Ariel School (Ruwa, 1994) — The Story of Children in Zimbabwe Encountering a UFO [PowerfulJRE (The Joe Rogan Experience)]

Source: YouTube, "The Story of Children in Zimbabwe Encountering a UFO", PowerfulJRE (The Joe Rogan Experience) channel — podcast clip.
URL: https://youtu.be/TukvVnadRic (8:18; ~7.6M views; uploaded 2020-12-04)
Captured: 2026-06-11 via YouTube auto-captions. Auto-caption text is lowercase and unpunctuated.
What this is: A Joe Rogan Experience segment recounting the Ariel School incident over the archival interview audio. Part of the Ariel School (Ruwa, Zimbabwe, 16 Sep 1994) source set — see ../../sources/ariel-school-ufo-1994.

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the jurgen experience i
was doing my first documentary back in
1997 when i was just naive enough to
think i can get an interview with steven
spielberg
we had a mutual friend involved this
woman janet
and she gets back to me and she's like
yeah so uh spielberg's definitely not
gonna meet with you
but he knows you're working on this ufo
documentary he thinks you should look
into this landing case that happened in
africa at the school
and i said to myself at the time and
remind you know remind you guys that i
was making a film
on ufos and i dismissed it so quickly
because i thought
there's no way that a mass landing
with the sheer volume of eyewitness
testimony at a school
in broad daylight could happen and the
whole world not know about it so i just
walked away from that story for about 10
years
10 years later i'm doing an event at the
national press club with
with leslie kane who was part of the
article in new york times it came out in
2017 and she introduced me to this guy
randall nickerson and she's like oh he's
working on this landing case in africa
long story short he's working on a film
uh
now i think it's coming out next year
specifically on just that case
dan farah is producing it and he said
i'm working on the case and and if you
want to do something with me on it
a small piece i could so i got back into
it i licensed some of the footage
that dr john mack the harvard
psychiatrist that came and interviewed
the school children on camera within a
week of it happening
he unfortunately looked the wrong way in
london got run down by a car and died
so i contacted the institute with the
help of randall nickerson
i licensed the archival footage we
tracked down the witnesses today
we flew them in from all different
corners of the world brought them
together a lot of them were standing
right next to each other these they came
face to face and one of the things i
realized was that
there were roughly a hundred kids in the
playground broad daylight
aerial school rule zimbabwe 1994
and they got within arms right armed
some of them within arm's length
of these beans and brought these
witnesses together for the first time
in 20 years and a lot of them hadn't
even told their their
you know significant others just because
they said they were tired of having to
defend this
and i myself didn't believe it when i
first heard about it back in 1997
and that segment of the film
is the most in my opinion is the most
powerful segment very compelling
you've got all these children saying
what they saw on camera after it
happened and then you
see them 20 years later and then we go
to africa and we meet with the
headmistress she was a teacher at the
time
we meet with other witnesses we go to
the landing site we talk to people at
the school
that case is absolutely and it was
witnessed by lots of other people in and
around the area for several days before
it chose
a school to land it's so compelling
because the children are all clearly
they're not actors
so as they're adults later they're all
talking about this moment
and it's like they had a religious
experience together like they're all
sharing it and talking about it and you
could tell it's like it's a deeply
moving experience
if if they were actors they wouldn't
have been able to do such a good job
because to convey the reality
of that moment to them to to to to
be able to have this interpretation of
this event
where they're all consistent in the
story and they're all
clearly still shook by this moment
it's really interesting because if you
had that scene in a movie
it would take like a really good actor
to pull it off and they'd probably need
multiple takes they'd probably want to
get the best one
but those kids the way they were talking
about it the way they were drawing it
you're like wow it really
does seem like something happened to
that i i know how
credible that the testimony of the
children is because i i
my partner rebecca she's never had much
of an interest in what i do making
documentaries on ufos i do other things
as well but
when i was reviewing in the studio uh
the archival interview of the children
she just dropped off a cup of coffee and
she stopped and went
oh my god those children are not lying
this is the most amazing thing i've ever
seen because look
i ask your audience to don't take it
from me
just suspend judgment for a moment and
imagine hypothetically if
a ufo or several ufos landed at a school
in broad daylight in rue zimbabwe africa
and interacted telepathically with
nearly a hundred school children
not all of them had telepathic but seen
the incident
how significant of a story would you
give that well not only that they had
the same message
yes but the telepathic message was that
technology is a real problem
yes and there's things that people are
doing with technology that are going to
ruin the earth
yes and they were trying to relay this
to children which is very strange
you know i mean maybe they just thought
they were adults because they were the
same size as the aliens
i mean do you think they knew that they
were children do you think they
understood that it was a school i mean
this is all speculation yeah right
but no i definitely had to ask myself
look during the production of the film
paula harris actually turned me on to
another landing case that happened in
australia in 1966
at a school and this time there were
roughly 300 witnesses
that saw a disc land right outside a
playground
in australia and we went to australia
and investigated that case went to the
landing site
talked to eyewitness testimony people
that jumped the fence at the school
playground
and ran over to where this thing landed
and then we even interviewed a guy who
snapped a photograph of a disc
a polaroid back in 1966 two days prior
to the incident so
it's very uh
probably that we have a photo we have
photographic evidence we have
eyewitness testimony and for the first
time we've got testimony from a science
teacher so
why do these things land at schools
it seems like and i'm just totally
speculating here but it seems like
if if i were going to do that it seems
like a pretty benign environment
when you have testimony from military
guys that we take a fairly hostile
position towards
things that penetrate sensitive military
installations
and um you know so maybe i'm just saying
maybe
maybe stay safe maybe it's safe
we have to stop reacting to uh you know
intrusions
by ufos as a threat i mean that's the
whole
thing behind this new task force and as
much as i respect you know the task
force
my colleagues and i want to cooperate
with them to the extent that
we can bring information or resources to
to what they do but there is more this
is not should not be looked at
specifically as a threat
i mean with with the phenomena that we
observe
i mean if they wanted to blow up those
f-18s i could do it okay
obviously that's that's not what it's
all about and
this idea of just labeling it all as a
as a threat because it's unknown that's
that's a wrong idea 90 of information
comes from the public comes from
children comes and
very very little of it is made up
you know in france i mean the the data
would we get
you know with at the french space agency
comes through channels where if people
reported something that's found to be
untrue
they're going to be called by the police
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