Ariel School UFO Landing, Zimbabwe, 1994

In September of 1994, more than 60 children at the Ariel Primary School in Zimbabwe witnessed a strange silver object land outside the playground, and were approached by small black beings with large and transing eyes. The children's stories alarmed their teachers, and aroused the curiosity of the BBC and the esteemed Harvard psychiatrist, John E. Mack.

While the common elements in the children's stories suggest that the object and the beings were physically real, the many divergent details, and the kids' highly personal reactions suggest that there are many subjective elements to UFO and entity encounters that we don't yet understand. The Ariel Primary School is a private institution in the agricultural community of Rua, 22 kilometers outside of Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. The school was founded by area farmers in 1991, and by 1994, it had more than 200 students from grades 1 to 7, or from 6 to 12 years old.

The students were a racially diverse group, though most of them were from wealthier farming families. Friday, September 16 was a clear and warm sunny day. 30 AM recess, all of the teachers were attending a staff meeting inside the school, and only one adult was outdoors, operating a tuck shop or snack store on the playground.

Shortly after recess began, the tuck shop attendant, Allison Kirkman, volunteer and mother to one of the Ariel students, said that a bunch of kids ran into the shop and told her about a little black man on the playground. Kirkman thought that the kids were trying to trick her, and refused to leave the shop. Shortly after, dozens of children rushed into the school, screaming about a landed craft outside the schoolyard, and little black men with big black eyes.

The teachers could tell that the kids were deeply frightened, but they could not believe what they were saying. The school's headmaster, Colin Mackey, sat the students down and had them each produce a drawing of the things they saw, as well as a written account of their experiences. These efforts committed the children's earliest memories to record, and created crucial documentation for later investigators.

Shortly after classes ended and the kids were sent home for the weekend, teachers saw several parents searching the ground at the edge of the schoolyard with their children. The yard was virtually empty, with minimal grass, no trees or bushes, and only a few play structures near the classrooms. The children said that the beings appeared beyond the fence at the furthest point from the school, not a place where the children typically played.

Beyond this fence was a field covered in brush and short trees. There was nothing there that could have been mistaken for a UFO or entity, and no indication that anything had been there at all. The following Monday, the school was inundated with letters from parents asking what had happened to their children on Friday that made them so frightened and upset.

Several students were traumatized, and did not return to school for several days after the event. That week, Tim Leach, senior correspondent with the BBC, visited the school, and other African news outlets picked up the story as well, including South African and Zimbabwean state television channels. Leach spoke with the children, and had them tell their stories for the first time on video.

He found that they were all genuinely shaken, and was convinced that they believed what they were saying. Leach later claimed that despite all his experience as a war reporter, it was the aerial school incident that frightened him most. Cynthia Hind, a MUFON field investigator and editor of UFO Afronews, was the first ufologist on the case.

Gunter Hofer, an electronics enthusiast and acquaintance of Hinds, accompanied her, and swept the yard with a Geiger counter, a metal detector, and a magnetometer, with no unusual finds. The team also sent ground samples to the University of Zimbabwe, which returned with no significant anomalies. Whatever the children saw, if anything, were then only memories.

After reviewing their drawings on first written accounts, Hind interviewed 62 of the witnesses grades 3 and up, and spoke with the school's teachers and administrators. Dr. John E.

Mack, the noted Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and ufologist, was visiting Africa at the time to explore the abduction phenomenon there, and visited aerial school. He spent two days talking with the kids, accompanied by his assistant and a South African TV camera operator who filmed some of the interviews. Hind and Mack found that the witnesses' stories conflicted on many details, but converged on a few key claims.

Most students had agreed that a round elliptical-shaped silver-colored object appeared among some trees just beyond the boundary of the schoolyard. The object had a lustrous surface, and a bright white or golden glow. Most of the students only saw the object on the ground, but some claimed to have seen it flying over top of the schoolyard before landing.

The object glowed brightly from its landing place, attracting the kids' attention, so they ran towards the fence to investigate. At this point, one or two small black beings approximately one meter tall emerged from the object. Some kids said that one paced back and forth on the ground, another said that they saw one on the object doing the same thing.

The being on the ground then began to move towards the students. The beings were mostly black, with pale faces, and huge elongated black eyes that were angled inwards. Very few of the students reported any other details about the beings' faces, though at least one saw a nose and mouth.

Twelve-year-old Liesl and eight-year-old Emily remember the being hovering over the ground rather than walking, though others described it taking steps. Emily said that the two beings hopped alongside her and Liesl as if to imitate the girls skipping on the playground, though their feet never touched the ground. After covering a short distance, the figure or figures stopped and stared at the children, who all felt compelled to stare back and return.

Emily said that the two beings she saw appeared in front of her instantaneously. At this point, some of the students began to feel that the beings were communicating with them telepathically, and a few students felt a rush of wind blow by. Several children saw visions of environmental catastrophe.

Liesl said that she saw a vision of Earth after all trees had been cleared, and there was no air left to breathe, and received a nonverbal warning about humans destroying the planet. Another student saw visions of polluted oceans. Emily saw a quick succession of still images, showing scenes of the environment in crisis, and was urged to use technology more responsibly.

Another student, Emma, received a similar message about humanity's destructive use of technology, and given the imperative that we mustn't get too acknowledged. 11-year-old Salma was holding Emma's hand during the encounter, and yet she has no memory of any communication at all, though she felt that the being was gazing into her soul, as she put it. Both Salma and Emily have stated that they felt that time was distorted for the duration of the encounter.

Salma said that although she tried to run to the protection of her younger siblings, she was unable to break eye contact with the being. After several minutes of staring at the children, perhaps as many as 15, the encounter abruptly ended, and the intruders disappeared. At least one student said that he saw the beings climb back inside the object and fly away again, but most said that the beings in the UFO simply vanished on the spot.

Emily claimed that they disappeared the instant that the bell rang for the end of recess, and her sense of reality immediately returned to normal. Though many of the students agreed on these details, there was a considerable amount of variation in their stories, and some outright contradiction. Some students reported seeing the black entities, but not the silver object.

Other students described the object in vivid detail, but had no recollection of the entities. Some students nearby to the action even said that they saw nothing at all. Multiple students attested to seeing a cluster of objects flying in the air, while others were adamant that they saw only one.

As Hein noted, although most of the students identified the object as some sort of vessel or craft, they could not agree on its appearance. Students variously drew windows, doors, lights, cockpits, landing gear, and many combinations of the above. Two boys said that it had stripes of black and green, others that there was a platform around the outside.

One child drew it red. Most agreed, however, that it was generally elliptical in shape. There were also several different accounts of how the object arrived on the ground.

Several noted that they saw flashes of bright, colorful lights above their heads before the sighting, and at least two students claimed to have heard loud noises in the sky. One student even described a flute-like sound. Another student claimed to have witnessed the object in several auxiliaries flying along some electricity wires beside the schoolyard before landing in the field.

He said that they flew over him with flashing red lights, disappearing and reappearing elsewhere in the sky several times before landing. Other students drew the object flying overhead in their illustrations as well. There was generally more agreement on the appearance of the euphemites, but accounts varied here as well.

Some described the figures as having long black hair, while other students claimed to have seen no hair at all. One student described the beings as looking like little plump humans, with long straight hair, though Emily saw beings with long necks and spindly limbs. Some students claimed that the beings wore skin-tight garments or shiny suits, and others thought that they were naked with black skin.

One child claimed that the figures looked just like a shadow. Another young girl said that they were three beings, in black, red, and white. While most teachers admitted to being initially skeptical of the children's stories, they later came to realize how profound the experience had been for the witnesses.

The aerial school headmaster acknowledged that he believed that the children saw something, but suggested that some of their recollections were products of their imaginations. However, other teachers were more sympathetic to the children's claims. It was difficult for them to accept that the children's imaginations had caused them all to conjure up such a strange experience, and to react so dramatically.

The teachers were generally convinced that the students could not have faked their hysteria when running into the school that morning, and that no one could have forced dozens of children to play along with the same hoax. Hine agreed. Mack was also convinced that the students had shared an authentic experience, and that it was unlikely, if not impossible, that they had all staged a hoax.

On the morning of the kid's encounter, a woman who owned a farm near the school saw a bright orange ball of light outside her chicken coop. The day before, a mother and her son reported seeing a craft ahead of their car around the same time that three aerial students saw an object shaped like a cigarette above the schoolyard. And the day before that, thousands of people across eastern Africa saw massive lights in the sky.

Many of these sightings were probably due to a meteor shower in the area, but Hine received calls and letters from numerous people asserting that they had seen a fireball with a tail of sparks and smaller lights. Like many UFO and entity encounters, the aerial school incident appears to have been part of a broader wave of sightings. Hine did Mack's research on the aerial incident was never published as a formal report.

Hine shared some details on the case in UFO Afronews in 1995, and more in her 1996 book, UFOs Over Africa. Mack was killed by a drunk driver in 2004, before publishing any of his work on the incident. After his death, Mack's family created the John E.

Mack Institute, which hired filmmaker Randall Nickerson to produce a film based on Mack's involvement with the case. Nickerson went on to find Tim Leach, as well as several of the aerial school witnesses, then in their mid-to-late 20s, and arranged a reunion in Los Angeles in 2013. He has also organized a number of public appearances and media interviews to help the aerial school witnesses share their stories.

Nickerson's film, Aerial Phenomenon, is now complete and seeking distribution. There is no doubt that the aerial school student saw something unusual that day, but what it was is still unclear. Nothing about the object or the entities suggested a particular origin, either on Earth or in outer space.

The beings conformed in many ways to the image of the gray visitors popularized by Whitley-Strieber's communion in 1987, but differed greatly in other ways, including in the presence of hair, squat bodies, and black skin or bodysuits. Still, they were similar to other commonly encountered entities in the sense that they only stood about a meter tall. Nickerson has also claimed at a public talk that many of the children's stories were extremely bizarre and highly illogical.

For example, he spoke of one student who said that he saw one of the black beings approach across the field, then vanish, and instantly reappear where it started, only to repeat the exact same approach. Perhaps the numerous discrepancies in the children's accounts were due to their failures to accurately recall what they'd seen. After all, it's well known that human memory is extremely faulty, especially when memories are formed under stressful and traumatic circumstances.

Alternatively, the discrepancies in the children's accounts may reflect real differences in the things themselves, or in the children's perception of those things, rather than simply differences in the recollection of those things. Ufologist John Keel proposed that UFOs were vessels for ultra-terrestrials, or interdimensional beings, that could somehow manipulate how they appeared, or how we perceived them. Jacques Ballet made a similar argument in suggesting that UFOs are both physically real and culturally constructed, either by some mind-interfacing technological operation, or a collective act of psychic projection.

These considerations have moved some ufologists to focus attention away from the strictly material aspects of the UFO phenomenon, and towards their effects on witnesses. Nickerson, too, has focused on the effects that this event has had on witnesses, and his documentary offers a fuller view of the ways in which it changed them. It was a dark and frightening experience for the majority.

One student said that the being looked evil, as if it wanted to come and take the kids. Many of the younger children said that they feared that the little men were coming to eat them. Liesl told Mac that when she got home that day, she felt horrible inside, describing an anxiety about humans not treating the environment with enough respect.

Still, years later, many of the students contacted by Nickerson and other journalists to claim that it was a powerful and transformative experience for them that initiated lifelong changes in their openness to new ideas and their general sense of purpose. For example, Salma pursued degrees in international relations and human rights law, and claims that the incident taught her to believe her own experiences, regardless of what other people thought of them. Liesl became a social support worker.

She said that she has always felt a strong duty to give back and do her part since the incident. Emily began producing art, with pieces that frequently feature otherworldly beings. Mac made similar kinds of observations of abductees, or experiencers, in general.

He claimed that many experiencers seek out more fulfilling, outreach-based jobs after their encounters, become better stewards of the environment, and develop a greater sense of spirituality. It's difficult to imagine that the students could have affected these changes on the basis of a mistaken sighting or an imagined incident. What is particularly striking about the Ariel School case is the sheer number of witnesses and the diversity of the student body.

The fact that none of the witnesses have gone back on their claims, or confessed to a hoax, even after more than 25 years, is a huge point in favor of their veracity. Witnesses such as Salma, Liesl, and Emily continue to speak about their experiences at public events and on a variety of media platforms. But while there's no doubt that the kids saw something highly unusual that day, the discrepancies in their accounts also suggest that there was a strong subjective component to their experiences.

Whatever the kids at Ariel School saw that morning, it moved them on a very deep level and affected lasting changes in their lives. And maybe that was the point. Hey guys, if you want to help me make more videos, the best way to do it is to support me on Patreon.

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