Anomyst

Nina Kulagina: The Woman Who Moved Objects With a Glance

2026-10-05T20:38:19.796Z

On a table in a Leningrad laboratory sits a box of matches, covered by a heavy glass dome. The woman sitting across from it touches nothing.

For a minute or two she simply watches the box. Then, one by one, the matches begin to slide across the table. Soviet scientists had been capturing this on film since the mid-1960s.

The woman's name is Ninel Sergeyevna Kulagina, née Mikhailova.

In the West, thanks to a small slip in how her name was transliterated, she became known as Nina Kulagina, though her real name was Ninel: "Lenin" spelled backward, a name Soviet families often gave their daughters after the revolution.

She was born on July 30, 1926, in Leningrad.

"Lenin" Spelled Backward

When German troops encircled the city in 1941, she was fifteen. The Siege of Leningrad lasted nearly nine hundred days and claimed hundreds of thousands of lives to starvation, cold, and relentless shelling.

Her father, brother, and sister went to the front. She soon followed, serving as a radio operator in a Red Army tank unit.

At seventeen she took a wound to the abdomen, survived the siege, and received a decoration and a military rank. After the war she married Viktor Kulagin, a naval engineer, and the couple had three children.

In the mid-1960s, while being treated in the hospital for a nervous breakdown (likely a lingering effect of her war wound and what we'd now call post-traumatic stress), she heard a radio program about a woman who could identify colors with her fingertips.

Her husband didn't believe it was possible, so she took out her bag of embroidery thread and, blindfolded, began pulling out the exact color he asked for.

A Bag of Thread

Her husband, an engineer by trade, bought a simple film camera and started recording small experiments at home.

They soon discovered something stranger still: when she got angry, objects would fly off the table on their own, spoons, glasses, small items, with no hand ever touching them.

When they mentioned it to a doctor during a routine checkup, word reached Leonid Vasiliev, a physiologist at Leningrad University and a pioneer of Soviet parapsychology research, who was the first to invite her into his laboratory.

Before anyone focused on moving objects, researchers first tested her earlier, "dermo-optical" ability.

In January 1964, a Leningrad commission, including S. G. Feinberg, who had discovered her, university rector A. T. Alexandrov, and Vasiliev himself, tested her with no magician in the room.

Blindfolded, she read from a magazine and correctly identified the dates on coins.

Kulagina wasn't the only such case in the Soviet Union at the time.

A few years earlier, a similar ability had been attributed to Rosa Kuleshova, a teacher from the Urals, and for a while Soviet researchers treated "finger vision" as a serious scientific question, before public interest faded.

For Kulagina, though, this was only the opening act. Her story was just beginning.

Under Glass, No Thread

Vasiliev died in 1966, before he could reach a final conclusion. His younger colleagues suspected he was being fooled by an invisible thread, and university administrators ordered the experiments stopped.

The research was picked up by Gennady Sergeyev, a physiologist at Leningrad's Ukhtomsky Military Institute, who tracked Kulagina for years using an electroencephalograph, an electrocardiograph, and Kirlian photography.

According to a report that later found its way into the archives of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, Sergeyev used a Kirlian camera to record a burst of light around her eyes at the exact moments objects began to move.

From this he developed a theory of "bioplasma," a kind of energy field the body supposedly emits and uses to act on its surroundings.

Western science never accepted the theory, but it intrigued American analysts enough to make it into their own reports.

The protocol grew stricter over time.

Before each session, her hands and clothing were inspected, and the table was cleared before she sat down.

Objects were placed under transparent domes and in four-inch (10-centimeter) plexiglass cubes, the magnetic field around her body was measured, and a technician would sometimes remove an object without warning, a check against any hidden thread.

Matches, a compass, a lit cigarette, an empty metal saltshaker, a wristwatch: according to the reports, all of it moved.

Nina Kulagina demonstrates psychokinesis with a ping-pong ball. Photo: Vladimir Bogatyrev.

Rarely did just one institution have a seat at that table.

Representatives from Leningrad University, the Bekhterev Institute, the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and even the KGB rotated through as observers over the years.

None of them, according to the available records, ever publicly claimed to have caught her in a trick.

The list of unusual feats kept growing. Once, in a saline solution, she separated an egg's yolk from its white without ever touching the egg.

She could spin a compass needle through a full rotation, stop a pendulum or reverse its direction, and set a hydrometer floating in a wire-mesh-covered container into motion.

Sometimes objects moved as much as six feet, though the usual distance was closer to a foot and a half.

The one thing she never managed was moving an object sealed inside a vacuum.

The West Comes to Leningrad

In 1968, at the first major Soviet parapsychology conference in Moscow, a silent black-and-white film showing Kulagina moving objects was screened.

A few months earlier, in February, Czech military researcher Zdeněk Rejdak had visited her in Leningrad.

He passed a compass around her, the table, and the chair with no result, until she concentrated. Then the needle spun more than ten full turns, and she went on to set a matchbox and a lit cigarette moving as well.

The film opened doors.

Over the following decade, five Western scientists tested Kulagina: Australian Jürgen Keil of the University of Tasmania; Briton Benson Herbert, editor of the Journal of Paraphysics; American J. Gaither Pratt of the University of Virginia; New York psychiatrist Montague Ullman; and J. A. Fahler. Together they ran more than a hundred, possibly as many as two hundred, sessions over ten years, according to a review published in the Society for Psychical Research's archive.

When Keil and Pratt showed up unannounced at her apartment in April 1968, she welcomed them as guests, serving them dinner and, afterward, a small demonstration.

Two years later, American William A. McGary described a session at her dining table in which she set a wedding ring and a jar lid moving, making the ring spin on its axis as though mounted on an invisible shaft.

The Price of Concentration

Every successful attempt came at a physical cost.

During sessions, her pulse climbed as high as 240 beats a minute: the kind of rate an athlete might hit after a grueling workout, except she was sitting calmly at a table the whole time.

She lost up to four pounds (two kilograms) of fluid per session, more than physical exertion would burn off in the same amount of time.

Afterward she complained of exhaustion, dizziness, back pain, and a metallic taste in her mouth, and sometimes needed days to recover before her next session.

The most famous experiment took place on March 10, 1970, in a Leningrad laboratory.

An isolated frog's heart, submerged in the saline solution that normally keeps it beating for hours outside the body, was placed in front of her.

Sergeyev watched the cardiogram as the heartbeat, by his account, first sped up, then slowed, then stopped completely, after about seven minutes of concentration.

Critics point out that an isolated frog's heart will stop beating sooner or later on its own, which leaves open just how much she actually hastened the end and how much was simply well-timed coincidence.

A Burn Without Fire

British researcher Benson Herbert, editor of the journal mentioned above, described the touch of her hand as unbearably painful: when Kulagina ran her hand along his forearm, it left a burn that took eight days to heal.

Keil and Fahler experienced a milder version of the same thing: a mark on the skin, with no blistering and no real wound.

A thermometer placed between her skin and theirs, however, never registered any actual change in temperature.

In another attempt, she turned her attention to a doctor who had openly doubted her abilities.

Both of them were hooked up to an EKG, and within a few minutes his pulse, according to Soviet reports, reached a dangerous level, so the experiment was stopped immediately.

In informal retellings, the story later picked up a more dramatic ending, that the doctor supposedly died on the spot, but no documented source confirms that version.

Accusations That Were Never Confirmed

Cooperating with Western visitors didn't come without consequences on the Soviet side either.

Eduard Naumov, a scientist who worked with Kulagina and often met with foreign visitors, spent a year in a KGB labor camp, likely because of exactly those contacts.

That alone says enough about how seriously the state apparatus took what was happening around that table.

Suspicions of fraud followed her from the start.

In 1965, Moscow's Institute of Metrology announced that it had found small magnets hidden "in intimate areas" of her body, though a later analysis by Jürgen Keil found that the report actually documented nothing more than an elevated magnetic field around her body, with no search ever having actually been carried out.

Magicians and skeptics, including the well-known paranormal critic Martin Gardner, long insisted it was a classic thread-or-magnet trick. In 1968, Gardner also cited a New York Times article claiming that Kulagina, under the pseudonym Nelya Mikhailova, had once been caught with magnets hidden in her clothing and previously sentenced to four years in prison.

Pratt, who met her in Moscow in the 1970s, described her as a pleasant, smiling woman with an inexplicable ability, far from the "charlatan" portrayed in newspaper articles.

Naumov, testifying on her behalf, added that she never asked for fame or money for what she did.

When Keil and his colleagues published an extensive analysis in the Society for Psychical Research's journal in 1976, after ten years of observation, the conclusion was anything but triumphant.

It stated that, based on all available data, Kulagina didn't behave like someone trying to hide something, which isn't proof that the ability was real, only an absence of evidence that it was fraud.

Refrigerators, a Courtroom, and a Verdict

In 1966, she faced an entirely different kind of accusation, one that had nothing to do with her alleged powers and everything to do with business.

She'd taken money from neighbors, at a time when refrigerators and furniture were hard to come by in the USSR, promising to help them get hold of those items. The deal fell through, and a conviction followed.

Some sources describe the case as an honest business mistake by a woman with no real experience in trade, others as outright fraud with a predictable outcome. After a prominent scientist intervened on her behalf, her prison sentence was commuted to hospital treatment.

Critics would cite that case for decades afterward as proof that she couldn't generally be trusted, even though it had nothing to do with telekinesis.

Twenty years later, in 1986, she filed a lawsuit of her own, against the Soviet magazine Man and the Law, published by the Ministry of Justice, which had accused her of fraud.

Scientists, a journalist, and a documentary filmmaker who had observed her for years testified in court.

The jury ruled in her favor: the magazine had offered no tangible proof of fraud, and the court ordered it to publish a correction.

The court didn't officially confirm her abilities either. It simply rejected the claim that she was a fraud.

A File From the Other Side of the Ocean

Under the pseudonym Nelya Mikhailova, Kulagina turns up in dozens of declassified documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, now available in the agency's Freedom of Information Act electronic reading room.

One CIA report describes Sergeyev as having spent years conducting intensive lab research on "the outstanding PK psychic in Leningrad, Nina Kulagina."

Analysts weren't necessarily convinced telekinesis was real, but they took seriously the possibility that the Soviets were developing paranormal abilities for military use.

The Americans already had their own center for parapsychology research by then: J. B. Rhine's laboratory at Duke University, where Pratt had worked before moving on to Virginia.

Fear that the Soviets might get to a usable "psychic weapon" first helped spur the American Stargate program, which, decades later, once declassified, would confirm just how seriously Washington took what was happening around that table in Leningrad.

It's striking that across dozens of pages of these declassified reports, now publicly available in the CIA's electronic reading room, I never found the word "proven" or "fraud." Just long strings of observations, measurements, and institutions that refused to let the question go.

Author

Her health, meanwhile, kept declining.

By the 1980s she already had a series of heart problems, and the pain-free stretches between them kept getting shorter.

She died on April 11, 1990, at age sixty-three, of a heart attack, after a long period of poor health that the researchers who had followed her case partly attributed to those exhausting sessions.

What she left behind was a thick file: hundreds of sessions, scientists from at least five countries, declassified reports from two intelligence agencies, and a court ruling that found no evidence of fraud.

And there's still that thermometer from the Leningrad laboratory, the one that, placed between her skin and someone else's, never recorded a single degree of change, while skin just an inch or so away took a full eight days to heal.

SOURCES

Ninel Sergejevna (Nina) Kulagina – Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research
Leonid Vasiliev – Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research
Keil, H.H.J., Herbert, B., Ullman, M., Pratt, J.G., Directly Observable Voluntary PK Effects: A Survey and Tentative Interpretation of Available Findings from Nina Kulagina, Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 56, 1976.
New York Times, May 21, 1968: a news item about allegedly hidden magnets and an earlier four-year prison sentence (as cited in Gardner, M., Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, 1981, p. 244).
Central Intelligence Agency, Controlled Offensive Behavior – USSR (U), Section IV: ESP and Psychokinesis, and related declassified documents, CIA Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (foia.cia.gov).

Computer or Cemetery? What Stonehenge Really Was

2026-10-03T21:06:27.582Z

In October 1963, the British science journal Nature published a three-page paper with an unusual title: "Stonehenge Decoded."

Its author was Gerald S. Hawkins, an astronomer at Boston University and a research associate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

For decades, scholars had filed Stonehenge under ritual: a shrine to a sun god, a sacrificial altar, a monumental tomb for the elite dead. Hawkins ignored that consensus.

With the help of an IBM computer, he claimed to have found something altogether different: the site's features lined up with the positions of the sun and moon with mathematical precision, and he believed the key to predicting eclipses was hidden in the number fifty-six.

To Hawkins, Stonehenge wasn't just a sacred site. It was an instrument.

A Computer Reads Prehistoric Stone

Hawkins first visited Stonehenge in 1961 and came away with precise survey maps: the positions of every stone, every excavated pit, every earthwork.

At the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory, he had access to an IBM 7090 (then the most powerful computer available to the observatory) and used it, together with his team, to calculate the celestial positions for the period when Stonehenge was built.

The computer analyzed 120 pairings among 165 identified points at the site and returned a result that surprised even Hawkins: dozens of alignments matched the positions of the summer solstice sunrise, the winter solstice sunset, and key points in the moon's cycle.

The sun rises over Stonehenge on the morning of the summer solstice, June 21, 2005. Photo: Andrew Dunn, CC BY-SA 2.0

His central argument centered on 56 evenly spaced pits around Stonehenge's outer edge, now known as the Aubrey Holes after the antiquarian John Aubrey, who first described them in the 17th century.

They were dug around 3100 BCE, during the first phase of construction, and their purpose was unknown.

Hawkins noticed that the cycle of lunar eclipses repeats every 18.67 years. Three such cycles add up to almost exactly 56.

The conclusion seemed elegant: by moving a marker three positions each year, prehistoric observers on Salisbury Plain would have had a reliable eclipse calendar at their disposal.

"Stonehenge was locked to the Sun and Moon as tightly as the tides," Hawkins told the BBC in the summer of 1966. "It was an astronomical observatory. And a good one, too."

A Bestseller for Readers, "Moonshine on Stonehenge" for Colleagues

The book "Stonehenge Decoded," published in 1965 and co-written with John B. White, became a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic. The combination of the Neolithic and an IBM computer drew attention far beyond academic circles.

Part of the theory's appeal came from its apparent scientific legitimacy: the original paper had run in the respected pages of Nature, and its conclusion was tidy and persuasive.

Hawkins argued that there was no real question of whether Stonehenge had been a temple or an observatory, since to his mind it had been both, because in that era the sun and moon were gods in their own right.

The scholarly response was fierce. British archaeologist R. J. C. Atkinson, who had led excavations at Stonehenge between 1950 and 1964 and was then regarded as the site's leading expert, published a rebuttal that same year in Antiquity titled "Moonshine on Stonehenge."

Atkinson showed that some of the points Hawkins had used for his sightlines were natural depressions, not deliberately dug features.

A margin of error of up to two degrees, which Hawkins accepted as acceptable, was, in Atkinson's view, wide enough that almost any geometric alignment on flat terrain could be called "precise."

Atkinson calculated that the probability of seeing that many alignments among 165 points was close to 0.5, or roughly 50:50, not the "one in a million" that Hawkins had claimed.

Hawkins defended his work, but he didn't win over the field. The Neolithic-computer theory lived on in popular culture. Among scholars, it steadily lost ground.

1,500 Years of Building, and a Cemetery in the Pits

The definitive answer came decades later, from the ground itself.

The Stonehenge Riverside Project ran from 2003 to 2009, led jointly by researchers from the universities of Sheffield, Manchester, Bournemouth, Southampton, and UCL. Among them was the archaeologist Michael Parker Pearson.

Parker Pearson's team analyzed the cremated remains buried at the site, applied radiocarbon dating, and reconstructed the building phases.

What they found ran directly against the basic premise of Hawkins's theory.

Hawkins had treated Stonehenge as a coherent whole, built for a single purpose.

Radiocarbon dating showed that the complex was actually built over more than 1,500 years, from roughly 3100 to about 1600 BCE, in distinct phases that reflect distinct communities with distinct needs.

The first building phase, the one that produced the Aubrey Holes, was tied to a burial ground: cremated human remains have been found in the holes themselves and in the ground immediately around them, showing that Stonehenge served a funerary purpose from its earliest stage.

Parker Pearson has explained to the BBC that Stonehenge was actually built in a completely different, multi-phase sequence spanning more than 1,500 years.

As he put it, the solstice alignments with the moon were never precise, accurate only to within a degree or two, so the monument was never a timekeeping instrument.

It was a monument that celebrated certain movements of the sun and moon.

Nobody denies that the astronomical connection is real: Stonehenge's solstice alignment is well documented and spatially confirmed. But there's a gap between a solstice orientation and a precise eclipse-prediction mechanism, and nothing in Stonehenge's architecture bridges it.

One comparison illustrates this well.

According to Parker Pearson, there's evidence that people in Britain were tracking and predicting lunar eclipses by around 1000 BCE.

That's somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 years after Stonehenge, as an active site, had already lost its primary role.

Hawkins was right that Stonehenge had something to do with the sky. Where he went wrong was projecting the defining metaphor of his own era, the computer, back onto the Neolithic.

SOURCES

Willis, C., Marshall, P., McKinley, J., Pitts, M., Pollard, J., Richards, C., Richards, J., Thomas, J., Waldron, T., Welham, K., and Parker Pearson, M., "The dead of Stonehenge," Antiquity 90, no. 350 (April 2016), pp. 337–356. https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2016.26
Hawkins, G. S., "Stonehenge Decoded," Nature 200, pp. 306–308 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1038/200306a0
Atkinson, R. J. C., "Moonshine on Stonehenge," Antiquity 40, no. 159 (September 1966), pp. 212–216. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X0003252X
Hawkins, G. S. and White, J. B., Stonehenge Decoded, Doubleday, Garden City, New York, 1965.
UCL News, "Rewriting the Story of Stonehenge," March 2013. Archived copy
"Astronomer Who Wrote On Stonehenge Dies," The Harvard Crimson, August 1, 2003. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/8/1/astronomer-who-wrote-on-stonehenge-dies/

The Dogon and Sirius B: Did They Know About a Hidden Star?

2026-10-02T19:48:19.281Z

The Dogon people have lived along the Bandiagara Escarpment in central Mali for centuries, without telescopes, observatories, or any written astronomical tradition.

And yet, according to the records of French ethnologist Marcel Griaule from 1950, they knew about a star invisible to the naked eye: that it was small, impossibly dense, and that it orbited the visible Sirius roughly every fifty years.

Astronomically, all of it checks out. Sirius B, a white dwarf not directly observed until 1862, fits that description closely.

The question that has remained open is not astronomical but anthropological: was that knowledge genuinely part of Dogon tradition, or did Griaule, without realizing it, introduce it himself?

Nearly Half a Century Between Two Researchers

The Dogon are a people of several hundred thousand, with a developed cosmology, a rich tradition of sculpture, and a ceremonial calendar passed down through generations.

The Dogon people of West Africa. Photo: OBERSON, CC BY-SA 4.0

Marcel Griaule, a French ethnologist and anthropologist, began fieldwork in Bandiagara in 1931 as part of the Dakar-Djibouti Mission (1931-1933).

His student Germaine Dieterlen joined the research during the 1930s.

The pivotal phase of that work began in 1946, when an elder named Ogotemmeli spent thirty-three days in conversation with Griaule. Those discussions became the foundation of Griaule's book Dieu d'eau (1948).

Several years later, Griaule and Dieterlen published a separate study on the Sirius system, drawing on accounts from four principal Dogon informants: Innekouzou Dolo, Ongnonlou Dolo, Yébéné, and Manda. Ogotemmeli, Griaule's 1946 interlocutor, was not among them.

In that paper, published in 1950 in the Journal de la Société des Africanistes, they claimed that the Dogon knew of a small, invisible companion to Sirius, which they called "po tolo," named after the seed they consider the tiniest and heaviest of all, and that it circled the visible Sirius every fifty years and was extraordinarily dense.

One detail in those records was never adequately explained.

According to Griaule's account, the great Sigui ceremony was held on a sixty-year cycle, which did not match the approximately fifty-year orbital period attributed to Sirius's companion.

Neither Griaule nor the later authors who relied on his work ever offered a convincing explanation for that discrepancy.

The Wobbling Star: Sirius B and the Discovery That Followed

Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, director of the Königsberg Observatory, noticed in 1844 that Sirius did not travel a straight path but wobbled slightly. He concluded it must have an invisible companion whose gravity was disturbing its motion, and he estimated the orbital period at roughly fifty years. Bessel died in 1846, never seeing his hypothesis confirmed.

Alvan Graham Clark found that companion on January 31, 1862, while testing an 18.5-inch refractor his family's firm had built for the Dearborn Observatory.

What he saw was a white dwarf — a type of star with a mass nearly equal to the Sun's, compressed into a volume smaller than Earth's.

The radius of Sirius B is about 3,500 miles (5,634 kilometers), slightly less than Earth's. Its surface temperature runs around 25,000 Kelvin, and its orbital period is approximately 50.1 years.

Its density is so extreme that, according to data published in a 2017 paper by Bond and colleagues, a teaspoon of its material would weigh roughly 13 tons on Earth.

The apparent and true orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A. Chart: SiriusB, CC BY-SA 3.0

Irving Lindenblad launched a long-term photographic monitoring program of Sirius in 1965, using the 26-inch (66-centimeter) refractor at the U.S. Naval Observatory; the program ran through 1984.

The Dogon, as Griaule recorded, described Sirius's companion as small, invisible, and extraordinarily dense, with an orbital period of fifty years.

Astronomically, the description matches the actual properties of Sirius B in its essential points.

But the question remains: where did that knowledge come from, and was it part of Dogon tradition before European researchers reached Mali?

The Book That Ignited the Debate

Robert Temple published The Sirius Mystery in 1976 (New York: St. Martin's Press) and offered one answer: the Dogon had been visited by beings from the Sirius system.

Temple read Griaule's findings as evidence that amphibious beings called the Nommos had passed astronomical knowledge to ancient peoples, and that the Dogon had inherited it.

The book spread quickly through alternative history circles and made the Nommos a fixture of that world.

Ian Ridpath published a detailed critique of Temple's claims in the fall 1978 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. He concluded that the Dogon tradition about Sirius, read literally, contained so many inconsistencies and factual errors that it could not be treated as coherent astronomical knowledge.

He pointed to contemporary contact, rather than ancient tradition, as the most likely source.

Carl Sagan, in Broca's Brain (Random House, 1979), offered a considerably simpler explanation: some of that knowledge may have reached the Dogon through contact with Europeans. Sirius B had been in astronomy textbooks since 1862.

Both critics pressed the same important point. By the 1930s, when Griaule was making his trips to Mali, Sirius B was no secret among educated Europeans: Arthur Eddington had described it in 1927, in his popular book Stars and Atoms, as a star whose matter was thousands of times denser than anything previously known.

Van Beek's Return

Van Beek's paper "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule" drew sharp reactions from anthropological circles.

Van Beek concluded that among the Dogon he worked with, he could find no knowledge of a stellar companion to Sirius of the kind Griaule had described.

His argument was that Griaule had probably, through unconsciously leading questions, shaped the answers his informants gave, and that the Dogon of the 1940s, faced with the authority of a foreign researcher, provided answers they assumed were expected of them.

Van Beek traced this to three interlocking factors: the researcher's confrontational style, the colonial context of the encounter, and a culture inclined to accommodate its interlocutors and absorb outside elements.

Geneviève Calame-Griaule, Griaule's daughter and collaborator, rejected this criticism in a later issue of the same journal.

Her position was that Van Beek had not reached a sufficient level of initiation into Dogon esoteric tradition for the elders to share deeper knowledge with him at all. The anthropologist Luc de Heusch took a more measured stance in "On Griaule on Trial." Van Beek held to his conclusion.

Sirius C and the End of the Search

Dogon tradition also speaks of a third star in the Sirius system, around which the Nommos' home planet would orbit. When Daniel Benest and J. L. Duvent published "Is Sirius a Triple Star?" in 1995 (Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 299, pp. 621-628), the idea acquired an astronomical reference.

Analyzing orbital residuals in the motion of Sirius A and B, Benest and Duvent concluded that a companion of no more than about 50 Jupiter masses could orbit Sirius A with a period of roughly 6.3 years.

Christian Thalmann's team published the results of a high-contrast direct imaging search of the Sirius system in 2011 in Astrophysical Journal Letters, using the Subaru Telescope.

None of the data sets produced a candidate above the five-sigma threshold. The authors concluded that a Sirius C of the kind predicted by the 1995 analysis probably does not exist. If it does, it would be considerably less massive than assumed.

Dogon cosmology, in any case, is not a fabrication. It is a genuine and rich tradition, documented across decades of fieldwork.

What remains disputed is only the claim about Sirius B. It rests on accounts from a single group of informants in 1950, and no independent confirmation has ever been found.

Van Beek's 1991 paper runs to roughly thirty pages documenting what happened when a researcher returned to the field and tried to verify Griaule's claims.

The results were far less dramatic: among the Dogon, he found no clear confirmation of the extraordinary astronomical knowledge attributed to them.

SOURCES

Van Beek, Walter E. A. "Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule." Current Anthropology, Vol. 32, no. 2, April 1991, pp. 139-167. doi:10.1086/203932 · full text (PDF)
Griaule, Marcel, and Germaine Dieterlen. "Un Système Soudanais de Sirius." Journal de la Société des Africanistes, Vol. 20, no. 2, 1950, pp. 273-294. doi:10.3406/jafr.1950.2611
Griaule, Marcel. Dieu d'eau. Entretiens avec Ogotemmêli. Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1948. (English edition Conversations with Ogotemmêli, 1965)
Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm. Astronomische Nachrichten, Vol. 22, no. 514, 1844, pp. 145-160.
Eddington, Arthur S. Stars and Atoms. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927.
Benest, D., and J. L. Duvent. "Is Sirius a Triple Star?" Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol. 299, 1995, pp. 621-628. VizieR J/A+A/299/621
Thalmann, Christian, et al. "Piercing the Glare: A Direct Imaging Search for Planets in the Sirius System." Astrophysical Journal Letters, Vol. 732, L34, 2011. doi:10.1088/2041-8205/732/2/L34
Bond, Howard E., et al. "The Sirius System and its Astrophysical Puzzles: Hubble Space Telescope and Ground-Based Astrometry." The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 840, no. 2, 2017. doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aa6af8
Calame-Griaule, Geneviève. "On the Dogon Restudied." Current Anthropology, Vol. 32, no. 5, December 1991, pp. 575-577. doi:10.1086/204001
De Heusch, Luc. "On Griaule on Trial." Current Anthropology, Vol. 32, no. 4, 1991, pp. 434-437. doi:10.1086/203978
Temple, Robert K. The Sirius Mystery. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1976.
Ridpath, Ian. "Investigating the Sirius 'Mystery.'" Skeptical Inquirer, Fall 1978.
Sagan, Carl. Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science. New York: Random House, 1979.

Dorothy Eady: Omm Sety, Abydos, and a Story of Reincarnation

2026-10-02T10:01:08.667Z

Barefoot, dressed in plain wool, a scarf over her head, and strings of pharaonic-era beads around her neck: that's how the woman who led tourists through the Temple of Seti I at Abydos looked.

She'd point out the painted reliefs calmly and confidently, the way a homeowner shows visitors around her own estate.

She really did consider the temple her home. Harry James, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities at the British Museum, wrote in her obituary that thousands of visitors came to know her at Abydos over the last twenty-five years of her life.

The editor of Antiquity, who reprinted that obituary, added that James had used it to paint a moving, vivid portrait of a truly unusual and remarkable woman.

Her name was Omm Sety. Born Dorothy Eady in Blackheath, London, she claimed that more than three thousand years earlier, she had been a priestess in that very same temple.

In 2013, Egyptian inspector Ayman Damarany opened a room that had been sealed for decades, in a part of the temple once used as a slaughterhouse.

He'd come to document the wall decorations. What he found instead was thousands of documents: some bundled together, others scattered across the floor.

Among them was a folder of monthly inspection reports Eady had written in 1968 and 1969. The American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) cites her reports as a good example of what the collection holds, everything from routine bureaucratic paperwork to documents of real historical value.

So Eady's story comes in two parts. One part is recorded in reports and documents. The other exists almost entirely in her own words.

That second part comes down to three claims that nothing in the available record independently confirms: her childhood memories of the temple and its garden, the knowledge of its rooms she demonstrated in the dark in 1952, and her account of a priestess named Bentreshyt, whom she claimed to have been herself.

The Girl Who Was Looking for a Garden

Almost everything we know about her childhood comes from The Search for Omm Sety, the 1987 biography by Jonathan Cott, and Cott mostly heard it from Eady herself.

The Psi Encyclopedia makes the same point explicitly.

According to the story, she fell down a flight of stairs at age three. A doctor pronounced her dead, and an hour later she was found playing on her bed without a scratch on her.

After that, the story goes, the dreams began: a vast building with columns, and a garden full of fruit and flowers.

Her mother would find her in tears. The child said she wanted to go home, even though she was already home.

At the British Museum, so the story goes, she ran from one display case to the next, kissing the feet of the statues.

When she saw a picture of the Temple of Seti I at Abydos, she told her parents that was her home. She asked why it was all in ruins and where the garden had gone.

It's a lovely story, but it has exactly one witness: Eady herself.

The obituary is the one place this story gets any firmer footing. The Egyptian department of the British Museum was her school and her university, and she used to say that E. A. Wallis Budge had taught her a bit of hieroglyphics.

So the museum really did shape her knowledge. Whether that knowledge came from a past life isn't a claim the obituary makes.

A Londoner at the Digs

In 1933 (Barbara Lesko's biographical survey gives 1931), Eady traveled to Egypt to marry Imam Abdel Meguid, whom she'd met while working at a magazine devoted to Egyptian independence. She never went back to England.

She named her son Seti, after the pharaoh, which gave her the name all of Abydos would know her by: Omm Sety, "Mother of Seti." The marriage fell apart by the mid-1930s.

When her husband went abroad for work, she went to work for Professor Selim Hassan, who was excavating at Giza at the time.

For twenty years she assisted him, and later Professor Ahmed Fakhry, on the pyramid fields of the great Memphite necropolis.

She prepared field notes and reports for publication, as her obituary records.

This part of her biography doesn't require taking anything on faith. She did the work, and she did it for a long time.

Barefoot Among the Columns

Her visits to Abydos in 1952 and 1954 convinced her, according to the obituary, that she had once lived in that temple before.

When Fakhry's project at Dahshur was shut down in 1956, he offered her a better-paying job in Cairo or a poorly paid position as a draftswoman at Abydos. She chose Abydos and stayed there for the rest of her life.

The Temple of Seti I in Abydos, Egypt. Photo: Gérard Ducher (Néfermaât), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

She lived in a simple mud-brick house, surrounded by cats, with a single goose, a donkey, and the occasional snake.

In the temple's sanctuaries, she performed ancient rites as she herself understood them.

And yet, James writes, she was practical and entirely free of occult irrationality.

She planned her tomb and burial well in advance, so that after death she could travel on to the beautiful West, to Osiris, to Seti, and to everyone she felt she belonged with.

In Abydos, she also wrote about life in Egyptian villages. Her notes on customs she believed dated back to pharaonic times weren't published until 2008, when Egyptologist Nicole B. Hansen released them under the title Omm Sety's Living Egypt.

A Test in the Dark and a Garden Found

The most famous episode took place, according to Cott, in 1952, during her first visit to Abydos.

The chief inspector of the Department of Antiquities decided to put her to the test.

In complete darkness, she was supposed to point out where certain scenes appeared on the temple walls, scenes whose locations hadn't been published at the time. She claimed she succeeded.

She also pointed to where, by her own memory, a garden had once stood. Later, according to El Zeini, the remains of old tree stumps turned up in that very spot.

That sounds like proof, but it's worth asking where the story actually comes from. It's told mainly by Hanny El Zeini, an Egyptian who became her friend and co-author of Cott's book.

He claimed to have personally watched an old stump get dug up on that spot, as the Psi Encyclopedia notes.

Even if Eady did correctly point out where the garden was, the question of how she knew remains open. She may have connected it to her belief in a past life.

Just as easily, she might have known it the way anyone learns things over years: through day-to-day work, conversations with archaeologists, and familiarity with earlier research on the site.

A Priestess Who Exists Only in Her Own Writings

According to Cott's biography, Eady would write down messages at night in hieroglyphs, which she told her husband were being dictated to her by a spirit named Hor-Ra. By her own account, the dictation went on for twelve months, and the resulting text ran to about seventy pages of cursive hieroglyphs.

Those writings gave rise to the story of Bentreshyt, a young priestess at the temple in Abydos.

One day, King Seti came to the temple, and the two young people grew close.

When Bentreshyt became pregnant, the high priest interrogated her, and she eventually confessed who the father was. She took her own life to spare the king.

Eady believed that Seti I later appeared to her as a spirit. Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý also saw her hieroglyphic writing and judged it good work for a beginner.

None of this has an independent witness. The Psi Encyclopedia notes that no researcher ever investigated the case, so the story rests almost entirely on her own accounts.

The distinction matters. "Eady claimed this" describes a fact that can be investigated.

"Eady really was Bentreshyt" would be an entirely different claim, one the available record offers no evidence for.

What the Skeptics Say

Cott also asked experts in other fields for their take on her claims, as the Psi Encyclopedia notes. The astronomer Carl Sagan, also known as a skeptic of paranormal claims, considered fantasy the most economical explanation.

His main objection was that nearly all the corroborating stories trace back to Eady herself: her diaries, and the stories she told to Egyptologists, journalists, and friends.

There was, he pointed out, no independent record at all, not even a letter written by her father, confirming so much as her early conviction that ancient Egypt was her "home." Her knowledge of Egypt, he added, required nothing more than a sharp mind devoted to the subject.

One psychiatrist who specialized in adolescent behavior offered a different explanation: that her fall at age three might have left a lasting psychological effect, which she worked through by embracing an obsession.

Psychologist Michael Gruber argued that Eady, who was clearly able to function normally, couldn't be called insane. Her experience, as he put it, "yielded a meaningful life." If being able to live creatively, compassionately, and with discipline is any measure of sanity, he said, then Omm Sety certainly met it. Her belief wasn't purely personal, either. It reached into history as well, and her firm faith in Seti as a guide contributed a great deal to her work in Egyptology.

Some psi researchers, even so, dispute the evidence for reincarnation.

Parapsychologist and remote-viewing researcher Stephan A. Schwartz rejects her certainty that she was reincarnated, arguing that her experiences could be explained by collective consciousness or remote viewing, though he allows that what she believed might still have been true.

Reincarnation researcher James G. Matlock adds that collective consciousness doesn't explain why such experiences latch onto the memories of just one deceased person, and that "psi" explanations require assuming something called "super-psi": an ability to draw together information from multiple sources in a way no one knows to be possible.

What Remains on Paper

The sturdiest part of this story is the part that needs no paranormal explanation at all. The folder containing her 1968 and 1969 reports is part of an archive belonging to the Sohag Inspectorate and the broader Egyptian Antiquities Service, a collection of correspondence, excavation reports, maps, and other documents, some dating back as far as the 1820s.

ARCE describes the collection as unique, the first one to let the early history of Egyptology be seen through Egyptian eyes rather than those of foreign missions.

Among the other files is one containing the papers of Labib Habachi, one of the first Egyptologists to graduate from Cairo University, who spent more than thirty years working for the Antiquities Service.

So Eady wasn't just a character out of later stories about the paranormal. She was a real employee, real enough that her reports survive in the Sohag Inspectorate's own archival collection.

According to Cott's biography, her work on the texts also fed into Edouard Ghazzouli's monograph on the palace and magazines of the Temple of Seti I, where the author specifically thanks her.

According to Cott, a number of respected Egyptologists have publicly said that some works published under other people's names were, in large part, edited or written by her.

Dorothy Eady died on April 21, 1981, in Abydos, at the age of 77, and was buried in the desert outside the Coptic cemetery, in an unmarked grave facing west.

She believed her life would go on. The paperwork speaks only to this one.

It doesn't say who she was before 1904. It says what she was doing near the end of her life, in a place she'd called home for decades.

SOURCES

American Research Center in Egypt, "Abydos Temple Paper Archive". Describes the 2013 discovery of the archive and cites the folder of Dorothy Eady's 1968–69 monthly reports (primary archival source for that section).
"Editorial", Antiquity, Vol. 55, No. 215, November 1981, pp. 165–171. Reprints Harry James's obituary from the London Times of April 29, 1981, with an introduction and closing note from the editor of Antiquity.
Harry James, obituary of Dorothy Eady, The Times, April 29, 1981. Source for details of her career, her life in Abydos, and her final years.
K. M. Wehrstein, "Dorothy Eady/Omm Sety (reincarnation case)", Psi Encyclopedia, Society for Psychical Research. An overview of the case with a full bibliography; source for the responses from Sagan, Gruber, Schwartz, and Matlock, and for the psychiatrist's alternative explanation (Cott, p. 219).
Cott, Jonathan, with Hanny El Zeini, The Search for Omm Sety: A Story of Eternal Love, Doubleday, 1987 (Internet Archive). The core biography: Sagan p. 205, Gruber pp. 228 and 230, Schwartz pp. 208–210, Egyptologists and attributed works p. 57, burial p. 174, Ghazzouli's monograph p. 84.
Omm Sety, with Hanny El Zeini, Abydos: Holy City of Ancient Egypt, L L Company, 1981 (Internet Archive). Her own book on Abydos (primary source).
El Zeini, Hanny, & Dees, Catherine, Omm Sety's Egypt, St Lynn's Press, 2007. An account from the co-author of Cott's book.
Omm Sety, Omm Sety's Living Egypt: Surviving Folkways from Pharaonic Times, ed. Nicole B. Hansen, Glyphdoctors, 2008.
Lesko, Barbara, "Omm Sety, 1904–1981", in: Joukowsky, Martha Sharp & Lesko, Barbara (eds.), Breaking Ground: Women in Old World Archaeology. An academic biographical overview.
Haraldsson, Erlendur, & Matlock, James G., I Saw a Light and Came Here: Children's Experiences of Reincarnation, White Crow Books, 2016, p. 262.
Matlock, James G., Signs of Reincarnation: Exploring Beliefs, Cases, and Theory, Rowman & Littlefield, 2019, pp. 116–117.

The Mystery of Gerry Irwin, the Soldier Who Lost His Memory

2026-10-01T11:50:38.186Z

Private First Class Gerry Irwin was driving toward Fort Bliss, Texas, late at night, on his way back from a leave spent with family in Idaho.

A Nike missile technician, he already had a long drive across the southern Utah desert behind him.

Somewhere on the road southeast of Cedar City, he spotted a light dropping down behind a nearby hill.

He thought it was a plane in trouble. He stopped the car, switched on his turn signals, and left a note on the steering wheel asking passersby to notify the police.

He was heading out on foot, the note explained, to check on a possible plane crash not far from the road.

He put on his military overcoat, grabbed a flashlight, and walked off into the dark.

The Nike missiles Irwin worked on were part of the air defense system the United States relied on at the time to protect its cities from a possible Soviet bombing attack.

It was a job that demanded considerable reliability and psychological stability from its technicians, something that would matter later, when military doctors came to evaluate Irwin's condition.

That same year, 1959, the U.S. Air Force was already in the sixth year of collecting reports on unidentified flying objects through Project Blue Book, so it's no surprise that Irwin's case caught the attention of military investigators, too.

Sources disagree on the exact date of that evening.

The earliest records, based on an investigation the research group APRO conducted right after the event, point to February 28.

More recent accounts, including Jacques Vallée's foreword to a book about Irwin's case, mention February 20 or 21.

A gap of just eight days might seem trivial, but it shows how little about this case has ever been independently verified.

Waking Up in a Cedar City Hospital

About half an hour later, a fish and game inspector came across Irwin's car and the note. He took the note to the sheriff of Cedar City, who organized a search party.

Searchers found Irwin lying unconscious in the snow about a quarter mile from his car.

The jacket he'd been wearing under his overcoat was nowhere to be found.

A doctor named Broadbent examined him at the hospital in Cedar City but couldn't find any physical cause for his condition.

Irwin's vital signs were normal, yet no one could wake him for almost a full 24 hours.

While he lay in that state, he muttered something about a jacket on a bush. When he finally came to, the first thing he asked was whether there were any survivors, even though no plane crash was ever confirmed.

Broadbent diagnosed hysteria, meaning a condition with no organic cause.

In the medicine of that period, the label often covered what today would be described as a dissociative reaction to acute stress: a state in which the body appears healthy while the mind temporarily shuts off access to a traumatic memory.

Irwin remembered nothing from the moment he stepped out of the car.

He went back to duty at Fort Bliss, but his security clearance was temporarily revoked.

A Second Collapse and a Shot of "Truth Serum"

A few weeks later, Irwin passed out on base, and then again on a street in El Paso.

He was taken to William Beaumont Army Hospital, where, as soon as he woke up, he behaved as though it were still February, when it was really March 16. Once again, he asked whether there were any survivors.

This time he was kept on the psychiatric ward for a month. Doctors found nothing unusual, so he was declared healthy and discharged.

On March 27, while he was still under observation, Captain Valentine injected him with sodium amytal, a barbiturate then used as a so-called "truth serum."

According to Valentine's official report, a document released decades later under the Freedom of Information Act, Irwin, under the drug's influence, said that a "special intelligence" had directed him not to remember or reveal what happened in Utah.

He also said that revealing the truth would set off a "big investigation" that would harm many people. He added that it had all begun when he was three years old, but he refused to say more.

A similar theme of blocked memory would surface two years later in the case of Betty and Barney Hill, the New Hampshire couple whose alleged encounter with extraterrestrials in 1961 is now considered the first widely known "abduction" case.

Given that timing, some researchers see Irwin's case as one of the earliest examples of a pattern that later became familiar in the literature on alleged abductions.

The Jacket on the Bush and the Escape

The day after he was declared healthy, Irwin left the base without permission and took a bus back to Cedar City. He seemed like a man in a trance.

He walked for miles across the desert, straight to the spot where he'd lost consciousness about two months earlier, and found his missing jacket hanging on a bush.

A pencil was stuck through one of the buttonholes, and a piece of paper was wound around the pencil.

He burned the paper before reading it. According to later accounts, the smell of smoke jolted him out of his trance, and only then did he realize he was AWOL.

He went back to Cedar City and turned himself in to the sheriff, who refreshed his memory of everything that had happened to him about two months earlier.

The military punished him for leaving his post without authorization.

According to researcher David Booher, he was soon readmitted for observation, spent three more weeks there, and walked off again without permission the day after his discharge.

At the end of August 1959, he was declared a deserter. But he was not lost forever: by his own admission he went into the back country of Idaho to clear his head, and the trip worked, in that the compulsions and blackouts stopped.

In October he returned to face charges, was acquitted of desertion, and served seven months at Leavenworth on lesser counts before resuming his duties.

What went cold after that was not Irwin's life, but the trail in the UFO literature, which lost sight of him for more than half a century.

The Man Found Half a Century Later

For decades, the case circulated in UFO literature as the story of a soldier who vanished without a trace, based mostly on the notes of Jim and Coral Lorenzen of APRO and on Jacques Vallée's later retelling.

Booher came across the story in 2013 and decided to try to track down at least someone from Irwin's family.

Instead, he found Irwin himself, alive and willing to talk.

Irwin let Booher see some of his military records and, for the first time since 1959, recounted the events from his own point of view, from the moment he noticed the light all the way to his return to Texas.

According to Booher, even Irwin himself, more than half a century later, couldn't fill in the gap between leaving the car and waking up in the hospital.

What the records and the book together settled was the shape of his later life.

He finished his service with an excellent record: he rose to sergeant, ran a divisional radio school in Germany, commanded a reconnaissance patrol truck, and went to Austria as an instructor on American communications equipment.

As a civilian he worked as a technician for Kodak and was promoted to a supervisory position.

He died on June 26, 2018, at nearly 83, after a heart attack in early 2015 had left him with significant cognitive impairment.

The conversations resulted in the book "No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story," published in 2017 with a foreword by Jacques Vallée.

A review in the Journal of Scientific Exploration (32(1), 2018) called the book "an exemplary case investigation and a model for careful argumentation," and its author "a resourceful and tenacious investigator driven by curiosity rather than a preconceived agenda."

A Tape Nobody Had Heard

In February 2025, Booher published an addendum to his book about a discovery he made in the archive of the National UFO Historical Records Center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.

Going through unsorted reel-to-reel tapes from APRO, he found one with a handwritten label that read simply "IRWIN."

On the tape, Jim Lorenzen introduces a recording made in the Lorenzens' living room in Alamogordo on May 30, 1959, about three months after the Utah incident and six weeks after Irwin's return there.

The young man speaking is identified as Bernard Irwin, who went by his middle name; he was 23 and talked for 45 minutes.

That recording solved the case's oldest problem, the location.

Irwin describes taking a bus, getting off at the roadway, and walking "approximately 5 to 6 miles" (8 to 10 kilometers) before turning into the hills and walking straight to his jacket.

According to Booher, that roadway is Highway 20, not Highway 14, the only highway named in the Lorenzens' published account. The two routes run roughly parallel, nearly 40 miles (about 64 kilometers) apart, which is why the question of where the events happened had never fit together.

The newspaper reports and the sheriff's letter also placed the original incident on Highway 20, Booher notes, and nothing in the interview points to a road that could be confused with Highway 14.

The tape sharpens one problem rather than settling it. Irwin mentions a single amytal interview during his 32 days in hospital.

His medical records put it on March 27; the Lorenzens put it about a day before his release, nearly three weeks later.

The review of Booher's book also notes that Irwin's doctors gave him sodium amytal more than once, apparently learning nothing new about Utah.

Booher leaves the question open: was there a second interview, one that was neither recorded nor remembered?

What the recording does support, in Booher's judgment, is the credibility of the people in the case.

He describes the Irwin on the tape as down-to-earth and methodical, and argues that the new interview confirms the Lorenzens' reporting more than it undermines it.

It also preserves something its subject later lost: Irwin told Booher he had no memory of finding the jacket, yet there he is in 1959 describing how he burned the note without reading it, and admitting he was "rather frightened."

What Remains Unresolved

It's documented that Irwin existed, that he was hospitalized twice, a month apart, and that an official military report of the sodium amytal session exists.

It's also documented that he was found alive decades later and that he himself confirmed the basic outlines of the story.

What has never been established, though, is what Irwin actually saw that night in Utah, or why his mind blocked the memory of it.

Explanations run the gamut, from a dissociative reaction or dissociative fugue brought on by stress and exhaustion, through speculation about the military mind-control experiments of the era, to a literal encounter with something extraterrestrial.

The Lorenzens did not stop at collecting testimony. Coral Lorenzen raised the case with the psychologist Carl Jung, who offered "ambulatory automatism," in which a person escapes an unbearable situation by forgetting one life and starting another, as a possible explanation.

Her letter is now held with the APRO file at the National UFO Historical Records Center.

As the review of Booher's book points out, the U.S. government ran mind- and behavior-control experiments in the 1950s, and the CIA's MKUltra program used drugs such as sodium amytal on soldiers, prisoners, and patients.

Such experiments also went on at Leavenworth, where Irwin later served seven months; the review adds that any tie to Fort Bliss is uncertain.

Researcher Kevin Randle included the case in his survey of government secrets related to the UFO phenomenon, but even he doesn't claim that the "special intelligence" in Valentine's report is proof of alien contact, only a documented but unexplained claim.

Booher's book, likewise, deliberately declines to choose among the possibilities on offer.

What remains is the sentence Captain Valentine wrote down in March 1959, the 45 minutes of tape on which Irwin tells his own story, and a question that more than sixty years of investigation have never settled.

SOURCES

Thomas E. Bullard, review of "No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story" in the Journal of Scientific Exploration 32(1), 2018, pp. 190–196
David Booher, No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story: UFO Abduction or Covert Operation?, Anomalist Books, 2017 (foreword by Jacques Vallée).
David Booher, Addendum to No Return: The Gerry Irwin Story, February 2025 (PDF), with the May 30, 1959 APRO recording and the Highway 20 identification.
L. J. Lorenzen, "Where Is Private Irwin?", Flying Saucers, November 1962, pp. 17–26.
Nick Redfern, "One of the Strangest Alien Abduction Cases Ever", Mysterious Universe
St. George News: interview about the book "No Return"
Kevin D. Randle, The UFO Dossier: 100 Years of Government Secrets, Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, Visible Ink Press, 2015, pp. 134–141.
Archival overview of the case and the APRO reports

DMT Entities: Hallucination, Archetype, or Real Encounter?

2026-09-29T19:21:54.062Z

In a survey published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology in 2020, 84 percent of the 2,561 respondents who reported meeting a being after inhaling DMT said some form of communication took place, and 40 percent described a two-way exchange.

Nearly all of them, 99 percent, reported an emotional response to the encounter. Only about one in five had gone in hoping to meet anyone or anything, and most said the being initiated the contact.

The survey was based on a self-selected online sample recruited largely through DMT-related communities, so the participants were not a random cross-section of DMT users.

The compound in question is N,N-dimethyltryptamine, or DMT for short, which users often describe as one of the most intense psychedelic experiences.

Unlike many other classic psychedelics, DMT is particularly associated with encounters involving seemingly conscious beings, and it produces them with striking consistency.

That consistency, more than the sheer strangeness of the visions, has puzzled researchers for decades. It recurs in people who have never heard of one another.

Ninety-nine percent of respondents reported an emotional response to the encounter, and 41 percent felt fear at some point.

A Brief History of One Molecule

Skeletal formula of the N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) molecule. Image: Cacycle, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

DMT was first synthesized in 1931 by the Canadian chemist Richard Manske, but nobody at the time suspected the compound had psychoactive properties.

The discovery didn't come until 1956, when the Hungarian chemist and psychiatrist Stephen Szára injected himself with the substance and described visual hallucinations, shifts in his perception of space, and speech disturbances.

Only a year earlier, DMT had been isolated from plants that Indigenous peoples of the Amazon had used for centuries to prepare tobacco blends and brews. That raised the question of how long humanity had already been familiar with this state of consciousness without knowing its chemical formula.

The decades that followed were shaped by the molecule's political fate rather than its scientific one.

In the mid-1960s, the United States banned DMT for public use, and in 1970 it was placed in the strictest category of controlled substances, on the grounds that it had no medical value and carried a high potential for abuse.

Research all but died out for 20 years, until the psychiatrist Rick Strassman got approval to resume it.

Between 1990 and 1995, Strassman ran clinical trials at the University of New Mexico, approved by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. They were the first of their kind in the country in more than 20 years.

In total, he injected 60 volunteers with about 400 doses of DMT.

Many participants reported encounters with what they described as intelligent, autonomous presences: aliens, angels, spirits. Strassman later gathered his observations in the book DMT: The Spirit Molecule, which set off a whole new wave of interest in psychedelic research.

The Key, Not the Source

DMT works primarily by binding to the 5-HT2A receptor, one of the brain's serotonin receptors.

That interaction changes how the brain processes information, including perception, emotion, and the sense of time.

The substance occurs naturally in the plants used to brew ayahuasca, an Amazonian drink that Indigenous communities use in ritual settings. According to some studies, trace amounts are also present in the human body itself, though its exact biological role remains unclear.

Advocates of psychedelics, drawing on the philosopher Aldous Huxley's idea of the brain as a kind of "reducing valve," argue that DMT doesn't create experiences but opens access to states of consciousness that already exist and are normally blocked so that we can function and survive.

That view has no empirical confirmation and remains an interpretation, not an established fact. Still, it has circulated in psychedelic culture for decades and is often offered as an explanation for why these experiences feel more real than everyday life.

A Catalog of Beings

Although every description bears a personal stamp, the patterns repeat often enough that researchers have started to classify them.

A 2019 content analysis examined 149 online DMT trip reports published between 2009 and 2019, identifying 180 entity encounters. Earlier, in 2012, Jon Hanna analyzed Erowid's much larger collection of experience reports, which at the time contained 22,640 reports, including 1,159 categorized as mentioning entities or beings.

A comprehensive 2020 survey from Johns Hopkins University, covering 2,561 people, reached similar results. The terms respondents used most often were "being," "guide," "spirit," "alien," and "helper."

Machine Elves

The best-known subtype is credited to the ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, who in the mid-1960s, during experiments with synthetic DMT in Berkeley, described an encounter with what he called self-transforming machine elves.

By his account, the beings looked like shining geometric figures trying to teach him a language the human mind can't fully grasp.

The term has since become a standard part of the psychedelic vocabulary, though McKenna himself never claimed he could prove the elves existed outside his own mind.

Insectoids, Reptilian Figures, and Geometric Beings

Beyond machine elves, reports often feature insectoid beings, most commonly a giant praying mantis that seems to be performing some kind of surgical procedure. There are also reptilian figures with scales and elongated faces, which users describe as authoritative and sometimes threatening.

A third major category consists of geometric, nonhumanoid beings with no recognizable form. Their communication is described as nonverbal and telepathic, almost like an exchange of feelings with no words in between.

Angelic, Plant, and Therapeutic Figures

Beings that users describe as angelic turn up less often, but almost always in a context of peace and unconditional affection. In ayahuasca ceremonies, so-called plant spirits appear especially often, an archetype users connect to the very substance they've taken into their bodies.

Some reports also describe what are known as therapeutic entities, beings that seem to act deliberately on emotional or physical pain. Ceremony facilitators often link their presence to the sense of relief participants report after especially difficult stretches of the experience.

Mythological Deities

Rarer but striking are encounters with figures that resemble deities from the world's mythologies, from the Hindu god Shiva to characters from the Greek pantheon.

Users describe these as the most intense encounters, accompanied by a sense of awe they rarely attribute to other kinds.

It's worth stressing that none of these categories proves the entities exist outside the experience of the person describing them. This is a catalog of subjective experiences, not a list of confirmed species.

How the Beings Communicate

The way these beings supposedly communicate also repeats from one report to the next.

At one end of the spectrum, users describe complete silence, without a single spoken word but with a clear sense of presence and intent. At the other end are experiences of fully intelligible speech, as clear in grammar and meaning as a conversation with another person. In between are degrees where users make out only single words, emotional tones, or what they describe as a sense of receiving a message with no actual language attached.

This pattern isn't a formal scientific classification, but it recurs so often in firsthand accounts that some researchers in the psychedelic field have begun using it as an informal framework for comparing reports.

Three Explanations, None Proven

Science currently offers three basic frameworks for interpreting these encounters, and none of them is conclusive.

The first, neurological, treats the entities as a product of chaotic brain activity: a brain flooded with unusual signals tries to organize them into recognizable shapes, much as we sometimes see faces in clouds.

The second, Jungian, views the entities as archetypal projections of the collective unconscious, fragments of the psyche that, freed from the ego's control, temporarily take on a form and a voice.

The third framework, the most speculative, treats them as autonomous beings from an external, independent reality that DMT supposedly just opens the door to.

Over the past 10 to 20 years, a technological variant of this idea has also emerged. It holds that reality might be structured like digital code, with DMT acting as a tool that temporarily grants access to that layer of information, and even allows limited manipulation of it.

That variant is developed furthest by the British neurobiologist and pharmacologist Andrew R. Gallimore, who in Alien Information Theory (2019) describes the universe as an informational system and DMT as a tool that temporarily opens access to one of its layers.

That's a metaphor, not a tested hypothesis, and serious science doesn't treat it as anything more for now.

None of the three frameworks can currently be confirmed or definitively ruled out. The neurological explanation has the most empirical support because it rests on known mechanisms of perception, while the other two are philosophical positions more than scientific ones.

What remains beyond dispute is that thousands of people who don't know one another, and who live in different cultural contexts, report surprisingly similar details.

What the Skeptics Say

Researcher James Kent, author of the book Psychedelic Information Theory, argues that these beings are mostly a product of pareidolia, the human brain's tendency to recognize familiar shapes in chaotic, random patterns, like faces in a cloud or in coffee grounds.

According to Kent, under the influence of DMT the visual system enters a chaotic state, and the brain, which is wired above all to pick out human and humanoid outlines, reads that chaos as the presence of another being rather than random noise.

More recent findings from neuroscientists at Imperial College London point in a similar direction, but with a more precise mechanism.

According to an analysis published in NOEMA magazine, researcher Christopher Timmermann proposes that DMT temporarily breaks down the brain networks responsible for our sense of continuity and identity. Out of that breakdown, he argues, the brain assembles new, seemingly conscious patterns, because evolution has programmed it to hear a predator's footstep in the rustling of branches rather than just the wind.

That same tendency to detect intent in chaos could explain why visual chaos under DMT so often takes the shape of beings, and not just abstract blotches.

A smaller but methodologically different study from 2021 backed up similar observations. Instead of relying on later recall, the researchers interviewed 36 experienced users right after they inhaled DMT. Encounters with seemingly autonomous beings were again common, described mostly as benevolent, while only a minority involved elements of threat.

The authors also noted that these experiences echo other kinds of extraordinary accounts, from near-death experiences and shamanic traditions to alien abduction stories.

Even these explanations, however, don't settle everything.

The open question is why, if this is purely a matter of random pattern recognition, specific archetypes like insectoid figures or machine elves keep turning up in completely unconnected people around the world, often before they've ever heard of such descriptions.

The Dark Side, Rarely Mentioned

Not every encounter is described in terms of love and wisdom.

According to the Johns Hopkins survey, about 41 percent of respondents felt fear at some point during the experience, although love, joy, and trust remained the dominant emotions across the sample as a whole.

In traditional ayahuasca ceremonies in the Amazon, facilitators and participants sometimes talk about so-called difficult encounters, in which a person experiences panic, loses control of the body, or goes through an intense emotional crisis.

The academic literature on the safety of ayahuasca ceremonies documents that adverse psychological reactions, including the reliving of traumatic memories, are not uncommon, especially in people with a prior history of trauma. Serious physical incidents, including deaths, remain extremely rare and are most often tied to uncertified centers with no medical supervision, or to a dangerous combination of the substance with other medications.

Religious traditions, including certain strands of Christianity and Islam, interpret these episodes as encounters with evil forces. Jungian-minded psychologists, by contrast, see them more as unprocessed, repressed parts of a person's own psyche that they weren't ready to face.

Interestingly, according to reports from therapeutic and integration communities, some people who went through especially harrowing experiences later conclude, months or years afterward, that this very encounter brought them the greatest personal benefit.

These observations haven't been confirmed by controlled clinical studies and remain in the realm of personal testimony, but they show up consistently in settings that deal with the psychotherapeutic integration of psychedelic experiences.

Cultural Legacy and the Legal Framework

Over the past two decades, the cultural context of these encounters has widened further with the arrival of changa, a smokable blend of DMT and plants that contain monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

The blend was developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Australian ethnobotanist Julian Palmer, who went on to promote it at festivals around the world, from Portugal to South America. That made the experience, until then tied mostly to clinical trials or traditional ceremonies, more accessible to the wider psychedelic scene.

In most countries, including the United States and much of Europe, DMT is legally classed among the most strictly controlled substances, which makes research like Strassman's rare and hard to pursue.

Only in the past 10 years or so, alongside renewed scientific interest in psychedelics for treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, have some universities begun to win permits again for controlled DMT research, including studies focused solely on the phenomenon of entity encounters.

What Remains Unresolved

Three decades of renewed research still haven't answered the basic question of whether these beings are something the brain produces, something it uncovers, or something else entirely that we currently have no conceptual framework for.

Phenomenology can't replace proof. A subjective report, however consistent across thousands of people who don't know one another, remains exactly that: a report, not evidence of an independent reality.

Studies suggest that in some people, these aftereffects can persist long after the drug's pharmacological effect has worn off. Researchers call this an enduring change in attitudes, mood, and behavior, and this measurable, long-term consequence is what interests psychedelic science most today, more than the question of whether the beings are "real."

For now, the only instrument available for measuring this phenomenon is the person's own account, given after returning from a state that language struggles to describe.

Until someone finds a way to measure hyperdimensional space from the outside instead of merely describing it from within, the line between discovery and projection stays where it has always been: inside the head of the person who says they saw something.

SOURCES

Davis AK, Clifton JM, Weaver EG, Hurwitz ES, Johnson MW, Griffiths RR. "Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine", Journal of Psychopharmacology, 2020.
Strassman RJ, Qualls CR. "Dose-response study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans. I. Neuroendocrine, autonomic, and cardiovascular effects", Archives of General Psychiatry, 51(2), 1994.
Strassman RJ, Qualls CR, Uhlenhuth EH, Kellner R. "Dose-response study of N,N-dimethyltryptamine in humans. II. Subjective effects and preliminary results of a new rating scale", Archives of General Psychiatry, 51(2), 1994.
Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Park Street Press, 2001.
Christopher Timmermann, analysis for NOEMA magazine
McKenna T. The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFOs, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991. (primary source for the description of "self-transforming machine elves")
St John G. "Aussiewaska: A Cultural History of Changa and Ayahuasca Analogues in Australia", in: Labate BC, Cavnar C, Gearin AK (eds.), The World Ayahuasca Diaspora: Reinventions and Controversies, Routledge, 2016, pp. 143–162.
Barker SA. "N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), an Endogenous Hallucinogen: Past, Present, and Future Research to Determine Its Role and Function", Frontiers in Neuroscience, 12:536, 2018.
Jon Hanna, Aliens, Insectoids, and Elves! Oh, My!, Erowid Extracts, no. 23, November 2012, pp. 8-21.
Jennifer A. Lyke, content analysis of 149 DMT trip reports from Erowid (2019), presented in the talk "DMT Entities: Not Everyone Gets Machine Elves".
Michael P, Luke D, Robinson O. "An Encounter With the Other: A Thematic and Content Analysis of DMT Experiences From a Naturalistic Field Study", Frontiers in Psychology, 12:720717, 2021.
Andrew R. Gallimore, Alien Information Theory: Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game, Strange Worlds Press, 2019.
Gallimore AR, "Restructuring consciousness - the psychedelic state in light of integrated information theory", Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9:346, 2015.
James Kent, Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, 2010.

The Architecture of Eternity: Do Past, Present, and Future All Exist at Once?

2026-09-27T17:32:41.006Z

In March 1955, a month before his own death, Albert Einstein learned that his longtime friend Michele Besso had died.

In a letter of condolence to the Besso family, he wrote a line that still fuels debate among physicists and philosophers of science today: that the distinction between past, present, and future is "only a stubbornly persistent illusion."

It wasn't just a comforting thought for a grieving family.

Einstein's special theory of relativity, published half a century earlier, had already shown mathematically that the flow of time depends on how an observer moves through space.

Philosopher of science Tim Maudlin, however, warns that nothing in relativity itself proves that the past and future are just as real as the present. That, he argues, is a popular but mistaken reading of Einstein's words.

Two People on a Street and a Galaxy 2.5 Million Light-Years Away

To understand why physicists take seriously the idea that the past and future are just as real as the present, it helps to revisit a certain thought experiment.

Physicist Roger Penrose described it in his 1989 book The Emperor's New Mind, building on an argument that physicist C. W. Rietdijk and philosopher Hilary Putnam had each formulated independently years earlier.

Picture two people walking side by side down a street. One is moving in the direction of the Andromeda galaxy; the other is walking the opposite way.

According to special relativity, that tiny difference in walking speed shifts what each of them would consider "now" on Andromeda by several days, purely because of the difference in the direction they're moving.

For one of them, a hypothetical decision by an advanced alien civilization to head for Earth has already been made. For the other, that same decision hasn't happened yet.

The only way to reconcile this within physics is to accept that both events, the deliberation and the decision, already exist somewhere in spacetime, since relativity doesn't allow for a single, universal "now" for the entire universe.

The Architecture of the Block: A Loaf of Bread, Not a Film

Physicists call this static structure the Block Universe, or eternalism.

Instead of picturing the cosmos as a film unspooling frame by frame, eternalists compare it to a loaf of bread that's already been sliced: one end is the Big Bang, the other is the heat death of the universe, and every moment is just a single slice.

Some popularizers sharpen the image even further, describing it as a vast, static crystal in which every moment is forever locked into its own coordinates.

In this model, every person, from birth to death, exists as one long, four-dimensional thread stretched across spacetime.

Physicists often bring this identity to life with a worm analogy: the tail of that thread is your baby self, the head is the version of you on your deathbed, and every cross-section along the way represents a single moment of life.

All of these moments, according to the eternalist view, exist equally, just at different coordinates.

Eternalism, however, is not a consensus position in physics or the philosophy of science.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that the link between relativity and eternalism remains disputed: some philosophers argue that accepting the spacetime framework necessarily implies eternalism, while others reject that connection.

The opposing position, presentism (the idea that only the present exists), runs into serious trouble when confronted with relativistic physics, but it hasn't been formally disproven.

Why We Feel Time Passing at All

If the universe really is a static block, an open question remains: why don't people experience it that way? Part of the answer lies in thermodynamics.

The second law of thermodynamics, the only physical law that distinguishes past from future, holds that disorder in a closed system always increases: a shattered cup never reassembles itself.

The brain exploits that asymmetry to build memories, spending energy to create order within itself while increasing disorder in its surroundings.

We remember the past because it left a measurable trace behind; we don't remember the future because, thermodynamically speaking, no such trace exists yet.

Neuroscience research further shows that our "present moment" isn't instantaneous at all.

Experiments using deliberately shuffled film clips, published in the journal PLOS ONE, show that the brain integrates sensory information within a window of roughly two to three seconds before we consciously register it as a single, unified experience.

Anything shorter than that never reaches consciousness; anything longer already becomes memory.

Many Worlds, One Equation

The Block Universe rests mainly on relativity, but the twentieth century also gave physics quantum mechanics, a theory in which particles exist only as probabilities before they're measured.

A young doctoral student named Hugh Everett tried to reconcile those two views at Princeton University, in a thesis he defended in 1957.

Everett's interpretation, later named the many-worlds interpretation, holds that the wave function never collapses into a single outcome.

Every time a quantum measurement has more than one possible result, the universe, according to this idea, branches: every outcome happens, each in its own branch of reality.

John Wheeler, Everett's mentor at Princeton, was thrilled with the work at first.

In May 1956, he personally traveled to Copenhagen to present Everett's ideas there, but the reaction from the physics community was cold.

Everett himself didn't reach Copenhagen until 1959, at Wheeler's urging, to meet with Niels Bohr, but that meeting didn't improve matters either.

Nearly seventy years later, the many-worlds interpretation remains a serious, but experimentally unconfirmed, interpretation of quantum mechanics.

It makes identical measurement predictions to competing interpretations, meaning there's currently no laboratory way to determine whether the universe really does branch.

Critics such as physicist Adrian Kent dispute even the mathematical derivation of the rule used to determine the probability of outcomes within the theory itself.

Where the Science Stops and the Speculation Begins

Up to this point, the story stands on fairly solid ground: relativity, thermodynamics, and quantum mechanics, even allowing for contested interpretations.

From here on, popular literature about the "crystal universe" often makes leaps that physics doesn't support.

Neuroscience generally explains déjà vu as a brief memory glitch, one in which the brain mistakenly files a current experience as something already lived through.

Some authors, drawing on physicist David Bohm's idea of the "implicate order," a 1980s concept holding that the universe might resemble a hologram in which every fragment is connected to the whole, speculate that déjà vu could be a brief "glimpse" into other parts of spacetime.

Bohm was a respected and serious physicist, but applying his idea to déjà vu remains speculation without a shred of experimental evidence, and even within physics, many regard his implicate-order theory as more of a philosophical metaphor than a testable model.

A similar fate has befallen Wheeler's delayed-choice experiment, often cited in popular writing as proof that a decision made in the present can affect how a particle behaved in the past.

A detailed mathematical analysis of this experiment shows the opposite: the results can be fully explained by standard quantum mechanics, with no signal traveling backward through time whatsoever.

What the experiment actually demonstrates is that a particle has no defined property before it's measured, not that the future changes the past.

Near-death experiences are no exception to this pattern either.

The life review, in which a dying person reportedly sees their entire life at once, has been documented since 1892, when Swiss geologist Albert Heim collected accounts from mountain climbers who survived falls. The phenomenon is real and well documented in the medical literature.

Its explanation, however, remains a matter of ongoing research within neuroscience itself, not evidence of anything supernatural.

Studies link these experiences to disrupted sensory processing and heightened activity in the brain's temporal lobes during extreme stress, not to any "lifting of filters" that supposedly conceal a broader reality.

A common claim in popular literature holds that near-death experiences prove death is simply an exit from the illusion of time. No peer-reviewed scientific paper, however, has confirmed this.

What Remains: Comfort Without Proof

Add it all up, and the boundary becomes clearer than it first appears.

That there's no single, universal "now" for the entire universe: that's established physics, confirmed by hundreds of experiments since 1905.

That relativity necessarily means the past and future exist in the same way as the present: that's an influential and seriously defended, but still contested, philosophical interpretation of that physics, not its inevitable consequence.

Everything else, déjà vu as a leak in time, quantum mechanics as proof of immortality, near-death experiences as an escape from illusion, belongs to speculation, however comforting it may be.

What speculation like this actually offers isn't proof, but the thought that the moments we've lost haven't been erased, just placed somewhere beyond our reach.

I've read Einstein's letter to the Besso family several times. The physics in it is beyond dispute. The comfort many people draw from it, the idea that none of us ever truly disappears, remains, for now, beyond what any experiment can confirm.

SOURCES

Quote Investigator – the origin of Einstein's quote from his letter to the Besso family
Tim Maudlin, "Einstein didn't think time is an illusion", IAI TV, 2022. – link
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy – "Being and Becoming in Modern Physics"
APS Physics Magazine – "Quantum Milestones, 1957: Sprouting Parallel Universes"
Scientific American – "The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett"
Springer, Quantum Studies: Mathematics and Foundations – "Why delayed choice experiments do Not imply retrocausality"
PLOS ONE / PMC – "Temporal Integration Windows for Naturalistic Visual Sequences"
PMC – "Near death experience: neuroscience perspective"

The Galactic Network: Bill Herrmann's Metal Bar From the Sky

2026-09-26T15:18:39.314Z

Officer Pike Limehouse of the Dorchester County Sheriff's Office took the call just after one in the morning: a man was standing alone in a remote field near Summerville, South Carolina, and seemed on the verge of a breakdown.

When he arrived, he found a young diesel mechanic, William "Bill" Herrmann, so shaken that the officer later admitted, on camera for a film crew, that he could recall few people he had seen in such a state.

Herrmann claimed that just moments earlier he'd been standing in his yard in North Charleston, and then, with no memory of the trip at all, suddenly found himself in a field about fifteen miles from his home.

That episode of missing time, from the night of March 18, 1978, became the opening chapter of one of the longest-documented contact cases in American ufology, and one of the hardest to untangle.

Since then, Herrmann's name has turned up regularly in newspaper articles, ufology catalogs, and books, always in the same context: the man who supposedly photographed a glowing disk over Charleston and received a message from an organization of alien civilizations he called "the Network."

The Mechanic Who Watched the Sky

In the second half of the 1970s, Herrmann lived in a mobile home in North Charleston, worked as a diesel mechanic, and was an active member of a Baptist church.

The first sightings of a strange light above his car began in November 1977, and repeated nighttime observations of pulsing objects over the wooded, marshy land near his house soon followed.

On January 22, 1978, he managed to snap nine photographs of a glowing disk. The pictures later made the rounds in newspapers, magazines, and even Japanese television.

His wife and several neighbors said they had noticed similar lights that same season, giving researchers additional testimony, but not confirmation of his claims.

Researchers from the Mutual UFO Network later analyzed the photographs and found no signs of tampering on the negatives, a finding that in itself proves nothing about the object's origin; it only rules out obvious fakery.

"I'd never been interested in science fiction. I thought that was all hogwash. Garbage," Herrmann told a reporter, adding that by then he'd had two contact experiences and fifteen UFO sightings.

The story took a real toll on his daily life.

On November 10, 1981, the church where he taught children removed him from that role after part of the congregation linked his televised confession about UFOs to satanic influence.

That same day, according to Stevens's records, he wrote an essay titled "Inevitable Destruction," warning that an unending firestorm would soon engulf the planet because of the geopolitical events of the time.

A year earlier, in an interview with the Index-Journal of Greenwood, he said his wife had put up with more than most people could: nights spent waiting for a husband who sat for hours in the car with binoculars, watching the sky.

An Object That Could Be Tested

Of everything Herrmann described, one detail stands apart because it could actually be verified: the metal bar.

According to his account, on April 21, 1979, a bar engraved with the letters "MAN" and a series of unknown symbols materialized in his bedroom inside a bluish-green sphere of light.

AI illustration of the metal bar described in the Bill Herrmann case, based on available testimony and descriptions. This is not an authentic photograph and does not represent the object's actual appearance.

A month later, on May 16, he deliberately went back to the site of his earlier encounters, where, in his own words, he was told the bar was a gift.

According to a Charleston News and Courier report of November 18, 1979, Omni magazine sent a small sample from the bar to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for analysis.

It's a rare moment in the story with an actual lab result behind it, and that result showed an ordinary cast lead alloy with six percent antimony, a composition close to what you'd find in lead pipe or car battery grids.

According to the laboratory report by Dr. Walter W. Walker reproduced in Stevens's book, the small symbols on top of the bar were cast with it, while the letters "MAN" were pressed in with a blade later, and the alloy itself was described as "indistinguishable from terrestrial hard lead."

That scientific finding doesn't support the claim of a material with unknown origins. If anything, it points the other way.

The bar itself disappeared in the early 1980s. Herrmann claimed intelligence agencies had confiscated it, a claim that, unlike the lab analysis, was never backed up by a single document or independent witness.

Tests That Couldn't Prove the Encounter

Herrmann's story went through a series of formal tests that are rare for cases like his.

In February 1978, he took a polygraph test administered by Thomas M. Olsen, then president of the UFO Information Retrieval Center in Maryland.

He later took a PSE test (psychological stress evaluation) administered by an examiner named McWinston, who said he personally screened hundreds of people every year who claimed to have seen a UFO or made contact with aliens.

McWinston found no signs of deliberate deception, but stressed that such a test can't establish whether an encounter actually happened, only whether the person believes what they're saying.

The distinction is subtle but crucial: none of the tests given to Herrmann confirmed that the encounter happened, only that he sincerely believed it did.

He also underwent hypnosis led by James Harder, a researcher affiliated with APRO, in an attempt to reconstruct the missing stretches of memory.

Stevens claimed the symbols engraved on the bar represented a star map of the constellation Reticulum, visible only from the Southern Hemisphere, in a configuration he said matched a rare Hungarian star chart.

No one else independently confirmed that claim. Stevens also sent Herrmann's photographs to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena for digital enhancement, but the results were never found or published, one more thread that disappears into the paperwork of this case.

A Crew Without Switches

According to Herrmann's account, he was brought inside the craft after a noninvasive medical exam.

The interior, he said, looked as though it had been cast in a single piece, with no visible seams, and the air smelled fresh, like ozone after a summer thunderstorm.

He said he never saw a single switch, handle, or control panel anywhere. By his account, the craft's systems responded to touch, or directly to the crew's thoughts.

The only being who communicated with him, called "the Leader," sent messages telepathically, while the rest of the crew wore dark red uniforms bearing the emblem of a winged serpent.

That description is a sharp departure from the popular stereotype of the Grays: short beings with large black eyes, most often associated with abductions from the second half of the twentieth century.

Herrmann's beings were, in his telling, taller and more open to communication, a difference that, like everything else in the story, comes down to one man's testimony with no independent confirmation.

An Archivist With a Past of His Own

The key figure in documenting the story was Wendelle C. Stevens, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel who became a researcher for the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) after his military career.

In 1981, he self-published a book devoted entirely to Herrmann's case: several hundred pages of illustrations, diagrams, and examples of the supposed alien script.

His reputation within ufology circles was a mixed one. He was regarded as one of the field's most dedicated archivists, a man who collected thousands of testimonies over the course of his career.

At the same time, critics point out that he backed nearly every contactee whose story he investigated, including some whose claims were later publicly debunked, which undercuts the value of his conclusions as independent confirmation.

The best-known example is Swiss farmer Eduard "Billy" Meier, whose story of contact with Pleiadian beings Stevens spent years wholeheartedly defending as credible.

Today, much of the ufology community considers that case one of the most elaborate known hoaxes in the field's history, with some alleging that certain photographs were taken using model spacecraft hung from string.

That willingness to defend such a discredited story without reservation further undercuts the weight of his support for Herrmann.

Stevens himself, apart from his work in ufology, later faced serious legal trouble.

According to Legs McNeil's "Loving the Aliens" in SPIN (July 1987), Stevens had pleaded guilty to 3 of 10 counts of child molestation, four counts of furnishing obscene or harmful material to minors, and two counts on the film and pictures charges. He was sentenced to seven years.

The Network, Zeta Reticuli, and a Family of Similar Stories

According to Herrmann, the beings who contacted him identified themselves as members of a species from Zeta Reticuli, a binary star system in the constellation Reticulum, and claimed to come from a distance of about 32 light years.

Modern parallax measurements place that system at roughly 39 light years from Earth, a discrepancy any fact check has to note, even though it doesn't by itself prove anything about the rest of the story.

Herrmann claimed the beings described an organization of dozens of species from that part of the galaxy, what he called "the Network," tasked with monitoring civilizations that had mastered nuclear energy and placing them under a kind of quarantine.

This kind of narrative, a network or federation of civilizations, isn't unique to Herrmann's case. Similar language and cosmology show up across many contactee accounts going back to the 1950s.

The Zeta Reticuli system became known in ufology mainly through the 1961 case of Betty and Barney Hill in New Hampshire, one of the first widely publicized abduction stories in the United States.

In the late 1960s, amateur researcher Marjorie Fish proposed that the star map Betty Hill drew under hypnosis resembled the layout of stars seen from that system's vicinity, an interpretation that made its way into popular ufology lore even though astronomy never accepted it as evidence.

Herrmann's case ties these two narratives even closer together, describing beings similar to the ones the Hills reported, with some differences in height and eye appearance.

In ufology literature, the case is often ranked alongside other frequently cited events, like the Rendlesham Forest incident in England (1980) or the Ariel School encounter in Zimbabwe (1994).

That kind of ranking says more about how ufology builds its own canon of "greatest hits" than it does about how well-proven any of these claims actually are.

What Verification Can't Reach

Most of Herrmann's story can't be confirmed by any independent source.

The claims of a planetary quarantine supposedly dating back to World War II, of 1940s and '50s radar systems that destabilized the gravitational fields of spacecraft and caused crashes like the one at Roswell, of a species that genetically shaped humanity, and of warnings tied to the years after 2027, all of it exists solely within Herrmann's testimony and Stevens's records.

No document, scientific paper, or independent institution confirms any of it.

That doesn't necessarily mean deliberate deception. The difference between unverifiable and false isn't a small one, and most researchers who've studied the case have concluded that the lack of corroboration makes it unproven rather than disproven.

Over time, Herrmann's case faded into the background of the ufology community: occasionally mentioned as a curiosity, rarely treated as a serious reference point.

What happened to him in the decades that followed is hard to say with any certainty.

One unsigned comment on an old ufology forum claims that Herrmann later rejected the alien story entirely, attributing the whole experience to demonic influence after joining a fundamentalist evangelical congregation.

The source's anonymity means this claim can't be treated as an established fact, but it does illustrate just how little is reliably known about his later life.

What's Proven, and What Isn't

A handful of elements remain solidly documented: the 1978 police call, photographs that were analyzed without any evidence of tampering, polygraph and PSE tests that found no deliberate deception, the MIT lab finding on the metal bar's composition, and Stevens's extensive, if biased, investigation.

Everything else, including the Galactic Network itself, its mission, and its rules for humanity, exists solely as Herrmann's testimony, filtered through a researcher who never questioned a single part of the story he was documenting.

For the reader, the dividing line is clear. The documents show that Bill Herrmann ended up in the middle of a remote field that night. What they don't show is that a Galactic Network is how he got there.

Video in which Bill Herrmann recounts his 1978 close encounter near Charleston Air Force Base in an exclusive interview for Japanese television.

SOURCES

URECAT catalog: William Herrmann, Summerville, March 18, 1978
Charleston City Paper – Shining a light on UFO sightings (Dustin Waters, 2016)
BBC Sky at Night Magazine – Zeta Reticuli star system
Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology – Hermann, William J.
Legs McNeil, "Loving the Aliens," SPIN, July 1987, p. 54 (archive.org)
Wendelle C. Stevens and William Herrmann, UFO Contact from Reticulum, self-published, 1981
News and Courier (Charleston), November 18, 1979 (via the URECAT catalog)

Boskop Man: How One Skull Became the Legend of a Genius Species

2026-10-02T09:12:22.000Z

In December 1925, editors at the London journal Nature received a short letter. Its author was Robert Broom, a Scottish-born physician and paleontologist who had spent most of his career digging up fossils in South Africa.

He was reminding readers of a conclusion he'd reached seven years earlier. The skull's bone ran up to 0.6 inches (15 millimeters) thick in places, and its brain volume, he wrote, had convinced him back in 1918 to give it a rank of its own within the human family: Homo capensis.

That skull is known today as Boskop Man, named for the South African town near where it was dug up twelve years before.

Across dozens of ancient-mystery websites, the story still circulates as proof that a humanoid species smarter than modern humans once existed, one whose existence science supposedly kept quiet.

Records from scientific archives and journals tell a very different story.

How Boskop Man Got a Name Science No Longer Uses

The story begins in the fall of 1913, on a farm near the town of Boskop in the Transvaal.

Two farmers, digging a drainage ditch, came across fragments of a skull and part of a jaw.

They weren't even sure the remains were human. They settled the dispute with a bet, turning to Frederick William Fitzsimons, director of the museum in Port Elizabeth, to make the call.

Fitzsimons immediately recognized the find's value and persuaded the farmers to donate the remains to the museum.

At first he linked them to Neanderthals because of the bone's thickness, even though the skull lacked the pronounced brow ridges typical of that species.

When the skull was sent to Cape Town for examination, paleontologist Sidney Haughton noted its similarities to Cro-Magnon man. A few years later, Broom took things a step further.

The 1913 find was incomplete. What survived were large sections of the frontal and parietal bones, part of the occipital bone, one temporal bone, and a fragment of the lower jaw. Haughton estimated the skull's greatest length at about 8 inches (205 millimeters) and its greatest breadth at about 6 inches (154 millimeters).

A reconstruction of the Homo capensis skull as Robert Broom envisioned it in his 1918 paper. The shaded areas show the bone that was actually recovered. Public domain

Similar large-boned finds turned up in the decades that followed, at Tsitsikamma, Matjes River, Fish Hoek, and the Springbok Flats site, convincing researchers they weren't looking at a single anomaly but at the remains of an entire, previously unknown race.

In a paper published in 1918, Broom declared the skull a representative of a brand-new species.

His estimate of its brain volume, corrected for the missing parts, came to about 1,980 cc.

Later estimates diverge, mostly because the bone's thickness made measurement tricky: paleoanthropologist John Hawks puts the figure at around 1,800 cc, with reported values ranging from 1,700 to 2,000 cc. The average human brain today measures about 1,350 cc.

Broom was no fringe figure looking for a sensation to build a career on.

The Royal Society elected him a fellow in 1920, and he's best known today for discoveries he made decades later: he described the species Paranthropus robustus in 1938, and in 1947 he found the skull known as "Mrs. Ples" in the Sterkfontein cave, one of the pivotal finds in the study of human origins.

When he wrote about the Boskop skull three decades earlier, he was working from a sample of just a handful of specimens and measurement methods that had yet to be refined, not out of any intent to manufacture a sensation.

The difference is real, but it isn't unique. As Hawks puts it, the skull is large, but it falls well within the range of sizes found among recent males.

What set the Boskop skull apart from the wider pool of human remains wasn't just its size, but the thickness of its bone, which made measurements unreliable. As it would turn out, that was only the beginning of the problem.

A Childlike Face That Became a Literary Image, Not a Scientific Finding

Along with the skull's size, early researchers noticed something else: a face much smaller than they'd expect on such a large head.

Anthropology calls the tendency to retain childlike facial features into adulthood pedomorphism, and in a milder form, it's also what distinguishes a human face from an ape's.

Unlike a gorilla's, the human face stays relatively flat and small throughout development, rather than growing a pronounced muzzle with age.

The claim that the Boskop face took up only a fifth of the skull's surface, versus a third in the average European adult, doesn't come from Broom's scientific papers at all.

It was popularized by the American anthropologist and essayist Loren Eiseley, in a piece from his collection The Immense Journey (1957), where he described Boskop Man as a man of the future trapped in the distant past, with a face that was almost childlike.

Eiseley wasn't a specialist in fossil skulls. He was a writer known for his poetic style and his gift for turning scientific subjects into lyrical prose.

His portrait of Boskop Man was more a literary image than the result of measurements published in a peer-reviewed paper.

Half a century later, neuroscientists Gary Lynch and Richard Granger picked up that same image in their book Big Brain (2008), presenting it as a serious anthropological hypothesis.

How One Book Calculated an IQ of 149 for an Extinct Species

In Big Brain, Lynch and Granger calculated that a population with an average brain of 1,750 cc, about 30 percent larger than today's average, would have an average IQ of 149.

Discover magazine picked up the passage in 2009, carrying the claim to a far wider audience than the book alone would ever have reached.

The math rests on the assumption that brain size explains between 10 and 20 percent of the variation in intelligence test scores, and on a regression equation the authors never cited or explained anywhere.

Paleoanthropologist John Hawks responded on his blog that no human population has ever had an average brain of 1,750 cc, and that estimating IQ from a fossil skull makes no scientific sense, since IQ tests measure ability within a living population, not the volume of a bone.

More recent data backs up Hawks's skepticism.

The most comprehensive meta-analysis to date of the link between brain volume and IQ scores, published in 2022 in the journal Royal Society Open Science and drawing on more than 26,000 subjects across 194 independent samples, found a correlation coefficient of about 0.24.

That's a weak-to-moderate relationship: a correlation of 0.24 means brain volume explains roughly six percent of the variation in scores, well under the 10 to 20 percent the Big Brain calculation assumes. It is nowhere near strong enough to support estimating the intelligence of an extinct population from skull volume alone.

Neither Lynch nor Granger is an anthropologist or a paleontologist. Both are researchers in neuroscience and cognitive science.

Their grasp of the brain isn't in question, but their reading of early-twentieth-century fossil finds, without accounting for research published after the 1940s, is.

Hawks described it as a book that presents 1920s anthropology as though it were the current state of the science.

There has been a genuine decline in average brain volume in part of the human population over the last ten thousand years, but the explanation has nothing to do with losing intelligence.

Hawks connects it to the energy cost of a large brain, the longer developmental period it takes to mature, and dietary changes after the rise of agriculture, when the average person's protein and fat intake declined.

None of those three factors supports the story of an extinct, more brilliant species.

What Actually Happened in the 1950s, and Why It Wasn't a Cover-Up

The idea of a distinct, big-skulled species didn't disappear because it made anyone uncomfortable. It disappeared because the evidence piled up against it.

In 1958, anthropologist Ronald Singer published a detailed review of every similar skull found up to that point.

He concluded there was no basis for carving out a separate group from the known range of variation in southern African populations, including the surviving population known today as the Khoisan.

Part of the problem was methodological. In their search for more Boskop-type specimens, researchers kept picking out the largest skulls from a much broader and more varied sample instead of comparing them against contemporary African populations.

Skulls found near Tsitsikamma in 1921 were classified as the Boskop type based solely on comparison with the original find, with no check against known Khoikhoi skulls, the population they ultimately turned out to belong to.

By 1963, anthropologist Don Brothwell was able to conclude that the original Boskop skull was simply a large example of the Khoisan type, with nothing to justify separate-species status.

By the 1970s, the name "Boskopoid" survived in the scientific literature only as a historical label, with no connection to actual taxonomy.

Eiseley's literary essay about the man of the future appeared a year before Singer published his review.

While science was closing the book on a separate species, popular literature, quite independently, was just opening one.

Those two threads, the scientific and the literary, have periodically crossed paths ever since in writing about ancient mysteries, with an added layer about a suppressed science that never existed in the original reports.

Why the Story Still Circulates, From a Popular Book to Aliens

The myth of Boskop Man has survived for decades the same way many ancient-mystery stories do: through popular books and websites that recycle old, long-abandoned scientific hypotheses and present them as current knowledge.

Despite sharp criticism from experts, Big Brain has stayed in print and is still cited in articles about "lost species," often without a single reference to anything written after 1958.

Once science rejects an idea, it's easy to reshape it into a story of suppressed truth, especially when the original find is old, incomplete, and far removed from public view.

Some amateur writers fill that gap with speculation about Atlanteans or human-alien hybrids, even though there's no documented trace of any such claim, not in Broom's papers and not in any later scientific research.

A similar fate has befallen other fossil finds interpreted through the lens of a single incomplete skull.

Without a wider sample and modern comparison methods, any statistical outlier can easily turn into a story about a lost civilization.

What actually survives from the Boskop Man story, once you set the legend aside, is quite solid, though the two threads of evidence shouldn't be confused with each other.

Later anthropology, Singer's 1958 review and Brothwell's 1963 analysis, linked the Boskop skull and similar finds to the range of variation in southern African populations, above all to the ancestors of today's Khoisan peoples.

That's a historical conclusion based on morphology, reached by comparing skull shape and size, not by genetic analysis.

Separately, a 2020 genetic study from Uppsala University, based on twenty-five complete genomes from five Khoisan populations, showed that today's Khoisan peoples carry genetic lineages representing the deepest known split within Homo sapiens, older than any other branch of humanity.

According to the 2017 study, that split happened about 260,000 to 350,000 years ago, long before the ancestors of today's Europeans and Asians had even left Africa. As much as a quarter of the genetic variants found in Khoisan populations exist nowhere else on Earth.

That study, however, is about living populations. The DNA from the actual 1913 skull was never sequenced, so this genetic finding can't be tied directly to that specific fossil, only to the population context that its morphology places it in.

What can be said with confidence is that the 1913 skull never belonged to a lost, more brilliant species.

It belonged to the range of variation within populations that genetics today credits with one of the deepest and oldest lineages in human history.

SOURCES

Robert Broom, "The Boskop Skull", Nature, 1925
Robert Broom, "The Evidence Afforded by the Boskop Skull of a New Species of Primitive Man (Homo capensis)", Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 23, pt. 2, 1918, pp. 63–79 — illustration source; full text and figures on the Internet Archive (public domain)
"Robert Broom 1866–1951", Obituary Notices of Fellows of the Royal Society, vol. 8, 1952 — the Royal Society's biography of Broom: his fellowship and career
John Hawks, "The 'amazing' Boskops"
John Hawks, "Return of the 'amazing' Boskops"
Gary Lynch and Richard Granger, "Who Were The Boskops And Were They Really Smarter Than Us?", Discover, 2009
Jakob Pietschnig, Daniel Gerdesmann, Michael Zeiler, Martin Voracek, "Of differing methods, disputed estimates and discordant interpretations: the meta-analytical multiverse of brain volume and IQ associations", Royal Society Open Science, 2022
Carina M. Schlebusch et al., "Khoe-San Genomes Reveal Unique Variation and Confirm the Deepest Population Divergence in Homo sapiens", Molecular Biology and Evolution, 2020
Carina M. Schlebusch et al., "Southern African ancient genomes estimate modern human divergence to 350,000 to 260,000 years ago", Science, 2017

The 1994 Ariel School UFO Incident: What Really Happened in Zimbabwe?

2026-09-24T21:37:48.980Z

In archival storage at Rice University in Houston lie 150 boxes of documents, tapes, and notes left behind by psychiatrist John Mack.

In November 1994, Mack recorded interviews with children from Ariel School in Zimbabwe. Sixty-two students claimed that during morning recess they had seen a UFO land, along with a being who, as they tell it, telepathically delivered a message about the destruction of the planet.

The material was digitized as early as 2023, yet to this day the public has seen only excerpts of those conversations. The full recordings remain unavailable, even to researchers who ask for them.

The case is known as the Ariel School incident, named for a private elementary school in the town of Ruwa, about 12 miles southeast of Harare.

According to 62 students between the ages of 6 and 12, silvery objects came down onto a neglected, brush-covered patch of ground right beside the schoolyard during recess on Friday, September 16, 1994.

Within days, the story had made the rounds of the world's media, and writer and researcher Jerome Clark would later rank it among the most significant close encounters of the third kind of that decade.

Three decades later, the witnesses are still divided. Some insist they remember details none of them could have invented, while one former student admitted on television that he made the whole thing up on his own.

Two Nights Earlier, the Sky Was Already Burning

Another event came before the story, and this one is confirmed.

On the evening of September 14, 1994, people across southern Africa watched a fireball slice across the sky, and the radio station ZBC asked listeners to call in and report what they had seen.

Calls came in from Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Botswana, with descriptions ranging from a single shooting star to a fleet of 16 glowing craft.

According to Brian Dunning's research for the Skeptoid podcast, the fireball was the remains of a Zenit-2 rocket reentering the atmosphere.

That rocket had launched the Cosmos 2290 satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in late August of that year, and data on individual pieces of it show they kept falling through the atmosphere throughout September, right in the window when the fireball was reported.

That episode of regional UFO mania, as Dunning called it, gripped southern Africa two days before any child at Ariel School told their story.

The Recess That Turned Into Panic

The teachers at Ariel School were in a meeting when recess began that Friday morning.

The only adult in the schoolyard was the woman who ran the school snack bar, suddenly surrounded by excited, frightened children.

According to later accounts, the children described one or several silvery objects that had come down or hovered over a thorny, overgrown stretch of ground just outside the school fence, an area they were normally forbidden to enter because of snakes.

Some of the children ran away, while the older ones stayed to watch. According to Dunning's research, of the roughly 250 students at school that day, 62 said they saw something, while nearly 200 reported nothing unusual.

UFO sightings with large numbers of witnesses are far from rare. Witnesses tend to agree on only a few basic claims, while the most important details of the story often diverge.

The 62 students who reported seeing a UFO in Zimbabwe in 1994 each described the event in their own way, and those very differences show how hard it is to boil their testimony down to a single version.

The Investigation That Contaminated Itself

News of the story reached the BBC's Zimbabwe correspondent, Tim Leach, by way of the same radio appeal ZBC had used to collect eyewitness reports of the fireball.

Leach visited the school on September 19 and recorded the first interviews with students and staff. He later said he had found war zones easier to endure than that conversation.

The next day, Cynthia Hind arrived as well. She was the editor of the newsletter UFO Afrinews and MUFON's representative for Africa.

She asked the children to draw what they had seen. Out of dozens of drawings, she herself picked 22 that she felt showed the sighting most clearly, while the rest, later analyses found, differed widely from one another.

Hind interviewed the children in groups of two to six while the others listened and watched, which Dunning points to as a classic recipe for cross-contaminating witness testimony.

She argued publicly that country children had no access to popular culture about aliens, so their drawings of flying saucers had to come from real experience.

That claim doesn't hold up, though. Ariel was one of the most expensive private schools in the region, with a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a golf course, and it sat on the outskirts of Harare, a city of about 1.2 million people in 1994.

Its students were taught in English and had access to the same television and movie theaters as children in any other modern city.

The Environmental Message Didn't Arrive Until Mack Did

On Hind's advice, Leach contacted John Mack, a Harvard professor of psychiatry who had published a book on alien abductions that year and was actively looking for new cases to investigate.

Budd Hopkins and John Mack during a hypnosis session with a young woman in Istanbul. Photo: Becket01, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Mack didn't reach Ariel School until November, more than 10 weeks after the event, and interviewed 12 children whose transcripts, according to the biography by Ralph Blumenthal, eventually ran to 104 pages.

At the time, Harvard was running an internal investigation of Mack over his methods with patients who claimed to have been abducted by aliens.

The inquiry ended in 1995 and Mack kept working, but the episode shows how contested his approach to the subject was, even within his own profession.

What the case is most famous for, a telepathic message about pollution and the destruction of the planet, doesn't appear in the earlier reports by Leach or Hind.

According to Dunning, that element enters the story only with Mack's interviews, and Hind didn't add it to her own reporting until afterward. Even in Mack's own interviews, only three of the 12 children mentioned the message, according to an analysis published in Skeptical Inquirer in 2025.

Dunning reads this as a result of Mack's own activism against nuclear weapons and pollution, which, in his assessment, shaped the questions Mack put to the children. That is Dunning's interpretation, not a proven fact, but the chronological order of the documents can be verified.

In one of those interviews, an 11-year-old girl said, according to a clip of the interview quoted by the Mail & Guardian, that "we mustn't get too technologed," a clumsy phrase that sounds more like a child fumbling for words than an adult's warning.

Africa Has a Long History of Episodes Like This

Mass hysteria in African schools is hardly a rare phenomenon.

A literature review by psychiatrist Demobly Kokota, published in the Malawi Medical Journal in 2011, documents numerous episodes in which students, most often preadolescent and adolescent girls, developed symptoms of fear, screaming, or fainting at the same time, with no physical cause.

Kokota also cites a 1962 case at a boarding school in Tanzania, where an epidemic of laughter spread to the surrounding villages and lasted 18 months.

Her conclusion is that the psychosocial environment, stress, and emotional tension play a decisive role in spreading such episodes, which usually subside once the children are physically separated and reassured that there is no danger.

Besides hysteria, researchers have proposed more concrete explanations.

Gideon Reid has put forward the hypothesis that the children may have mistaken puppets used by traveling theater troupes for the beings they described.

In those years, such troupes toured schools in rural Zimbabwe promoting awareness of AIDS, literacy, and farming practices, and the puppets' look, with big eyes and dark clothing, resembles the descriptions the children gave.

None of these hypotheses has been confirmed by physical evidence, just as the claim of an alien craft hasn't been. They all remain plausible explanations, not proven facts.

A Confession That Contradicts Itself

In a 2023 episode of the Netflix series Encounters, a former Ariel School student identified only as Dallyn said he had made up the whole event himself.

By his account, he wanted to get out of class, so he pointed out a rock glinting in the sun to a friend and claimed it was an alien spaceship. Within half an hour, he says, the whole school was talking about aliens.

As VICE reported, Dallyn added that the other witnesses had essentially talked themselves into believing they'd seen something. Another former student, introduced in the same documentary as Lisil, describes a long-lasting fear left by that day, including nightmares that, she says, continue to this day.

Dallyn's confession, however, doesn't survive a check against his own earlier words.

In a 2008 interview, 15 years before the Netflix confession, the same Dallyn described on camera an object whose light changed colors, a completely different scene from the glinting rock he talks about today.

His newer version also clashes with the accounts of other former students in the same documentary, several of whom still describe direct eye contact with a being with large, dark eyes.

One witness's confession doesn't prove a hoax for all 62, just as the others' steadfast claims don't prove that aliens visited.

The 150 Boxes No One Has Seen

Hind and Mack are both dead now. Hind died in 2000, and Mack in 2004, when he was killed in a traffic accident in London. Neither can decide the fate of the recordings anymore. They left that in the hands of former associates.

In 2007, Mack's assistant, Dominique Callimanopulos, entrusted the material to Randall Nickerson, a self-described abduction survivor and former patient of Mack's. His testimony appears in Mack's 1994 book, and the two appeared together on The Oprah Winfrey Show that same year.

It took Nickerson 15 years to turn that material into the feature-length documentary Ariel Phenomenon, released in 2022, in which the now-adult witnesses mostly stick to what they said as children.

Journalist Gideon Reid of The Skeptic has spent years trying to get access to the unedited footage in the Rice University archive, and he argues that existing documentaries rely on an editing trick in which separate shots are spliced together so they seem to belong to the same moment.

In one example, a shot of Leach describing his call to Mack cuts straight to a shot of Mack walking across the schoolyard, erasing the 10-week gap between the two events. The head of the archive also told Reid that the material still isn't ready for researchers, even though it was publicly announced in 2023 that everything had been digitized.

Of the 12 children Mack recorded, only seven have appeared in clips shown to the public across three decades of documentaries.

The remaining five interviews have been seen by no one outside a small circle of collaborators, and how those 12 were chosen from a total of 62 witnesses remains unexplained.

Until those recordings are opened up, the Ariel School case remains what it was in 1994: a story pieced together from clips that other people chose to show us.

A short overview of the Ariel School case and the children's testimony, from the Think Anomalous channel.

SOURCES

Brian Dunning, "The 1994 Ruwa Zimbabwe Alien Encounter", Skeptoid Podcast
Demobly Kokota, "Episodes of mass hysteria in African schools: A study of literature", Malawi Medical Journal, 2011
Gideon Reid, "The seemingly impossible task of getting access to Ariel School's 'Impossible Archive'", The Skeptic
Nathaniel Janowitz, "A 1994 UFO Sighting by Children Changed Lives. What If This Guy Made It Up?", VICE
Sean Christie, "Remembering Zimbabwe's great alien invasion", Mail & Guardian
NPR, "John Mack, Author of Lawrence Book, Dies in London"
Ralph Blumenthal, The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack, University of New Mexico Press, 2021.
"A Closer Look at Encounters and the Ariel School Sighting", Skeptical Inquirer, 2025