[imagesource: Ariel Phenomenon]
Your stereotypical UFO sighting usually comes from a backwoods place somewhere in the US Midwest or the Deep South.
More recently, we’ve seen grainy footage of alleged sightings from the likes of Canada and Brazil.
Rarely do sightings in Africa crack the news. Zimbabweans of a certain age may well remember what happened on September 16, 1994, in Ruwa, a town around 20 kilometres southeast of Harare.
More than 60 pupils at Ariel School, an expensive private institution, said they saw “a disc-shaped craft land from the sky and stop in a field outside their school”.
Some even claimed that humanoid-like creatures then emerged from the craft and communicated with them telepathically.
More via The Mirror:
The children at the rural Ariel School were having their morning break when the incident happened.
Teachers at the school were having a meeting inside at 10am and not around to bear witness to the event.
The former pupils recalled that the landing took around 15 minutes and they saw an object lower from the sky onto a field behind the school’s playground.
Immediately some of the children ran away as they watched the craft land.
Because teachers were not present when the sighting happened, their claims were at first dismissed on the day. However, when parents began to call the school over the next 24 hours, they took the matter more seriously.
Head of the Harvard Department of Psychiatry, John Mack, soon flew to Zimbabwe to interview the children. He concluded that their accounts were credible.
In later years, doubt has been cast on his methods and skeptics have claimed it’s a classic example of mass hysteria.
In 2004, Mack was killed by a drunk driver while visiting London.
In 2014, the Mail & Guardian spoke with one then-pupil who said the incident had in many ways shaped her life:
“Whaddya wanna know? Actually, it’ll be simpler if I just shoot. It happened, OK. Sixty-two kids between the ages of about six and 12 saw the aliens land and get out of their little ships. When the kids returned to class they were completely freaked and couldn’t stop nattering about little men who looked a bit like Michael Jackson. The teachers told them to shut up, as teachers are wont to do, and classes proceeded.”
The woman said she had been interviewed years earlier by a young filmmaker called Randall Nickerson.
Finally, many years later, Nickerson’s documentary has come to fruition.
It’s titled Ariel Phenomenon and can be streamed online here.
Let’s see the trailer:
Photographer Gunter Hofer was one of the first on the scene to document what happened.
Ahead of the release of the documentary, he spoke with The Daily Mail about what he saw:
‘I couldn’t find anything in the area where many of the children had seen a craft. It was difficult, as the ground was already flat, there was no grass and the surface was hard,’ he said.
‘But some of the children described seeing a craft in a separate location on the savanna, which is where I found impressions in the grass.
‘I found two oval shapes, one smaller and one larger. I also found what looked like a wedge-shaped marking in the ground, something had pushed in,’ he said.
Whatever transpired, it’s a fascinating story that continues to affect many of the people who were there that day.
