Encounter During Recess
Wednesday, September 14, 1994, was an exciting night for South Africa.Round about 8:50 p.m. to 9:05 p.m., a pyrotechnic display of some magnificence appeared in the almost clear night skies of this part of the continent.
Astronomers across the region soon reported that the pyrotechnic display, seen as far away as Zambia and Botswana, had been a meteor shower.
However though, dozens of reports of a capsule like fireball, trailing fire and flanked by 2 smaller capsules.
A young boy and his mother reported a daylight sighting, a trucker who had seen strange beings on the road at night.
The multitude of witnesses that reported seeing strange and wonderfully eerie fireballs burning across the night sky included scientists, astronomers, amateur astronomers, and the dozens of scattered residents that happened to be looking up into the night sky.
The accounts varied of what flew across the sky that night.
From a zeppelin on fire to a low flying jumbo jet with visible cabin lights and sparks blazing out its tail.
Many witnesses submitted drawings of what they saw in the sky that night and remarkably, almost all of the the drawings resembled the same shaped craft in distress.
2 days later during morning, a group of children attending Ariel Primary School in Ruwa watched in fascination as 3 silver balls hovered in the sky over the school, before disappearing and reappearing several times.
One of the UFOs slowly landed, or hovered, on an area of rough ground next to the school.
The children are not allowed in this area although it is adjacent to their playing field and is not fenced off, because of snakes, spiders and perhaps other harmful creatures. One can soon disappear from view while walking here, and there is only one very rough track used by tractors in an attempt to clear this area.
While some children ran off in terror, a number of curious ones ran over to the school boundary fence to investigate from a safe distance.
There is a line of electricity pylons and according to one boy, the object followed along this line prior to landing.
62 of the children, most of which were 10 & 11, later gave a variety of descriptions to investigators, but the common report was of a large, glowing, saucer shaped craft with 3 legs.
To the childrens amazement, 3 beings had emerged from the craft, all dressed in one piece suits.
The children described them as moving in slow motion and as having large black eyes.
According to the children, when they looked into the creatures eyes, they received telepathic messages from them. The message they received was one expressing the need for humanity to take action to stop further environmental damage from occurring to the planet, as if we didn't, we would be doomed as a species.
One eyewitness, Barry D., said he had seen 3 objects flying over, with flashing red lights. They disappeared, and reappeared almost immediately, but somewhere else. This happened about 3 times.
Then they came and landed near some gum trees, the main one, object, was about the size of his thumb nail held at arm's length.
The reports were similar although some children were more observant than others.
The consensus of opinion was that an object came down in the area where they indicated, about 300' from where they were at the edge of the school playing field.
Then a small man, about 3' tall, appeared on top of the object. He walked a little way across the rough ground, became aware of the children and disappeared.
He, or someone very like him, then reappeared at the back of the object. The object took off very rapidly and disappeared.
The little man was dressed in a tight fitting black suit which was shiny, according to one observant girl, 11 years of age.
He had a long scrawny neck and huge eyes like rugby balls. He had a pale face with long black hair coming below his shoulders.
The children vary in cultures, there are black, white, & Asian children.
One little girl said:
I swear by every hair on my head and the whole Bible that I am telling the truth.
The smaller children from 5 to 7 years were very frightened at the time and ran shouting:
Help me, help me.
When the older children asked why they were saying this, the reply was:
He is coming to eat us.
This mainly applied more to the black African children who have legends of Tikoloshe eating children.
Their teachers were in a meeting and did not come out.
When the headmaster was queried about this, he said the children always shouted and yelled during their playtime and no one thought there was anything unusual going on, and although he had never been involved with UFOs or a believer in them, said that he believed the children had seen what they said they saw.
The only other adult available at the time was one of the mothers who was running the tuckshop, lunchroom.
When the children came to call her, she did not believe them and would not come out, she was not prepared to leave the tuckshop with all the food and money.
Gunter Hofer, a young man who builds his own electrical equipment, a Geiger counter, a metal detector and a magnetometer, to try and see if the object left any traces behind.
Gunter and the men thoroughly examined the ground around where the children had seen the object, but could get no reaction on the geiger counter or any other equipment. If the object was hovering perhaps nothing would show.
The whole encounter lasted less than 5 minutes, and by the time the teaching staff had been alerted, the UFO had disappeared.
At first the teachers believed that the children had simply imagined the event, but soon began to realize that something out of the ordinary had happened that recess, some of the children were hysterical with fear, while others were overcome with excitement at what they had witnessed.
Although there were discrepancies, researchers point to the fact that under the circumstances this was understandable. What stood out weren't the differences, but the obvious similarities between the accounts and honesty of the children concerned.
A Pulitzer Prize winning head of psychiatry at Harvard interviewed many of the 62 children at length shortly after, and concluded they were telling the truth.
Now adults, they have all stuck to their stories for decades.
Previously unseen photo evidence has been shared ahead of the release of a new documentary, Ariel Phenomenon, about the astonishing incident.
The stunning revelation also comes as interest in UFOs is growing in the United States.
Researchers traveled to the school where they asked the kids to draw what they'd seen while it was fresh in their minds.
Photographer Gunter Hofer, who was one of the first on the scene documenting the incident, shared his photos which show wedge shaped impressions allegedly left by the UFO in the grass field. Hofer would later realize that some of the children had seen UFOs on 2 different days, Thursday September 15, 1994 and Friday, September 16 1994.
The kids claimed the first alleged landing took place on the other end of the campus, which led Hofer to discover the physical evidence marked photo illustrates the wedge shaped impressions found in the dry soil within the grass after the alleged UFO sighting.
Then a congressional sub committee held the first public hearings into unidentified aerial phenomena, UAP, for over 50 years, prompted by continued reports of incursions by strange and highly sophisticated craft in U.S. airspace, including near aircraft carriers and nuclear weapon silos.
In December, Congress passed a new law mandating a government UFO office to investigate such incidents.
The Ariel incident is one of the most prized UFO cases among researchers, who say that the scores of witnesses, their participative accounts and even striking drawings of the alleged craft and beings drawn the same day make for a very compelling, if unsettling story.
The one element that had been lacking in the extraordinary case was physical evidence that something had landed in the schoolyard that morning.
But now one source can reveal photographs of wedge shaped impressions in the rock hard soil and an oval indentation in the long grass allegedly left by the craft.
Hofer explained he didn't find any evidence of a landing in this area where the ground was already flat, there was no grass and the surface was hard.
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 2 oval shapes, one smaller and one larger. I also found what looked like a wedge shaped marking in the ground, something had pushed in, Hofer said.
Hofer was first alerted to the incident the day it occurred by the BBC's man in Zimbabwe, journalist Tim Leech.
Leech accompanied him and local UFO researcher Cynthia Hind to interview the children the following Tuesday.
Cynthia asked the headmaster if the kids could draw what they'd seen while it was fresh in their minds, Hofer said.
There was a very palpable atmosphere of excitement, of course, and also confusion over what it could be.
Most of the descriptions we got from the kids were very consistent, of a short looking entity, he added.
A lot of them described very large eyes. They couldn't describe the clothing exactly.
But one of them said it reminded them of a diving suit because it was tight fitting.
When the school children were asked to draw their observations, some produced drawings containing 2 objects, one which was cigar shaped labeled Thursday and another which was disk like or oval shaped, labeled Friday.
As for the humanoids, some claimed to see emerge from the craft, Hofer said that most of the students descriptions were very consistent of a short looking being, and a lot of them described very large eyes.
One student drew a picture of an alien that allegedly came out of the UFO in front of the group of school children.
News of the strange encounter spread and media flocked to the school to cover the story.
Subsequent retellings focused on the children's accounts of 4 craft hovering and landing at the far end of the schoolyard, beings emerging and even telepathically communicating with them.
But Hofer realized some of the children had also seen UFOs the day before on the other end of the campus, which led him to discover the physical evidence.
We noticed some of the kids drew 2 objects. One object looked like a cigar, and they labeled that Thursday, he mentioned.
Then they drew what they saw on Friday the 16th which is more of a disk like, oval shaped object.
Hofer said 2 boys told him that on Thursday September 15 they saw a craft with flashing lights flying above the power lines at the other end of the playground.
It was moving, disappeared, instantly reappeared somewhere else, and then vanished, Hofer said.
It was in that location he found the flattened grass and wedge markings.
The Earth there was rock solid due to a long drought in Zimbabwe, so whatever made that mark really dug in hard, he said.
In the weeks after the incident, head of the Harvard Department of Psychiatry John Mack flew to Zimbabwe to interview the children.
Dr. Mack interviewed many of the 62 children at length shortly after, and concluded they were telling the truth.
Although cattle could access the area, the largest shape was about 30' long and there were no imprints to suggest cows walking through.
Hofer said that while he and Leech were interviewing the boys, they were distracted by a bright light shining from the nearby hills.
On top of a nearby hill, we saw an extremely bright intense light, like someone was reflecting sunlight, he said.
I went to investigate later on and could find no apparent source from where it originated from. It actually interfered with filming.
The footage featuring the bright light has never been released and Hofer has tried to obtain it from the BBC without success.
Leech, a former head of the Foreign Correspondents Association, died in 2011.
According to Hofer, the children who saw the beings described them as moving in slow motion like they were on the moon and speculated there may have been an intense gravitational field created by the craft.
The children stand by their story to this day.
Several were interviewed by documentary director Randall Nickerson for his new movie on the incident, Ariel Phenomenon, released Thursday.
Nickerson told news outlets the witnesses are still impacted as adults and have suffered from PTSD.
Lisil Field, who was in Grade 4 at the time, told the documentary:
I remember seeing 2 flashing lights and I saw a big silver saucer thing that was hovering, and then it landed or hovered on a stone, then I saw 2 figures come out, really black but their face, you could actually see not much of their face, but it was really white in color.
Another witness, Robert Medcalf, who was in Grade 2 at the time, said:
I quickly realized that he's not quite normal. I didn't actually know about UFOs or aliens at the time, I just thought it was a strange person, the being's eyes were almost like rugby balls or American footballs, with huge eyes on the side of his face.
Nickerson mentioned that a UFO was tracked on radar twice a day before the encounter.
An unidentified object traveling across the Atlantic at high speed was pinged first by Mexican radar, then shortly after by commercial radar operators from Johannesburg in South Africa, he said, adding that radar contact was eventually tracked to a location near the Zimbabwean border with Botswana.
In a still from the documentary, one of the students returned to the school and the site of the landing in 2015.
In the weeks after the incident, the head of the Harvard Department of Psychiatry John Mack flew to Zimbabwe to interview the children.
In videotaped sessions included in Nickerson's documentary, several of the children said they received psychic messages from the beings they encountered warning them of environmental damage by humans to the planet.
Lisil Field told Mack the being didn't speak but sent her a message through the eyes.
It was like in the world all the trees would just go down and there would be no air and people will be dying. I think that in space there is no love, but down here there is, Field said in the session with the psychiatrist.
Nickerson is a UFO experiencer himself. He appeared on TV in 1994, together with his sister, claiming they had been abducted by alien beings as children.