September 16, 1994, started like any other day for the students at Ariel School, some 20 miles outside the Zimbabwean capital of Harare. It was a hot Friday morning – over 90 degrees Fahrenheit at 10:00 am – and the students, aged 5-12, were eager to get outside for their mid-morning break.
It would be unlike any break they’d ever taken.
Out in the schoolyard, a sound suddenly pierced the air, like a high-pitched flute. The students turned their eyes skyward looking for the source of the sound, and what they saw stunned them. There, in the sky above, were five mysterious disc-like crafts, glowing red. The students watched in wonder as the crafts disappeared and reappeared in flashes of light.
Without warning, one of the five broke off from the rest and began to descend, touching down a few hundred feet away on a hill just beyond the boundaries of the schoolyard. Though the students were not permitted to enter this area of thorny bushes and tall grass, their curiosity got the better of them and they rushed towards it.
Suddenly, a small humanoid figure emerged from inside the craft. It appeared to be only about three feet tall, with a pale, oblong face, and huge eyes – “like rugby balls,” one student would say. It was wearing a tight-fitting, shiny black suit, and, to the shock of the students, it began to move towards them. As it did, a second creature appeared on top of the craft, gazing down.
Some of the students panicked and ran off screaming. Others stood spellbound, watching the creatures as the creatures watched them. The kids that remained at the sight staring at the beings suddenly started to feel as if the beings were communicating with them telepathically.
Several students saw visions of a global environmental catastrophe, while others saw Earth after all trees had been cleared and there was no breathable air left. It was as if the beings were trying to warn the children of the future of the planet if humanity continues their devastating policies towards the environment. Some students saw polluted oceans, while others received direct warnings of the use of our technologies, and that we shouldn’t develop our technologies too much as they may cause our extinction.
Inside the school, teachers and administrative staff in the midst of their mid-morning meeting rolled their eyes. They heard the screams of the children but assumed that it was nothing more than the shrieking of some sort of silly game. They paid no attention to the commotion.
The only adult on campus not in the meeting was the mother of one of the students, who was volunteering at the school’s snack shop. When hysterical students approached her shouting about flying objects and little men, she assumed they were playing a prank on her in an attempt to gain access to her cache of snacks, so she brushed them off.
Within 15 minutes, the creatures had returned inside the craft, and it had gone speeding off into the sky.
Once back in the school, their recess over, the students breathlessly told their teachers what had happened, what they had seen. But the teachers did not believe them, instead telling them to stop talking and get back to work. At the end of the day, the students were sent home for the weekend as if nothing had happened, the teachers hoping that by Monday, the entire incident would simply blow over.
It did not blow over.
Cynthia Hind – UFO Researcher
By Monday morning, the school was inundated by calls from concerned parents asking what had happened to their children. Some kids were traumatized by the experience, some even required the assistance of paramedics once they got home, while others did not return to the school for many days.
But these were not the only calls the school had received. There, amidst the soliloquies of anxious parents, was a call from one Cynthia Hind.
Hind was known as “Africa’s famous UFO researcher,” and, in the days before the incident at Ariel School, she had already been on the trail of something big. Earlier in the week, thousands of people across Zimbabwe and neighboring South Africa, Botswana, and Zaire had reported seeing bright flashing lights and unusual objects in the sky, like a “pyrotechnic display” of unprecedented proportions. Local astronomers had claimed it was nothing more than a meteor shower, but Hind was not so sure.
Many had reported distinctly seeing a “capsule-like fireball” trailing fire through the sky. Some went further, like one woman, who told local newspapers:
“As I was sitting on the lawn at around 7 pm I saw a round figure with plenty of lights hovering above our home. The object was definitely not an airplane since it was too round to be one.”
Another local man described an encounter with a similar craft:
“It had the shape of a disc and was brightly colored. It might have been a spaceship or satellite transmission equipment. I do not know what that thing was.”
As Hind had discovered, there were also accounts from the air traffic controller at Harare Airport, of inexplicable activity on the radar at that time, and one of the area’s pilots, who reported seeing “a strange craft flying at 25,000 feet from horizon to horizon in less than four seconds.”
And then there was the account of a local trucker who had been out driving the roads that night. He reported passing two strange beings on the road in the middle of nowhere, who had, according to the trucker, pale, oblong heads, but with huge eyes. They wore tight-fitting, shiny black suits.
All of these things were noted and carefully recorded by Hind before news came across her desk about an incident at Ariel School.
Thinking quickly, Hind contacted the school’s headmaster, Colin Mackie, and asked if he could get the students to draw pictures of what they’d seen when they came to school on Monday morning. Then, she made plans to visit the school herself on Tuesday.
Before she did, Hind received a call from Tim Leach, a BBC journalist and senior correspondent in Zimbabwe. Could he come along with her and talk to the kids, he asked? She agreed, and the two of them set out early Tuesday morning.
At the school, Hind and Leach slowly interviewed the children. They were an eclectic group, composed of a variety of cultural backgrounds – children from several African tribes, as well as white and Asian. And yet, despite their differences, they all told the same incredible story – the disc-like crafts, the strange beings, the high-pitched flute sound.
Most incredible were the drawings the students had made. Though they’d been kept apart to prevent them from copying each other, all 35 children who partook in the exercise had drawn almost exactly the same thing – what appeared to be a UFO and an alien being.
This was especially stunning to Hind, since these children in rural Africa would not likely have been aware of pop-culture concepts of flying saucers and aliens. How could they have drawn these things when they didn’t even know what they were … unless they’d seen them in the schoolyard that day?
Could this really be possible?
Tim Leach found the whole experience deeply unsettling, to the point where, despite his years of experience as a war correspondent in a violent country, he professed that the Ariel School incident was the thing which frightened him most in his career. According to Leach, the accounts of the students gave him a “new perspective on life, the universe, and everything.”
What Hind and Leach had discovered at that school was so remarkable, so perplexing, that they had no choice but to call John Mack.
John Mack’s Involvement
John Edward Mack came from a long line of distinguished academics. His great grandfather was a scientist who pioneered the use of anesthetics in eye surgery, and his great uncle, one of the first Jewish professors at Harvard Medical School. Growing up, Mack’s father had been a noted literary biographer and scholar at the prestigious City College in New York, while his stepmother was an eminent feminist economist.
Coming from this type of stock, it is perhaps no surprise that John Mack was something of a prodigy.
After serving in the US Air Force, he graduated cum laude from Harvard Medical School and immediately went to work for the institution. He would become a tenured professor, and then, the Head of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
His specialty? Child psychiatry.
While he was only a resident, he founded the first psychiatric department at the Harvard-affiliated Cambridge Hospital. In 1970, his first book, Nightmares and Human Conflict, which explored childhood nightmares, earned him an award for his study on the subject. His second book, a psychoanalytic biography of Lawrence of Arabia, titled A Prince of Our Own Disorder, earned him the Pulitzer Prize in 1977. In 1983, he founded the Center for Psychology and Social Change at Harvard, which is now known as the Mack Center.
But he didn’t stop there.
In addition to all of his other work, by the mid-1980s, Mack had become a leading figure in the nuclear disarmament movement, travelling around the Middle East giving speeches on the topic, interviewing Presidents, and even, unbelievably, winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for his work as part of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
Not yet 50 years old, Mack was the head of department at Harvard, and had won just about every award there was for him to win.
Then, in 1990, came a meeting that would fundamentally alter the course of Mack’s life. It was, in his words, “one of those dates you remember that mark a time when everything in your life changes.”
Through mutual friends, he was introduced to Budd Hopkins, the New York abstract expressionist artist whose work is permanently featured in the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim. But Hopkins was not just an artist, he was also an author. In the 1980s, he’d written two books on the subject of alien abduction.
When the two met, Hopkins gave Mack a box of letters written by people who had allegedly experienced alien encounters – called “experiencers.”
“I think most of these people are perfectly sane, with real experiences,” he told Mack.
But he wanted an expert psychiatrist’s opinion.
“Nothing in my nearly 40 years of familiarity with psychiatry prepared me,” Mack would say of the letters. As he began to read through them, he noticed many things he simply could not explain. This led him to assert:
“I would never say, yes, there are aliens taking people. I would say there is a compelling powerful phenomenon here that I can’t account for in any other way, that’s mysterious … I can’t know what it is, but it seems to me that it invites a deeper, further inquiry.”
Mack took it upon himself to provide this ‘further inquiry,’ and he began conducting research with experiencers. As he did, he noted astonishing consistencies between the stories told by experiencers from all over the world. How, Mack wondered, were these people from different cultures and locations around the globe telling, in effect, the same story, down to the minute details?
Even more shocking was the response he would get if he showed a drawing done by an experiencer depicting their alien encounter to another experiencer. As he described,
“There are individuals who literally shake with fear confronting the memories of how they were paralyzed or upon seeing again the little aliens with the big black eyes. Their bodies shake, and they scream literally with terror.”
To this, Mack concluded,
“That response struck me as something that could only occur if something real, and not imaginary, had happened to them. Dreams do not work like that. People do not respond to another’s dreams that way.”
His research had brought him to a stunning conclusion – the people who claimed to have experienced alien encounters were not insane or deluded … something real had happened to them.
“If what these abductees are saying is happening to them isn’t happening, what is?”
Mack pondered.
In 1994, his search for answers to this question led Mack to write a book – Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. The book quickly became a best seller, perhaps no surprise, since it was one of the world’s leading academics, and a Harvard professor no less, saying that alien abductions might be real.
In fact, the book made Mack something of a celebrity. Articles were written about him in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and Time Magazine. He even appeared on Oprah, where he challenged her skeptical audience with the following statement:
“Every other culture in history except this one, in the history of the human race, has believed there were other entities, other intelligences in the universe. Why are we so goofy about this? Why do we treat people like they’re crazy, humiliate them, if they’re experiencing some other intelligence?”
Despite his popularity, or maybe because of it, there was at least one entity vigorously opposed to Mack’s work – Harvard University. For the first time in its long and storied history, Harvard formed a committee to investigate, and attempt to expel, a tenured professor, demanding that Mack recant his work or be fired.
The investigation quickly divided the academic community. Some of Mack’s colleagues publicly disavowed him, including Paul McHugh, a psychiatrist at John Hopkins Medical School, who told the LA Times that Mack had “lost it big time.” Others, however, likened the investigation to a “witch hunt,” since Harvard was unable to accuse Mack of any ethical violation or professional misconduct.
Mack in Zimbabwe
Just as the investigation was ramping up, John Mack received a dramatic call from halfway around the world. It was Tim Leach, the BBC’s chief correspondent in Zimbabwe. He spoke of an unbelievable happening at a small rural school outside Harare. Mack might be the only one, Leach believed, who could make sense of it all. Could he come to Zimbabwe to check it out?
In the midst of a professional scandal which threatened his career, Mack may have chosen to keep a low profile. But he couldn’t resist; he hopped on a plane.
When John Mack walked into Ariel School in Zimbabwe, he walked into something of a calamity – panic-stricken kids and adults who could not make sense of the situation they were in. Drawing upon his years of experience as perhaps the world’s premier expert on child psychology, Mack quickly took control of the situation.
For two days, he conducted interviews with the students, using every technique he knew to put the children at ease and earn their trust, allowing them to articulate their experiences accurately, and without being led.
And articulate, they did.
The children told Mack of aliens and flying objects, of the sights and the sounds and the feelings they’d experienced that day. Some of the children even said the beings had communicated with them telepathically. Most shocking of all was the message they claimed to have received during this telepathic communication. As one student put it:
“What I thought was they were telling us the world is going to end, because we don’t look after the planet properly. I just felt all horrible inside. All the trees will just go down and there will be no air and people will be dying,”
This, Mack made a note of. He had observed many times in his work the appearance of these types of environmental prophecies. “In case after case,” he wrote, “powerful messages about the human threat to the Earth’s ecology were being conveyed to the experiencers in vivid, unmistakable words and images.”
What could this mean, Mack wondered? What “powerful messages” were human beings missing?
After two grueling days of interviews, Mack had a decision to make. Back home, he was on trial for his research into aliens. It would have been so easy for him to simply proclaim that the children’s stories were fake, as a sort of public denouncement of his views for all at Harvard to see.
Yet, Mack had sat with the children, listened to their accounts, he had observed with his well-trained eye their body language, emotion, sense of conviction, their consistency. “They describe these experiences like a person talks about something that has happened to them,” he concluded. “When you’re talking with someone who’s telling you a delusion, I can tell. There’s nothing like that here.”
According to Mack, the children were telling the truth.
Randall Nickerson’s Documentary
It is interesting to note that Mack’s initial conclusions were strengthened years later, when a filmmaker by the name of Randall Nickerson stumbled across the story of the Ariel School incident and decided to make documentary about it in 2008. In doing so, Nickerson tracked down the students who had been present that day, by then adults spread all across the world.
If what they said they’d experienced at the time had in fact been their imaginations, or some sort of hoax, then surely, they would recant their stories as adults. They would have grown out of the lie, so to speak.
Except, what Nickerson found was exactly the opposite; their stories had not changed, and, in fact, they described in vivid detail how the event had impacted their lives ever since.
“It was that face, that craft. It will never go out of my mind,” one woman proclaimed.
“It was very immense, very intense, and clearly has changed my life,” asserted another.
Nickerson concluded that “there’s no question that something very unusual happened at that school.”
The effect on the kids’ encounters with the extraterrestrial beings was so profound, that even today, as adults, they continue to remember this experience, and state that it affected their life choices when becoming adults.
For example, one of the kids – Salma Siddick, persued degrees in International Relations and Human Rights Law, and works in finding different ways to talk about social injustices.
Another one – Lisil Field became a social support worker, stating that after the incident, she felt a strong sense of duty to give back and help humanity.
Both Salma Siddick and Lisil Fields appear in different conferences about extraterrestrials and continue to tell their story and what they say at that school in 1994.
Most interesting is the experience of Emily Trim. The extraterrestrial encounter in Areal School have had such a profound effect on her life that she became an artist, drawing and painting images of the beings she saw. She even says that she continues to receive telepathic signals and images from these beings, often times in the forms of symbols which she also depicts in her art.
John Mack’s Suppression
Of course, this did not help John Mack in 1994, as he was fighting for his academic life.
And fight he did.
He hired the same high-powered legal team which had exposed none other than the United States government and President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra drugs-for-guns scandal. If they could fight the mighty US government, surely they could fight Harvard.
The turning point may have come when Mack’s colleague Alan Dershowitz, a prominent professor at Harvard Law School, published a piece in the Washington Post entitled “Defining Academic Freedom.” In it, he wrote:
“Should a distinguished Harvard professor of psychiatry be subject to formal investigation and potential discipline for doing research on the possibility that people who claim that they were abducted by space aliens may not all be crazy after all?
It is extremely unusual for great universities to second-guess the research or publications of their tenured faculty. Will the next professor who is thinking about an unconventional research project be deterred by the prospect of having to hire a lawyer to defend his ideas?
What is on trial in his case are his ideas—his willingness to consider the possibility that the numerous accounts of alien abductions may not all be products of insane delusions.
Eventually the truth will come out.”
With public opinion turned against them, and some of their greatest minds lining up behind Mack, Harvard was forced to abandon its investigation.
To Mack, they offered, not an apology, but a curt letter, warning him “not, in any way, to violate the high standards for the conduct of clinical practice and clinical investigation that have been the hallmarks of this Faculty,” while meekly reaffirming “Mack’s academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment.”
Here is something to consider: Harvard University has been around for nearly 400 years. Over those years, they’ve had professors who were religious fanatics, who oversaw witches being burned alive; they’ve had professors who where eugenicists and slave owners and open fascists.
And yet, the only one they came for in this way was John Mack. Why?
Why him?
Mack himself has an answer.
“I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested in the book that my findings might require a change in our view of reality.”
Mack was not merely saying in his work that aliens might exist, he was challenging the entire Western scientific establishment, of which Harvard University and its powerful donors were a prominent part; he was challenging our perceptions of reality.
In fact, this was not just Mack’s opinion, but the opinion of his nemesis Arnold Relman, who led the investigation against Mack. In Relman’s words,
“If these stories are believed as literal factual accounts, they would contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.”
Of course. That was exactly Mack’s point.
“Why is it we want to shrink this powerful phenomenon to our notions of reality,” Mack asked, “rather than be able to stretch ourselves to expand what we know.”
Having survived Harvard’s attempts to take him down, this is precisely what Mack would do. He would attempt to find what he described as a “new scientific paradigm,” asserting that “our consensus framework of reality is too limited.”
Research Into Consciousness
By the early-2000s, Mack had begun work on this with two notable people. The first was Elisabeth Targ, a psychiatrist with an interest in the paranormal, and, incidentally, the daughter of an inventor who worked with the CIA in the 1970s on their infamous “remote viewing” project. Second, was Targ’s husband Mark Comings, a theoretical physicist and mathematician specializing in research on alternative energy.
Together, the three of them began never-before-seen research into consciousness, and, in particular, the survival of consciousness after death. Unfortunately, in the midst of this research, Targ got cancer and passed away. This did, however, add another wrinkle to their work, when Comings began to assert that his dead wife was communicating with him from beyond the grave.
In short order, Mack put together a manuscript detailing their findings, which was set to be published as a book. But before it was, Mack would travel to London, England to deliver a lecture on Lawrence of Arabia, the man Mack had won a Pulitzer for writing a book about.
Before he left, he sent the completed manuscript to his publisher. With it was an attached note. It read, “there is a bit of urgency about this.”
Did Mack know something his publishers didn’t?
Because it was in London that tragedy struck.
John Mack’s Mysterious Death
On September 27, 2004, John Mack delivered his lecture on Lawrence of Arabia to great aplomb. Many in the audience had bought his Pulitzer-winning book on the subject, and in fact, the lecture had gone so well that the event’s organizers had invited Mack back to give another lecture later that evening. It wasn’t until around 11pm local time that a weary Mack began to make his way to the home of a family friend in the north London suburb of Barnet, where he would be staying for the night.
According to the police reports, Mack exited the underground subway station at Totteridge and Whetstone and proceeded on foot up Totteridge Lane. As he stepped to cross the street, perhaps used to American traffic and looking the wrong way, he was struck by a car driven by a drunk driver. Though emergency crews arrived quickly, Mack was pronounced dead later that evening.
Despite the police report, there are many who believe that John Mack’s death was not some random accident, that he was too fastidious, as academics sometimes are, that he had been to London too many times, to just walk out into traffic. Some suggest that, where Harvard may have failed to silence Mack in the 1990s, somebody had finally finished the job.
Whether or not that’s true, whether or not Mack’s death could be a murder designed to silence his research, what is incontrovertibly true is that John Mack and his research were silenced.
The manuscript Mack had written detailing the research on consciousness after death, without its author, would go unpublished. Mark Comings tried to continue on after the death of, first his wife, and then his colleague. He briefly toured around the country and giving speeches at American universities, when suddenly, he seemed to disappear into thin air. Without warning, he stopped appearing, stopped writing articles; no obituary ever appeared, but neither was Comings ever heard from again.
All three researchers on the project, dead or disappeared in quick succession, and their research dead with them.
Or is it?
Incredibly, after his death, Mack’s friends insisted that he was contacting them from beyond the grave. In fact, the friend who sat beside Mack’s lifeless body in the hospital on the night of his death insisted that he had materialized and spoken to her then, saying,
“It was as if I was touched with a feather. I did not feel a thing. I was given a choice: should I go or should I stay? I looked down at my broken body and decided to go.”
Just what could John Mack have been researching before his death? What “new scientific paradigm” might he have discovered?
Remember the words of Arnold Relman, who led the Harvard investigation against Mack in the 1990s. If Mack’s work was to be believed, Relman said, it would “contradict virtually all of the basic laws of physics, chemistry and biology on which modern science depends.”
Maybe that’s exactly the point.