By Correspondent
In 1994, 62 children at Ariel school in Ruwa said they’d seen a ‘UFO’ and ‘aliens with big eyes’ in bush land near their school playground.
The story was reported around the world and drew much attention to the country.
Dr John Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winner and head of Harvard’s psychiatry department visited the school for interviews from which a documentary was produced.
In the documentary, one teacher said he thought the children made the incident up after hearing news reports of what some speculated were meteorites in the sky.
According to a WHYY report, two other teachers said they believed the children.
One defended this because of the sudden and universal panic that erupted the day it happened.
The other said because of drawings the kids had made of the incident.
“So many of the drawings were similar,” she said.
“And also when they wrote their stories in their story books, they definitely seemed genuine, because I mean they all wrote completely different stories but they had seen the same thing.
“I think that’s what convinced me because I think I was as skeptical as everybody.”
Through a series of interviews, John Mack pieced together a narrative of what happened.
Dr John Mack, who later died after being struck by a drunken driver
The Narrative
It was a Friday morning, and Ariel’s teachers were inside holding a staff meeting, while the students — kids ranging in age from 6 to 12 or 13 years old — were outside playing.
One little girl who Mack interviewed, named Haley, said that what caught her attention was a strange sound.
“What was it like?” Mack asked her.
“Like a roar or a buzz or a hum? Or what kind of a noise?”
“It was like someone was blowing a flute,” she said.
Other kids reported a buzzing sound, like bees or electricity.
Several described seeing a silver object whizzing through the sky, and then landing near some trees.
The kids all ran over to see what it was.
“We got closer and closer, and we saw this silver thing just shining,” said a girl named Candace in a news interview.
“We thought that it was just a house with glass reflecting in the sun and shining.
“Then we thought, no, it can’t be that, because there’s no houses up there on the rocks.”
It was at this point that the kids described seeing two figures — small, maybe 4 feet tall, dressed in skin-tight black bodysuits.
They had narrow, pale, almost plasticky-looking faces with two enormous black eyes.
One of the figures stayed on with the ship, and the other started running through the grass.
In one of John Mack’s interviews, a student described the figure running “bouncy, as if a human would run on the moon.”
Several other children said it looked like he was running in slow motion.
Recounting The Alien Story
They were close to the whole scene, just a few feet away — and yet somehow, they said, it looked like the ship and the figures were glitching.
“It was running in slow motion diagonally down the field,” one of the students named Claire recalled many years later as an adult.
“And then suddenly, it would reappear in the corner where it started and do the same thing.
“Then it would reappear and do the same thing. And that was frightening — more frightening than seeing what these things actually were.”
Finally, the figured stopped in front of them.
In their interviews with Mack, the children, over and over again, focused on its eyes — big, black, shiny pools that they found they couldn’t look away from.
“It looked evil because it was just staring at me,” one girl said.
“As if it wanted to come and take us.”
The children were made to draw and write what they had seen.
Some of the drawings by the pupils.
Resultantly, many documentaries and writings have been done on the subject which remains controversial today.
While some have become convinced about the veracity of the story others are still skeptical.