the importance of accepting these men in wider society:
External Quote:
Local families were encouraged to welcome them as guests, and other residents to treat them without distinction: East Grinstead became "the town that didn't stare".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_Pig_Club
(Several hundred of McIndoe's patients formed the "Guinea Pig Club", darkly named after those animals used in experiments).
Not all men with such injuries would have had the luck to be treated by McIndoe, and many would have been left with significant disfigurement regardless. In
Facing fire: burns and visibility in the two World Wars, 2016, Gemma Bowsher comments on how men who sustained face injuries in the First World War were treated very differently to the injured of World War Two, their injuries seen as stigmatising, the men cutting ties to family/ loved ones
https://hekint.org/2017/01/22/facing-fire-burns-and-visibility-in-the-two-world-wars/, Hektoen International, "A Journal of Medical Humanities".
There must have been many such unfortunates, some surviving several decades, leading perhaps a
literal twilight existence- going out when there were less people about, maybe shopping at a small number of local shops where they were known.
Some (this is speculation) may have worked for Remploy, an organisation that up until c. 2012 ran businesses employing disabled people and some others with "barriers to employment". It's broadly accepted that this provided useful opportunities to many disabled people, but with the unintended side-effect of keeping some of them "out of sight" of wider society.
Other nations must have had (and have) people with severe facial disfigurement, some perhaps feeling compelled to hide their faces to "spare the feelings" of others.
