Jul 21, 2009 01:00 PM
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Hoping to spark their students' imaginations, a junior school in England staged an alien invasion, complete with a crash landing and the "abduction" of one of their faculty members while the children watched. What could possibly go wrong?
Faculty at the Southway Junior School in West Sussex hoped to improve their students' writing skills by giving them something exciting to write about about – front row seats to an alien invasion:
Diana Goss, the headteacher, informed pupils that an alien craft had crashed near the school and pupils were encouraged to "follow a trail of debris" before stumbling across the UFO.
A member of staff was then abducted by aliens before the children were sent back to class.
Sussex police not only approved the event, they participated in it, contributing sirens and flashing lights to make the crash more convincing. Unfortunately, it proved too convincing for some of the 370 students – some as young as seven – who witnessed the abduction. Parents, who were not informed about the "invasion" in advance, were less than pleased when their youngsters came home certain that they had witnessed an actual alien abduction. Said one parent:
"My daughter was deeply upset by it all and came home looking shell shocked.
"She wasn't sure what had happened and really wanted to know that everything was going to be alright."
Still, the school's creative goals might be met when the students use this childhood trauma as fodder for their eventual memoirs.
Children traumatised by 'War of Worlds' abduction of teacher [Telegraph via Xenophilia]
Send an email to Lauren Davis, the author of this post, at lauren@io9.com.
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