Almost 30 years ago, with September 2024 being the 30th anniversary of the incident, 60 school children reported one of the now most famous alien sightings on record with detailed descriptions all the way down to what the strange space creatures were wearing.
On 16 September 1994, there was a UFO 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 that did maintain that their account of the incident is true.
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 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’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.
Source: Wikipedia | Daily Mail UK
