Does “Encounters” Confirm the Ariel School Event was a Hoax?
A new witness testimony casts doubt on the famous encounter
Episode two of Encounters covers the Ariel School encounter which was an event when 62 school children witnessed a UFO land near their recess area. Not only did they see the craft, but many of the children had direct contact with two strange beings. After the event, the children drew pictures and described what they saw with very similar accounts across the board.
While I still feel that the Ariel Phenomenon documentary should still be anyone’s first stop to understanding that encounter, this episode revealed great new interviews and perspectives not in that documentary. Most notably, one man revealed himself as one of the children at the school that day and claims it was all a hoax concocted by himself and a friend.
The man, Dallyn Vice, gave an interesting perspective that I had never heard in my previous research. While everyone is entitled to interpret their experiences with their own biases, this lone outlier’s point of view seems strangely out of place among the other 60 witnesses. I would be interested to learn more about his background to perhaps shed some light on why it was important to him to come out now.
After a series of talk show appearances and news reports in the 1990’s, the Ariel encounter story was dormant for many years except among serious followers of ufology. A search on the internet for a long time would only turn up very short clips of interviews with the children that were often poor quality. The Ariel story finally got the attention it deserved for a new generation in 2021 when Randall Nickerson’s independent documentary—over ten years in the making—was released.
What I found interesting about Dallyn’s new version of the story is that it reveals yet another facet of the long term experience (almost 30 years later) this phenomenon has psychologically.
Did he really see nothing and fool the children as he claims? Was he finally fed up with all the media attention, and he wanted his truth to be known?
Or, was he so terrified by the experience at the time that he mentally blocked it? Did he create his own story to protect his sanity? Did someone else—a parent or teacher perhaps—create it for him?
Or, perhaps, with the story suddenly getting so much more attention, was he approached by someone else to “muddy the waters” with a new perspective?
Obviously, this is how conspiracy theories get started, and I don’t have an answer to such speculations. It does highlight one of the key challenges of seeking truth about a phenomenon that reveals itself so briefly to so few. To paraphrase a remark made by the renowned J. Allen Hynek: researchers like him are less in the business of studying the science of these objects and more in the business of studying stories.
Despite having the accounts of 60+ school children describing a similar encounter, their experience will always be filtered to the rest of us through our own judgements of character, personal experience, belief, opinions, and all the rest of the things we examine when taking one person’s testimony to heart.
What organizations trying to debunk or misinform the public about these encounters have known for years is simple: it only takes one person telling a different story to throw into question every other testimony told in good faith. Without facts, we are reliant on the look in a person’s eyes, the consistency of their telling, the background of the character, and, perhaps most importantly, their underlying motivations—which are often the most difficult to perceive. (For more on this topic, I highly recommend you watch the 2014 documentary, Mirage Men.)
A similar situation of muddying the waters is presented in the Broad Haven episode on Encounters where multiple people described encountering seven or eight foot tall beings in silver suits. To hear their first hand descriptions, it is hard not to believe their testimony until a man comes forward years later (similar to above) and claims he was wandering around Broad Haven in a fire retardant suit scaring locals on the alert for aliens.
Some part of me senses that in this new era of covering these topics on larger platforms, there is a requirement at the studio level to provide some level of insurance to protect investors in case of public ridicule. If that is true, documentary filmmakers could be required by contract to seek out alternate perspectives of the events—even if they may actually be less credible than the accounts of phenomena experiencers. This type of equal bias (common in American news media) is especially apparent in the J.J. Abrams series that was on Showtime, UFO.
However, after years of such hoaxers and debunkers corralling these stories into the sector of wild nonsense and spooky entertainment, the changes happening in recent documentaries and, more importantly, in our government could turn out to be a true watershed moment in our history.
Scientists at NASA are publicly acknowledging programs to gather and research data on the phenomenon. Government whistleblowers are speaking out to congress about long kept secrets at the Pentagon. Major news networks have presented UFO stories sans X-Files theme music.
Something is changing. Will we get answers?
Perhaps. But, if I had to guess, any answers we may get will only hatch more mysteries to confound us.
UPDATE!
Since I wrote the section above about the man claiming the Ariel encounter was a hoax, Randall Nickerson (director of Ariel Phenomenon), recently posted this video to the Ariel Phenomenon Instagram account. In 2008, Randall did an interview with the same man, Dallyn Vice, from which he shares footage here:
It is interesting in this interview that Dallyn’s story is very different from what he tells in the Netflix documentary. In this version of events, he claims he was further away from the other children on the playground, and he did not see the craft or the beings first hand. However, there is no mention of him hoaxing anyone.
Based on this new information, it is easy to speculate that someone may have convinced Dallyn to change his story—whether to muddy the truth or to protect his reputation for the sake of family, work, or some other entity. However, there may be a more interesting psychological possibility if this version of Dallyn’s experience is closer to reality.
If indeed he was off elsewhere when a craft landed and sixty of his schoolmates witnessed one of the most significant contact events in modern history, there may have been mere yards of difference between him being a first-hand and second-hand witness. Despite claiming to have witnessed other anomalies himself, there may be a much more human explanation to the shifting story.
Could he just be jealous?
Only Dallyn Vice will ever know his full truth.
Sterling Martin is a writer, 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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