So, a “Former CIA Man” Found Alien Bases in Zimbabwe?

Pull up a chair, hold your tea. This week the timeline is buzzing again: a viral clip of a self-described former intelligence man claiming there are extraterrestrial bases hidden in Zimbabwe. The shares, the gasps, the “I always knew it.” And TeteGetty just sighs, smiles, and reaches for the same tool our grandmothers used on a tall tale at the fire: a raised eyebrow and a simple question — where is the evidence?

Not the story. Not the confidence. Not the man’s old job title, which proves nothing — espionage is literally the profession of telling convincing untruths. The evidence. A claim that would rewrite human history — alien bases, on our soil — would need satellite data, soil samples, materials science, independent verification by people with no franchise to sell. What it actually comes with is: a camera, a confident voice, and an algorithm that rewards your outrage. That is not a discovery. That is content.

Ruwa, 1994: The Ariel School Story

To understand the new clip, we must visit the most famous “Zimbabwe alien” story of all — because it is the template. On 16 September 1994, at the Ariel School in Ruwa, near Harare, around sixty-two children reported during morning break that they had seen a craft land at the edge of the schoolyard and one or more beings. It became, over the years, the most cited “mass child UFO sighting” in the world.

Now — TeteGetty is not here to call a single child a liar. Something happened that morning that frightened and excited a yard full of children; that much is real to them. Children misperceive, then talk to each other, and excitement spreads through a group faster than truth ever could — this is documented, ordinary human behaviour, no spacecraft required. The interesting question is not “were the children lying?” It is “what happened to that raw, confused morning between the event and the polished alien story the world later received?” And the answer has a name.

Enter Dr John Mack: Harvard’s Believer

Dr John E. Mack was no crank, and we must be fair. He was a genuinely accomplished man — a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his biography of T.E. Lawrence. Real credentials. Which is exactly what made him such an effective vehicle for the narrative: a title from the world’s most famous university travels further than any fact.

By the 1990s, Mack had become the world’s most prominent academic champion of alien “abduction.” He flew to Zimbabwe and interviewed the Ariel children. And here is the part that should make any thinking person sit forward: his methods, with patients generally, leaned on hypnotic regression and suggestive questioning to draw out “repressed memories.” His critics — including fellow psychiatrists — argued these very techniques do not recover hidden memories so much as manufacture them. When Mack dismissed the standard scientific demand for physical evidence by suggesting the encounters happened in “other dimensions” that cannot be measured — well, that is the moment the scientist left the room and the preacher took the pulpit.

To Harvard’s credit, in 1994 the Medical School took the near-unprecedented step of convening an ad-hoc committee to examine a tenured professor’s work. After a fourteen-month inquiry the dean concluded Mack had not violated research ethics, and he kept his tenure and his academic freedom. Note what that finding actually means, because people misquote it: it means he was free to hold and research his views. It did not mean the aliens were real. “Cleared to keep researching” and “proven correct” are very different sentences — and the narrative machine loves to blur them.

How You Build a Memory That Never Happened — Tap Each

This is the heart of the couch conversation. Memory is not a video recording you replay. It is a story your brain rebuilds each time — and a skilled questioner can edit that story while “helping you remember.” The science here is rock-solid. Tap each technique.

Illustrative of findings from memory research (Loftus and others): the more suggestive the method, the higher the rate of confident but false recollections. Exact figures vary by study; the direction is robust and repeatedly replicated.

Zimbabweans Should Spot a Psyop in Their Sleep

Here is why this conversation matters more for us than for most. A psychological operation is simply the systematic shaping of what a group of people believes about themselves and their world. And we, the peoples of this land, are veterans of it. We did not start learning about mind-reprogramming on the internet. We have been living it since the 1890s.

The colonial boarding school took a child who knew their totem, their lineage, their land, and their Mwari, and patiently reprogrammed them into someone who found their own grandmother “backward.” The mission church taught that the spirituality of this soil was darkness and that salvation came in a foreign shape. This is the machinery that turns a rooted person into what we have called the transient mind — mombe yemashanga, a beast that no longer knows its own kraal. If you understand how that was done to us over a century, you understand exactly how a yard of children becomes a global alien legend, and how a viral clip becomes “the truth they don’t want you to know.”

Why the Alien Story Is So Useful to the Powerful

Ask the old question: who benefits? The alien narrative is not random noise — it is a remarkably useful story for those who shape public feeling. In 1987, US President Ronald Reagan stood at the UN General Assembly and mused that “an alien threat from outside this world” would unite all humanity and dissolve our differences overnight. He said versions of this more than once. A common external enemy is the oldest crowd-control device there is, and a being from the sky is the most universal enemy you could invent.

Add Hollywood, which spent a century making the imagery so familiar that we now “remember” aliens we have only ever seen on screen — the big black eyes, the saucer, the beam of light. Add social media, which pays in attention for the most shocking version of any story. Add a sealed-document drip-feed that keeps everyone hooked on the promise of a reveal that never quite arrives. You do not need a single real alien to run this franchise. You need only an audience that has stopped asking for evidence. TeteGetty is simply asking us not to be that audience.

Real Science, Real Evidence — Not Hollywood

Now, the part TeteGetty feels most strongly about, and it is not cynical — it is hopeful. The tragedy of the alien franchise is not just that it fools people. It is that it steals attention and wonder away from the real thing. The actual cosmos — the physics, the engineering, the brutal and beautiful problem of keeping a fragile human alive in the most hostile environment imaginable — is more astonishing than any saucer. And it demands rigour, not vibes.

So the standard on this couch is the same one we would apply to anything: show the data, and let it be checked by people who are not on the same team. The most powerful proof in science is independent verification — when a rival who would love to catch you lying instead confirms what you found. That is the gold standard, and it is the standard we should demand of every space agency, every claim, every “trust me.” When China, India, Russia and others publish their own raw data and instruments and we can cross-check them against each other, truth gets stronger and the storytellers lose their grip. More independent eyes, not more sealed boxes. That is the direction of real knowledge.

This Land Already Has Its Real Power Centres

And here is the part that should make us almost laugh. While the world imports a made-up mythology of sky-beings into our country, we are sitting on one of the oldest, deepest, genuinely sacred spiritual landscapes on earth — and too many of us were taught to ignore it. The Zimbabwe Plateau has been a place of real spiritual power since the dawn of our memory.

The Matobo Hills — Mabweadziva — hold Njelele, the great rain shrine, the voice-place of the Mwari tradition that guided this civilisation for centuries before anyone arrived to “civilise” it. These are our true power centres: the granite cathedrals, the rain shrines, the sacred groves, the places where the ancestors are addressed and the land is honoured. Mwari vari kumatenga; vadzimu vari kumhepo. This is not folklore to be replaced by Hollywood’s saucers. It is a living, rooted spirituality that needs no imported aliens to feel awe. The irony is almost too neat: we are being offered fake sky-gods while standing on the soil of the real and sacred. Honour the real thing. It was always here.

The Story, Start to Now

Muri Vanhu Vakuru — Act Like It

So let us bring the couch conversation home. TeteGetty is not telling you what to think — that would make me just another narrator working the crowd. I am asking you to do the thing this people has always done best when it remembers itself: think. Raise the eyebrow. Ask for the evidence. Notice who profits from your gasp. Separate “this person is confident and credentialed” from “this person is correct.” Those are not the same, and the gap between them is where every con in history has lived.

The Ariel children deserve compassion, not mockery; Dr Mack was a clever, sincere man who fooled himself with a faulty tool; and the viral CIA clip deserves exactly the scrutiny we would give a stranger selling a miracle cure at the bus rank. None of this requires us to be cynical. It requires us to be rigorous — which is a far more joyful thing, because rigour is how you actually find out what is true, and the truth of this cosmos is grander than any franchise.

We have, this very season, won a seat on the UN Security Council. We are debating our own constitution, our own minerals, our own food security, our own future. These are the conversations of a serious, educated people. Let us not be marched off into the bush chasing little grey men while the real work — and the real wonder — waits. Drink your tea. Keep your wits. Ayaas. We are grown.