Alien Encounter on the Playground!
Some Great Documentaries on Real Life Aliens and UFO's!
Ariel Phenomenon
Director: Randall Nickerson
Format: Documentary
Where to watch: Rent or Buy at Website
If anyone asks me to recommend one alien encounter case, the Ariel School encounter in Zimbabwe always ranks at the top of my list. For years, all you could find on the case were low-quality internet clips from old news shows. After over ten years in the making, a definitive documentary finally arrived this year, and it is stunning.
Background: On September 16, 1994 around 60 children ranging in ages from six to twelve witnessed a silver craft land in a nearby field during their recess. Two beings emerged from the craft who had brief, wordless interactions with the children before the craft apparently left and disappeared. The frightened children ran screaming back to the school where the adult teachers had been in a meeting and recounted what they had seen.
Anyone’s first reaction to what I just wrote would obviously be the kids were playing a prank, but the case drew the attention of news reporters and researchers partly because others in the area had been reporting strange sightings around that time. Because of this, there is a wealth of interviews with the children along with the pictures they drew of the encounter.
The documentary follows a few of the children in present day who are now adults living in different parts of the world. They return to the school to recount their memories and talk about the life-long effects the event had on them and their classmates. The film intercuts the adult stories with the original 1994 interviews with the children about their experience. Seeing the faces of the children describing what they saw alongside shots of the same people describing the events as adults is nothing less than chilling.
The case also drew the attention of renowned Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. John Mack, who had become interested in alien abduction cases at the time. When he got word of the incident, he visited the school within a matter of days to interview the children. The videos of these fascinating interviews are in this documentary.
The most bizarre and terrifying part of the whole story is how the children describe the beings themselves. Strange black eyes and alien bodies aside, the children describe the movements of the beings in ways that sound almost like they were out of phase with our reality—sort of moving in slow motion. Some children also described being sent telepathic messages as one of the beings gazed at them.
However, explaining the mystery of what these people saw is only half of the story. What makes this documentary truly special is showing the real world effects of how this kind of experience affects someone over a lifetime. The emotional and psychological trauma shown reveals the witnesses’ struggles don’t stop at grappling with unanswered questions about what they saw. There is also the long, difficult road of how to associate with a world of people who never saw something so strange. Not to mention the consequences simply studying and reporting on the case had on the careers of Mack and one of the BBC reporters.
If this sounds like the alien encounter documentary you’ve been searching for, I guarantee you will not be disappointed. But be warned: it comes at a high cost. When I watched, this video was only available to rent for $20 on Amazon, but now a week later, it is only available to rent on the film’s website for $15 or buy for $24! (Had a I known I would have waited and just bought it.)
The reason for the high cost is because it was a crowdfunded passion project made mostly by one filmmaker, Randall Nickerson, who spent millions on the production for travels to Africa and other places around the world to track down these witnesses. He is still in a huge debt-hole after making the film. If you want to learn more about the filmmaker and the behind the scenes, Ryan Sprague has a great interview with him here on his podcast, Somewhere in the Skies.
Moment of Contact
Director: James Fox
Format: Documentary
Where to watch: Rent on Amazon Prime
If you study UFO lore at all, you probably already know that Brazil is a hotbed of amazing encounter stories. The 1996 Varginha, Brazil case takes the cake, however. This story has it all: crashed UFOs, alien encounters, government cover-ups, alien autopsies, and (wouldn’t you know?) even the men in black show up!
Sound ridiculous? Absolutely. To hear someone tell it sounds like the wishful-thinking brainstorm of a UFO fanatic. But to hear it from the witness’ mouths—particularly the ones unwilling to show their faces on camera out of fear—the story takes on a new feeling of reality.
This documentary lacks some of the charm of the Ariel Phenomenon because the filmmaker chooses to put himself at the center of the film rather than the experiencers. However, the accounts of the witnesses in their own words are pretty incredible.
The story starts with a witness who saw the actual crash site before the military arrived. He describes touching a piece of the craft that had very similar properties to those described in the Roswell, New Mexico crash in 1947. While I want to believe this guy’s part of the story, it is easy to have doubts since there were no other witnesses present to verify.
Similar to Roswell, once the military takes control of the situation, the occupants of the downed craft are taken to the nearest local hospital for examination. However, the story takes a decidedly different turn from Roswell when these aliens allegedly went full E.T. and managed to escape into the neighborhood!
The first witnesses to this escape were three little girls who saw one of the frightened creatures cowering by a wall. According to them it seemed as terrified of them as they were of it. They immediately ran home screaming to their mother about what happened—apparently forgetting to leave a trail of Reese’s Pieces so the alien could follow them home.
Probably for the best that they didn’t, though, as a military officer who tried to grab one of oily black creatures with his bare hands found out. The creature apparently stunk of sulfur and ammonia, and the officer came down with an unexplainable sickness that soon took his life. It is unclear if anyone else became sick as most related to the case were sworn to secrecy and some disappeared.
I don’t want to give all the exciting details away because this one is chocked full of them. Like the children in the Ariel Phenomenon, there is something hard to deny in the eyes and voices of first-hand witnesses telling their story.
As always, though, I recommend considering all of these stories carefully as to their validity. I researched one of the cases the filmmakers reference, the Trindade Island UFO, for my satirical instagram account, Flying Saucers Are Swell. Based on what I researched, I believe those photos are a flat out hoax. Still, I have seen this documentary and another book by Leslie Kean reference that case leading viewers to believe it is an example of verifiable evidence. The photo evidence is not, although there were reports from other sources claiming to have seen strange objects in the sky at that time.
Unsolved Mysteries: Something In the Sky
Format: Television Show
Where to watch: Netflix
If you don’t want to rent or buy a documentary, but you have a Netflix subscription, you can find another compelling 1994 UFO case on the newest season of Unsolved Mysteries. (What was going on in 1994?)
The episode is called Something in the Sky, and this case is a little closer to home for me as it took place over Lake Michigan. The event had over 300 witness testimonies of strange lights in the sky on the evening of March 8, 1994. What really makes this case special, however, is that many of these witness sightings were able to be triangulated with evidence from an on duty radar operator at a local weather station.
Over the course of several hours, the objects display odd but intelligent movements creating triangle formations, following the path of a radar, and at one point drawing up water from Lake Michigan like a reverse waterfall.
Similar to the Ariel School documentary, this episode has a downside showing how it upended the life of the innocent radar operator whose conversations with emergency responders were recorded and published afterward.
If you like this episode, the new Unsolved Mysteries has some other great paranormal cases to watch including one about Navajo rangers who spent their career investigating various reports on the reservation including bigfoots, UFOs, skinwalkers, and even a strange poltergeist case involving coins. Watch if you dare!
Sterling Martin is an artist and designer living in Chicago, IL. His background includes drawing, writing, theatre, teaching, improv & sketch comedy, and whatever else he can get his hands on to be creative. You can find him on the internet at:
Instagram: @sterfest.art
Website: sterlingmartin.design
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