All these comments about details
Details- like why at least two very different types of aliens are drawn, with no overlap between witnesses- are important.
-And that's out of the 15 reports (out of supposedly, 62) selected by Cynthia Hind and John Mack.
Or details like why no children reported any message from the aliens until interviewed some time later by psychiatrist John Mack, a sincere man who arguably used leading questions and suggestion in his interactions with UFO witnesses.
If we ignore details, we are prone to accept the homogenized but unrepresentative narrative of Hind and Mack- just as many UFO enthusiasts believe Betty and Barney Hill reported being abducted by "Grays". They didn't, and their descriptions differed between them, and they changed over time.
(You very rarely see a UFO blog stating that Barney recounted seeing a smiling red-headed Irishman and a Nazi in shiny black clothes with a scarf next to each other.)
And the context is important; at least one class had a discussion about UFOs earlier that week, and this was followed by the
dramatic fireball of what we now know was a Zenit-2 booster re-entry, seen across much of Zimbabwe, generating UFO reports and getting national press coverage. We know this was a coincidence; the children didn't.
...are a desperate attempt to discretize these people.
Not at all. And please stop trying to make other people's observations or points of view here seem ill-intentioned.
Around the world, people see and experience unusual things all the time, and sometimes these experiences are very important to them. Their accounts are often fascinating in their own right, and perhaps we can learn things by examining them.
We can't tell whether the Ariel School witnesses (and the other, probably greater number of children present, who witnessed nothing out of the ordinary) are recounting what they subjectively believe to be true or not, although an assumption of veracity is a good starting point, just as in other areas of life.
And if they did believe that what they saw was objectively true, there's the problem of if it
was.
In another context, I said
There is no reason to doubt Fravor's competency as a pilot at the time of the Tic-Tac sighting, and there's no reason to doubt his honesty. But pilots do misperceive things, just like everyone else does from time to time, and this might apply to Fravor's sighting without impugning his honesty, intelligence or professionalism.
-The same for the Ariel kids; there's no reason to doubt that they were, as a group, anything other than normal, broadly healthy and well-behaved children. Some of them made extraordinary claims which, if true, would be
profoundly significant.
It's important to critically examine unusual claims. Even if we can't conclude that we are being visited by aliens, or that ghosts exist as sentient entities, etc., we might learn things about perception, memory, communication or the nature of belief.
Reviewing unusual claims isn't about discrediting people, it's about trying to understand what happened.
