Bruce Ndlovu, Sunday Life Reporter
ON Friday, September 16, in 1994, the tuck shop minder at Ariel Primary School, Ruwa, Mashonaland West province, suddenly found herself swarmed by a group of pupils during break time.
In any school tuck shop, business reaches its peak at around at around 10am, as children take a break from their lessons, so there seemed to be nothing unusual about the tuck shop mistress suddenly being the centre of attention at around that time.
However, there seemed to be something different about this mob clamouring for the attention of this lady. For one, the children did not have the excited eagerness of those in need of a snack.
Instead, they displayed the anxious energy of those that had seen something extremely disturbing.
While the school teachers were in a meeting in the staff room, the tuck shop minder found herself having to allay alarm among a group of children that claimed to have seen a disc-shaped object land in the bushes near the school’s playground.
If it had been one or two children that were showing signs of distress, the tuck shop keeper might have dismissed them, blaming their hysteria on a sugar rush acquired from whatever sweet delicacies they had consumed during their break.
But this was different. Over 60 kids, were claiming to have seen this disc-shaped object, while others swore that they had seen some mysterious figures disembark from this Unidentified Flying Object (UFO).
Initially, the teachers at the school dismissed the testimonies of the children offhand. After all, UFOs did not exist and if they did it was unlikely they would choose rural Ruwa to make their grand entrance. However, soon, a BBC reporter, a UFO investigator and a Harvard Professor would be on the scene, trying to make sense of an event that seemed to shake the children at the school to the core. “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,” one of the children, Sarah (not real name) who claimed to have witnessed the incident, told The Mail & Guardian in 2015. Now all grown up, over two decades later, she still stuck with the events of that September morning.
“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.
“But the next day the school received a bunch of calls from parents wanting to know why their kids were spooked. It got so tense that the teachers started to freak out, too, and a local UFO expert called Cynthia Hind was invited to speak to everyone. It was via her, I think, that we heard about a famous shrink who was coming from the US to assess the children. What was his name now . . . Mack, Dr John Mack, who I heard was killed by a drunk driver a few years back.”
Hind, who had reportedly dedicated “half her life” to investigating UFO landings, was the first on the scene. Immediately, she was disturbed by the teachers’ attitude towards the children’s plight. Simply put, they did not believe that children had just had a brief encounter with beings from another planet.
“What a frightening indictment of our society that when we are confronted by something we don’t understand, we don’t even attempt to open our minds to the event,” Hind, who passed away in 2000, wrote at the time.
For Hind, a sleuth who had dedicated herself to investigating landings of such extra-terrestrial beings, the testimonies of the children were too detailed, too identical to be the work of their collective imagination.
“What happened at Ariel was certainly weird, so many kids coming back from break with such similar stories, but I doubt many people would have heard about it if Hind hadn’t made such a fuss. She was the first person to interview the kids, and got the news out to all sorts of important people, Mack included, as if, you know, finally here was some vindication,” said Sarah.
The children at Ariel were drawn from different backgrounds, hence their interpretation of the beings that they saw differed.
One of the white students, for example, “thought at first that the little man in black might have been Mrs Stevens’ gardener, but then he saw that the figure had long, straight black hair, ‘not really like (a) black (person’s) hair’, so he realised he had made a mistake!”
Another, referred to as Guy G, said he “could see the little man (about a metre tall) was dressed in a black, shiny suit; that he had long black hair and his eyes, which seemed lower on the cheek than our eyes, were large and elongated. The mouth was just a slit and the ears were hardly discernible.”
For the black children at the school, the beings had the sinister appearances of zvikwambo or tikoloshes that they had grown up hearing from the folktales told by their parents and grandparents.
BBC’s Tim Leach who visited the school three days later on 19 September 1994 was so shaken by what he had heard during his interviews with the students that he said, “I could handle war zones, but I could not handle this”.
Hot on the heels of investigator Hinds and reporter Leach, was Dr John E Mack, a Pulitzer award winning writer and the Professor of Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School.
Dr Mack, who had an interest in alien abductions, had a visit scheduled for Africa when the incident at Ariel occurred. While his initial itinerary was meant to take him to South Africa, the “invasion” at Ariel immediately encouraged him to change course and head south of the Limpopo.
It was Dr Mack who came up with a theory that the aliens had somehow managed to communicate with the children. In one snippet on YouTube, a Grade 5 pupil called Francis tells the gentle-eyed psychiatrist he was warned “about something that’s going to happen,” and that “pollution mustn’t be,” Another, 11-year-old Emma said “I think they want people to know that we’re actually making harm on this world and we mustn’t get too technologed (sic).”
When it was all said and done, it remained unclear whether the children at Ariel had indeed spotted aliens near their playground that sunny autumn afternoon or were just simply victims of mass hysteria.
Photographer, Gunter Hofer, who was one of the first on the scene, last year released photographs taken at the site of the incident, which showed that a large object had made a big mark where the kids claim to have seen the alien craft land, flattening grass and twigs while leaving an oval indentation on the rock hard soil. Like everyone else, Hofer had to live with the consequences of what the children saw or didn’t see at their school that day.
While Dr Mack’s investigations made prime time news around the world, his work as an academic took a hit, as he had already been under scrutiny at Harvard for believing in “looney” ideas.
Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Medical School, was one of those that led the charge against Mack, describing him in the Los Angeles Times as “a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he’s lost it big time”.
There were suggestions that Mack had also led the children, who may have already been influenced by movies and other popular forms of popular culture, into believing that the aliens had communicated with them.
Last year, a documentary, The Ariel Phenomenon, debuted to widespread acclaim. The children from the school, who are now all grown up and scattered around the globe, still maintain that they saw aliens that day. It is a day that is still permanently etched in their minds.
“You want to know the real message here? The real message is that this stuff can brand you for life. It undermined Mack’s credibility, became this huge unending thing for others, and it certainly f***d me up. I mean, try telling people that you live in permanent fear of these things returning one day. Try telling them that you can actually sense when they’re back in our atmosphere. They’ll think you’re a kook. All this lot do,” said Sarah.