The Ariel School Phenomenon: Mass Hysteria Or Alien Encounter?
Ariel Phenomenon/FacebookA student sketch of an alien encounter at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe.
On Sept. 16, 1994, 62 students at the Ariel School in Ruwa, Zimbabwe claimed that they saw a UFO descend onto a field near their school during recess.
“It looked like it was glinting in the trees,” one of the children told the BBC after the event. “It looked like a [round] disc.”
Some of the children also claimed to have encountered aliens with big eyes and waxy skin, who communicated with them telepathically about the importance of protecting the Earth’s environment.
This incident became known as the Ariel School Phenomenon. And when the news of these sightings broke, it swept all of Zimbabwe into a frenzy.
In the weeks that followed, several UFO experts and even a Harvard psychiatrist came to the school to interview the students about what they had seen. Many of the children provided nearly identical accounts of the sightings, and produced remarkably similar drawings of the aliens.
While some experts believed the children’s story, others suggested that the event was nothing more than an example of mass hysteria. After all, the Ariel School Phenomenon hadn’t even been the first UFO sighting in southern Africa that week.
In the days leading up to the event, reports had flooded in from across the region of strange lights streaking across the sky. While it was later determined that these people had simply been witnessing the reentry of the Zenit-2 rocket, these sightings had sparked a sort of UFO mania in the area.
Finally, in 2023, a former Ariel student named Dallyn claimed that he had made the entire UFO story up. According to Dallyn, he had told a couple of his fellow students that a shiny rock near the school was a UFO; the story spread, and before long, it had snowballed into one of history’s most legendary UFO sightings.
However, other former students continue to insist that they saw something truly out of this world that day.
