Ariel School

On September 16, 1994, there was a UFO sighting outside Ruwa, Zimbabwe. 62 pupils at the Ariel School aged between six and twelve claimed that they saw one or more silver craft descend from the sky and land on a field near their school. One or more creatures dressed all in black then approached the children and telepathically communicated to them a message with an environmental theme.

The Fortean writer Jerome Clark has called the incident the “most remarkable close encounter of the third kind of the 1990s”. Skeptics have described the incident as one of mass hysteria. Not all the children at the school that day claimed that they saw something. Several of those that did maintain that their account of the incident is true.

Background

Ruwa is a small agricultural centre located 22 km 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 prior to the incident at Ariel there had been a number of 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 September 16, 1994, when pupils were outside on mid-morning break. The adult faculty at the school were 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
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