The Ariel School Encounter: What the Children Saw

Ruwa, near Harare, Zimbabwe, southern Africa · 16 September 1994

Key Facts

• Location: Ariel School, Ruwa, Zimbabwe.
• Date: Friday, 16 September 1994.
• Reported encounter: Unfamiliar objects and figures beyond the playground.
• Surviving record: Children’s drawings, recorded interviews and investigators’ accounts.

At the edge of the playground, the cleared ground gave way to long grass and trees.

It was a place the children could look into without necessarily seeing everything that was there. Beyond their familiar school grounds lay rougher land: bushes, undergrowth and patches of shade.

On the morning of 16 September 1994, something in that direction caught their attention.

The teachers were inside for a staff meeting. Outside, during the morning break, children began looking towards the trees. What they subsequently described would bring television cameras to this small school near Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe, and eventually a psychiatrist from Harvard.

There was something bright beyond the playground. Some described objects descending or hovering. Others spoke of a small figure dressed in black.

Then there were the eyes.

In the interviews that followed, children tried to explain their size and shape. They used words, drawings and gestures. Some had been frightened. Others had watched with curiosity before the fear of those around them became their own.

An adult running the school tuckshop remembered children coming to tell her about a little man. She did not go outside to look. At first, she suspected a diversion from the sweets and money in her care.

The incident left no known photograph of the supposed visitors. What survived was the children’s account of them—and the difficulty the adults had in deciding what to make of it.

For some former pupils, that Friday morning would remain an encounter with something they had never seen before or since.