On 16 September 1994, a UFO was sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe. Sixty-two pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve said that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school. Some of the children claimed that one or more creatures dressed all in black then approached and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme, frightening them and causing them to cry.
The Fortean writer Jerome Clark has called the incident the “most remarkable close encounter of the
third kind of the 1990s”. Some skeptics have described the incident as one
of mass hysteria. Not all the children at the school that day stated that they
saw something. Several of those who did maintain that their account of the
incident is true.
Background
Ruwa is a small agricultural center located 22 kilometres
(14 mi) south-east of the capital Harare. At the time of the incident, it was
not a town but only a local place-name, "little
more than a crossroads in an agricultural region".
Ariel School was an expensive private school. Most of the
pupils were from wealthy white families in Harare.
Two days before the incident at Ariel there had been several UFO sightings throughout southern Africa. There had been numerous
reports of a bright fireball passing through the sky at night. Many people
answered ZBC Radio's request to call in and describe what they had seen.
Although some witnesses interpreted the fireball as a comet or meteor, it
resulted in a wave of UFO mania in Zimbabwe at the time.
According to skeptic Brian Dunning, the fireball "had been the re-entry of the Zenit-2
rocket from the Cosmos 2290 satellite launch. The booster broke up into burning
streaks as it moved silently across the sky, giving an impressive light show to
millions of Africans." Local UFO researcher Cynthia Hind recorded
other alien sightings at this time, including a daylight sighting by a young
boy and his mother and a report of alien beings on a road by a trucker.
Incident
The sightings at Ariel occurred at 10am on 16 September
1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break. The adult faculty at the
school was inside having a meeting at the time. The entire incident lasted
about fifteen minutes. When the children returned to class they told the
teachers what they had seen but were dismissed.
When they returned home they told their parents. Many of
those parents came to the school the next day to discuss what had happened with
the faculty. The sighting was reported on ZBC Radio, from where Cynthia Hind
learned about it.
The BBC's correspondent in Zimbabwe, Tim Leach, visited the
school on 19 September to film interviews with pupils and staff. After
investigating this incident, Leach stated "I
could handle war zones, but I could not handle this". Hind visited the
school on 20 September 1994. She interviewed some of the children and asked
them to draw pictures of what they had seen. She reported that the children all
told her the same story.
That November, Harvard University professor of psychiatry
and Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Mack visited the Ariel school to
interview witnesses. Throughout the 1990s Mack had investigated UFO sightings
and the alien abduction phenomenon.
According to the interviews of Hind, Leach, and Mack, 62
children between the ages of six and twelve said that they had seen at least one
UFO. One or more silver objects, usually described as discs, appeared in the
sky. They then floated down to a field of brush and small trees just outside the school property.
Between one and four creatures with big eyes and dressed all
in black, exited a craft and approached the children. At this point, many of the
children ran but some, mostly older pupils, stayed and watched the approach.
According to Mack's interviews the creature or creatures then telepathically
communicated to the children an environmental message, before returning to the
craft and flying away. According to Dunning, this telepathic message aspect of
the story was not included in Hind or Leach's reports, only Mack's, although
Hind reported it later.
In Mack's interviews one fifth-grader tells how he was
warned "about something that's going
to happen," and that "pollution
mustn't be". An eleven-year-old girl told Mack "I think they want people to know that we're actually making harm
on this world and we mustn’t get too technologed." One child said that
he was told that the world would end because they are not taking care of the
planet.
The children were adamant that they had not seen a plane.
Hind noted that the different cultural background of the children gave rise to
different interpretations of what they had seen and they did not all believe
that they had seen extraterrestrials. She noted that some of the children
thought the short little beings were tikoloshes, creatures of Shona and Ndebele
folklore.
Aftermath
The Ariel School UFO incident quickly became one of the most
famous UFO cases in Africa. On a June 2021 episode of the BBC's Witness
History, the event was described as "one
of the most significant events in UFO history". Ufologists continue to
cite the case as providing compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visits to
Earth. Skeptics have suggested the incident could be explained as mass
hysteria, a prank, or even confusion with touring puppet shows designed to promote
awareness around AIDS. It has alternatively been argued that the children misidentified
a dust devil.
Hind interviewed the children in groups of four to six with
every other child allowed to listen and so their stories were
cross-contaminated. Mack only interviewed the children two months after the
alleged sighting and Dunning says that Mack, a known environmentalist, "prompted and suggested" the
telepathic communication angle, which was not present in Hind's previous
report.
Several of the witnesses maintain that what was reported is
true. In 2014 the Mail & Guardian spoke to one witness who said that she
fears that the creatures will return and that she can "sense when they are back in the atmosphere". In 2016
witness Emily Trim exhibited paintings that she described as a "manifestation of the messages she
received" from the beings that day.
In June 2021, Barstool Sports writer Zah spoke in an
interview about being a pupil in Ariel that day. He recounted that he saw a
bright light come down from the sky and aliens exit it. Other witnesses were
interviewed for the 2020 documentary The Phenomenon and spoke about how the experience
has affected them.
In 2023 in a Netflix documentary called "Encounters", a former student named Dallyn claimed that
he was behind this incident. He claimed that he purposefully told his
classmates and other students that a "shiny
rock" in the distance was a UFO. According to his own statement in the
documentary, he never thought this would work, and was surprised about the mass
hysteria. Dallyn's claims in the documentary directly contradict claims made on
camera 15 years prior to the documentary, describing the UFO as having a
light that would "flash a different
color in the sky."
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