Dozens of Schoolchildren Observe Beings Emerging From UFO

Each year, thousands of UFO reports are filed with various agencies- mostly mundane, they range from ambiguous flashing lights to far-out stories of contact with extraterrestrial beings. Apart from the fanatical followers of the phenomenon, most find these reports easy to dismiss as misidentified aircraft or outright hoaxes. But every once in a while, a UFO event occurs that is difficult to ignore.

Phoenix, 1997: thousands of residents, including the governor of Arizona, witnessed a football-field-sized object gliding silently above the metropolis.

Los Angeles, 1942: hundreds of witnesses observe US anti-aircraft artillery engaging unidentified craft in the legendary Battle of Los Angeles.

Zimbabwe, 1994: 62 school children encounter a flying saucer landing, and receive telepathic communication from the craft’s inhabitants.

This last event, known as the Ariel School Encounter, remains one of the most compelling cases in UFO lore, in part due to one investigator who was quickly called to the scene. Beyond the exacting similarities of the children’s testimonies and the numerous drawings- precise in their depictions- the man responsible for documenting their stories carried a resume beyond reproach.

Pulitzer Prize winner, head of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and best-selling author, Dr. John E. Mack was no stranger to accolades and the respect of his peers. Yet he risked his professional reputation, and his personal success, in the pursuit of a truth he was convinced of: the event described by the students of the Ariel School was real- and validating their stories of contact was worth the cost of ridicule.

On September 16, 1994, the students of the Ariel School in suburban Zimbabwe were at recess, enjoying an extra feeling of freedom as the faculty and staff were in a mandatory meeting. The children noticed three orbs hovering in the distance; the orbs disappeared several times, only to reappear somewhere else in the sky. One of the orbs slowly began to descend towards the ground, revealing itself as a saucer-shaped craft, landing 100 meters from the fascinated group of children. Two small beings emerged from the craft, standing roughly 3 ft in height, with massive oval shaped black eyes, shoulder-length black hair, and dark, tight-fitting suits. The children were frozen in shock. They watched the beings for a few moments, until one of them noticed the children and immediately proceeded to board the ship, disappearing as mysteriously as they arrived.

Running back into the school, the children hysterically attempted to explain what they had witnessed to the teachers, who had seen nothing from inside the building. Somewhat surprisingly, the school immediately reached out to Cynthia Hind, a well-known UFO investigator. She interviewed the children and asked them to draw what they saw, resulting in around 40 depictions of the event. Hind isolated the children during their interviews- yet the similarities of their individual accounts were inexplicable. The craft’s occupants were drawn with remarkable precision, and details such as the exact location of the landing are indicated quite clearly.

Armed with this preliminary information, Hind reached out to Harvard Professor Dr. John E. Mack to share details of this extraordinary contact experience. Mack had published a book of alien encounter case studies just a few months previously, and Hind expected he may have an interest in these children’s stories. Mack wasted no time in booking his passage to Zimbabwe.

Awarded a Pulitzer Price for his biography of TE Lawrence in 1977, Mack’s most recent publication, Abduction: Human Encounters With Aliens, met with critical animosity from his peers, despite becoming a best seller. His colleagues and superiors at Harvard were particularly concerned about the book, and for the first time in the school’s history, a committee was assembled to investigate the legitimacy of Mack’s work. A 14-month legal battle ensued.

The book was not criticized for its methods, however- Mack was a rigorous and ethical psychiatrist, and there was nothing controversial about his relationship to his patients or his case-study techniques. It was revealed to Mack that the objections were with his conclusions on the topic. He wrote: “I would not have gotten into trouble if I had not suggested that my findings might require a change in our view of reality, rather than saying that I had found a new psychiatric syndrome whose cause had not yet been established.”

When he arrived in Zimbabwe, the battle with Harvard was still ongoing. Undeterred, Mack carried with him a unique set of professional experiences- before turning his attention to the alien contact experience, his clinical expertise was in child and adolescent psychology. Mack interviewed each of the children individually, making sure that they would not influence each other’s stories. Again, the uncanny similarities in their descriptions lead Mack to believe they were indeed describing a legitimate event. Many of the older children spoke of receiving a telepathic communication from the visitors when they looked into their large black eyes. The messages centered around environmental destruction- with one student saying they were told “we are not taking proper care of the planet.” Another said “they want people to know that we’re actually making harm on this world.”

Mack had heard similar telepathic warnings from former patients with alien contact experiences- in fact, abduction research is full of these sorts of messages. This is not the only significant similarity the group testimony of the Ariel School children bears to other reports of alien encounters.

Orbs, often in groups of 3, have frequently been witnessed performing impossible maneuvers, like the sudden disappearance and reappearance seen at the school. The familiar saucer shape of the craft is all too common in UFO reports since the 1940s, although this can perhaps be dismissed by its prominence in tv shows and movies. Perhaps the most compelling detail is the matching reports from all of the students describing the beings as having long black hair. Aside from this feature, the aliens from the Ariel School sighting match the typical description of alien grays. If the children were merely imagining the popular depiction of aliens and UFOs, it’s hard to believe that they would add this unusual feature. And yet, this anomaly does have precedence in other contact reports. Grays have been known to wear disguises, often in misguided attempts to comfort those they encounter. Many reports have mentioned hair, although it is usually white. In a few cases, grays have appeared wearing cowboy hats, and in a particularly terrifying encounter, one has been described wearing a full clown costume.

If the individual accounts of this alien encounter directly resembled an X-Files episode or one of many popular movies on the subject, it might be easier to dismiss. The particulars of this case contained enough similarity to established research in the field, and just enough difference from depictions in popular media, to convince the expert minds of Cynthia Hind and Dr. John E. Mack.

Some have suggested a group hallucination, or some form of mass hysteria, as a possible, and utterly terrestrial, explanation. However, these group psychological effects are almost always tied to shared religious or cultural beliefs, such as the various mass-sightings of the Virgin Mary. The Ariel School children were not only diverse in age, but came from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds- as Hind wrote, they represented a wide cross-section of Zimbabweans: “Black African children from several tribes, mix-raced children, Asian children (whose grandparents were from India) and white children, mostly Zimbabwean-born, but whose parents were either from South Africa or Britain”. These cultural differences make the similar reports all the more compelling.

What would motivate a group of schoolchildren to fabricate such an elaborate story? And what would a respected psychiatrist have to gain in validating the details of the event? Even if it is a case of group hallucination, it would break the mold of any known previous case. And wouldn’t that be fascinating enough in its own right?