Can anyone come up with a citation for this?
Not to say it's a hallucination, but, to modern standards, if this were publicly funded research, it seems like it would have been a gross violation of ethics or other non-technical criteria. Interested to see how people think of it in later years, e.g., now.
It's a particularly misleading anecdote.
In a sufficiently isolated population, you get the same effect from a sound-making greeting card, or a battery powered light and/or sound toy from a carnival.
And for what it's worth, tomorrow they don't miss whatever “indistinguishable from magic” thing, so no harm done.
// grew up near such areas