The Ariel School Incident (ca. 1994)

On September 16, 1994, children at Ariel school in Ruwa, Zimbabwe said they’d seen a ‘UFO’ and ‘aliens with big eyes’ in bush land near their school playground.  It was the mid-morning break. 250 schoolchildren were all outside playing at the Ariel School, a private elementary school in the Harare province of Zimbabwe.

The teaching staff were inside having a meeting and none of them witnessed what happened. 62 of the children saw it (aged 6 to 12); nearly 200 did not. The details are not actually as consistent as usually reported, but the basics generally are.

Somewhere between one and several silver balls or objects or spacecraft either appeared in the sky, darted about, or came floating in low, to a field of brush and small trees just outside the school property. One or more either landed or hovered above the field, and anywhere between one and four men, either normal-looking black men or conventional small gray aliens wearing black clothes, stood either atop the craft or beside it, faced the children, and communicated telepathically the need to take good care of planet Earth. The craft either faded away, flew away quickly, or disappeared, either leaving one or more men behind or taking them away. When classes resumed, some of the children told their teachers. Some told their parents. The story got out.

Universally, it was reported that 62 children, with no reason to lie and no prior exposure to the concept of space aliens, would never all make up (and stick to) exactly the same story.