For many years, UFOs (unidentified flying objects) have been the subject of scholarly ridicule for those who believe in them.
However, things gradually changed, as several high-ranking military leaders and politicians around the world are said to have acknowledged the phenomenon. Not only in America, Europe, but even in Africa, UFOs also cause a stir in public opinion.
UFO appeared in front of students?
Ariel School is located in Ruwa, a small rural area, 22km from the Zimbabwean capital Harare. At the time of the UFO event, this place was not even a town, but just a locality associated with agriculture. Ariel is a private school with high tuition fees, students mostly from middle-class, white families.
The UFO incident occurred on September 16, 1994, while teachers attended a meeting in the school, and students enjoyed a mid-morning break to play outside.
Back in the classroom, the children scrambled to tell the teacher a strange story but were dismissed as a myth. The next day, many parents went to the school to find out what strange things had happened to the children. Soon after, the story was also disseminated on ZBC radio. Soon, foreign journalists and many UFO experts also came to the school to find out.
The first reporter on the scene was Tim Leach of the BBC. He arrived at the school three days later and was truly taken aback by what he heard when he interviewed the students. “I can easily process information from war zones, but I can’t understand the event,” he said.
After Leach, Cynthia Hind, a Zimbabwean ufologist, came to the school the next day. She questioned the children and asked them to draw what they saw. Two months later, John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, USA also came and conducted many more interviews.
In all three interviews, 62 students, ages 6 to 12, told quite the same story. Accordingly, while playing outdoors, they saw some UFOs. These silver objects are disc-shaped, appearing very clearly in the sky. At least one of these flying saucers is believed to have landed in a field just outside the school boundary.
Then, one to four large-eyed, black-clad creatures left the UFO and approached the children. Some of the students confessed to running away in fear, but the older children stayed behind and watched them.
From here, different versions of the story begin. According to Professor Mack, the aliens communicated telepathically with the children. It is said that they have issued an ecological warning to the students, with the content that people must stop polluting the planet, or the world will end. Hind, later accepted Mack’s interpretations and added them to later versions in her own interpretation.
Belief and Doubt
Of course, the question is, what did the children actually see? According to ufologists, the Ariel incident is one of the most important UFO sightings in modern history. However, skeptics viewed the incident as a hoax.
Meanwhile, Cynthia Hind said that an important factor affecting people’s beliefs is that children do not agree with each other. Many of the children said they saw a strange entity but did not think it was an alien.
Some relied on local folklore to explain what they saw, that the creatures were “Zvikwambo” (human souls nourished by magic) or “Tokoloshe” (evil goblin creatures). in Shona and Ndebele folklore).
Because they live in the countryside, they may not be familiar with the idea of UFOs in popular culture, Hind says. Many children are not allowed to watch Hollywood movies or TV shows about aliens.
As a result, she feels their reports are believable because their imaginations are not influenced by movies, as evidenced by their various interpretations. One or two children may lie, but here with more than sixty children recounting exactly the same incident, it’s hard to believe that nothing out of the ordinary happened here.
However, Hind’s argument was rejected by many. They believe that, before the event in Ariel, Africa was also covered by UFO fever in the media.
The children themselves also come from well-to-do families and have access to all modern conveniences. They are also not closed off from audio-visual media. In addition, Hind interviewed the children in groups, making their stories vulnerable to cross-influence.
Mack’s results were even more troubling. He visited the children a few weeks after the incident. This gave the children enough time to weave a richer story.
Mack also somewhat has a reputation for leading his witnesses. In particular, it is believed that he may have “fed up” to the children the idea that the creatures communicated with them telepathically.
Additionally, while 62 students claimed to have seen something, dozens more admitted to seeing nothing. Some have seen a UFO, others have seen more. Some see one creature, and some see four.
In the end, everyone will continue to draw their own conclusions about the UFO Ariel incident. Ufologists will find reasons to believe and skeptics will try to find holes in children’s accounts to refute. They said the incident could have been a case of mass hysteria, but offered little evidence as to why they thought so.
To this day, 28 years later, many of the students present at that time still insist their story is true. And so far, everything is still a mystery.