The Ariel School UFO

In September 1994 about 60 pupils at Ariel School in Ruwa, near Harare, Zimbabwe, described a spaceship and aliens in the bush near their playground.

Investigator Cynthia Hind reported the case in UFO Times, the magazine of the UFO research group BUFORA, in early 1995. She wrote that at about 10:15 one Friday morning in September, 62 children at Ariel School, a private primary some 20 km outside Harare, were on their mid-morning break when three silver balls appeared in the sky above them. By her account the balls vanished in a flash and reappeared three times, then came down toward the school, and one landed or hovered over rough ground of trees, thornbush and cut grass.

Tim Leach, the BBC's man in Zimbabwe, came to the school on 19 September to film pupils and staff, Wikipedia says, and afterwards said "I could handle war zones, but I could not handle this". Hind visited the next day, interviewed some of the children and had them draw what they saw. She reported that they all told the same story. A 2021 BBC World Service programme by Rebecca Kesby says around 60 children described aliens and a space ship, and that their drawings, though different in skill, were alike in detail and proportion.

Skeptics point to an event two nights earlier. The Mail & Guardian (2014) quotes an account of a bright display in the night sky over southern Africa on Wednesday 14 September 1994. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid (2020) says ZBC Radio reported a wave of UFO sightings across southeastern Africa fitting a large fireball at about 9 p.m. that night, and that it was a Zenit-2 rocket stage used to launch the Cosmos 2290 satellite, breaking up on re-entry.