I'm not saying it's indisputable, I'm saying I don't hear many valid arguments as to what these kids saw.
This is the exact same reasoning as religion. Without doing any digging, I'm guessing there's very little testable/verifiable proof of this case, which makes coming up with "valid arguments" against it essentially worthless, there's nothing to validly argue against as there's nothing beyond psychological impact to really study.
Zimbabwe is ruled by a dictator, so let's start with that realization (that alone tends to put the entire country in an odd mental state).
And there's a long history of using groups of children as test subjects by various governments and person throughout history.
Makes you wonder if the Roswell UFO was indeed real or not. Not saying it was, but do you really trust the official government explanation?
I keep an open mind on these sorts of things. 10 being yes, aliens exist and 1 being hell no, I'm at a 7.
No, it really doesn't.
You remind me of something one of the guys from Last Podcast on the Left said, I think they were talking about Hitler (and other Nazis) and his propensity to buy into all manner of crazy things, but only for specific reasons (namely anything to prop up his anti-Jew/pro-Arian beliefs), you're very open-minded in a very close minded way.
The vast majority of these "sightings" are obviously bunk. But there are a few well documented cases where I believe people have certainly seen something. It may not have been anything more than a very secret gov project or it could be a bored extraterrestrial, unless the gov proves something one way or another I don't think we will ever know. As far as aliens are concerned I am more open to the alternate theories such as inter-dimensional beings than standard extraterrestrials though.
Even the good ones have far too much similarities with obvious bullshit (speaking about things that get shared in common, stuff like men in black, various alien types, UFO shapes, etc). Now, I don't know if a lot of that stuff is just latently inside a large amount of the population (kinda like how people who want to believe in Bigfoot point out how just about every culture has such a creature) and bubbles up from time to time, or what. It just seems like this stuff is a way for our silly brains to rationalize and use our weird internal logic to deal with situations that are tough to process. We've consistently learned how flawed our minds are, and couple that with how powerful suggestion and manipulation can be, weighed against the almost total lack of quantifiable evidence, just seems like it'd make the most sense to apply Occam's Razor.
Not even going to touch aliens and interdimensional beings. I find a lot of nonsense stuff (cryptozoology for instance) actually interesting (to a point, which is usually about when it gets to talking to people about their experiences with it), but the modern mythology with regards to aliens, government involvement with them, and all the ancillary is completely uninteresting to me. They're taking things that are incredibly fascinating (at lest to me personally), stuff like space, perception, technology, history, and a bunch else, making it ridiculous (which on its own should be quite entertaining/compelling), and making it utterly boring and non-compelling.