The skeptic's point of view:

With most UFO stories, we can trace a case back to a single person who became its primary advocate and "creator of the legend". In this case, there were two. One was John Mack, and the other was UFO writer Cynthia Hind, editor of the periodical UFO Afrinews, and also the African representative for MUFON — the Mutual UFO Network.

Those children's stories came to us mainly through John Mack's interviews. Mack was going through a rough spell professionally. Earlier that year, he'd published a book called Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens. As a tenured professor, he'd virtually abandoned his academic work and had devoted himself nearly full time to attempting to prove his deep conviction that aliens actively visit the Earth. Harvard had opened an official investigation into him for misconduct; specifically, for telling people who believed they'd been abducted by aliens that their experience had been absolutely real. One colleague wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Mack was "a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he's lost it big time". Keep that in mind: Harvard's issue with Mack is that his thing was convincing people they'd had an alien encounter.

So it was with a heavy baggage of bias and preconceived conclusions that Mack arrived in Harare to speak with these children. When multiple witnesses are involved in something, they should be interviewed as soon as possible and separately, to avoid any cross contamination between their stories. Mack did the opposite: giving the students two months to converse among themselves. A crucial insight into Mack's interview technique is revealed when comparing his results to those obtained by Cynthia Hind two months earlier: the whole theme of a telepathic message to protect planet Earth was not found in the stories collected by Hind at all. This major part of the story did not exist at all until Mack's interviews. Why? Because he prompted and suggested it, according to his existing beliefs; in addition to being an alien visitation advocate, Mack was an anti-nuclear and environmental activist. (Hind ultimately did report this angle extensively, but only after Mack's interviews.)

Hind's own interviews were even worse. She interviewed the children in groups of two to six, while other children were allowed to watch and listen to each group. Every single child's story was necessarily cross contaminated with the others. There is little wonder that she always reported that all the students told exactly the same story.

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4760 

 

My partner is from Zimbabwe and yes this story is well known in that culture, it comes up in her family from time to time

Edited November 9, 20232 yr by Matthew Kane