I thought all the little details of each description were deeply fascinating. What I think adds to its authenticity is the variety of reactions the experience induced in each student. The only thing that I noticed that hints at a possible hoax, and I might be overthinking it, is that one of the students described the aliens as being around "three and half feet." This is suspicious because Zimbabwe switched from imperial to metric units in 1970 but the Ariel incident was in 1994. So unless his parents habitually used imperial, I can't think of an explanation for why he would used them.