Ariel School is a private primary in Ruwa, about twenty kilometres from Harare. On Friday 16 September 1994, at the mid-morning break, around 10:15, a group of the children were on the playing field. The teachers were indoors in a staff meeting. Cynthia Hind, the investigator who came four days later, was told that the children always shouted at break, and that nobody inside thought the noise that morning was different. The one other adult on the grounds was a mother running the tuckshop. Children went and called her. She would not leave the food and the money, and she did not come out to look.

Hind’s count, and the headmaster Colin Mackie’s later one, is about sixty children who said they had seen something. Mackie told John Mack that the youngest classes were not in that tally, and that more may have kept quiet. The reports Hind took from the older ones agree on the outline and not on every detail. Barry, one of the boys, said three objects with flashing red lights passed over, vanished, and showed up again somewhere else, and that this happened about three times. The account she treats as the common one is that an object then came down by some gum trees, on rough ground about a hundred metres past the edge of the field: thorn, cut grass, bamboo shoots. The children were not allowed in there, because of snakes. Hind says the ground was not fenced. Some of them said the object landed. Some said it hovered. One boy said it had come along the line of the electricity pylons.

A small figure, about a metre tall, was then on top of it. In the version Hind wrote up, he walked a little way, seemed to notice the children, vanished, and was seen again at the back of the object. The object left quickly. A girl of eleven said the suit was black, tight, and shiny. Hind’s summary of the figure, from those interviews, is a long thin neck, eyes huge like rugby balls, a pale face, and long black hair past the shoulders. The smaller children ran and shouted “Help me, help me.” Asked why, they said he was coming to eat them. Hind thought that line sat close to stories of the tokoloshe. The children were black, white, coloured, and Asian. Mackie later put the whole scene at about ten to fifteen minutes. He told Mack he believed they had seen something, and that he would not say what it was.

The sky over southern Africa had already been in the papers. On the night of Wednesday 14 September, around nine, a chain of bright lights crossed from north to south, with a boom a few minutes after. The Herald of 17 September carried bearings taken by Euan Nisbet, a geologist who watched it from Zvishavane and at first took it for a meteor. It was the re-entry of the spent Zenit-2 rocket from Cosmos 2290, launched on 26 August. The Harare press did not say “Russian rocket” until 8 October. In the days between, Tim Leach of the BBC was already taking calls about lights in the sky. He rang Hind just after two on the Friday of the school break.

Leach filmed children at the school on Monday 19 September. Hind came on Tuesday the 20th, with Leach, her son, and Gunter Hofer, who brought a Geiger counter, a metal detector, and a magnetometer. She had asked Mackie, before she arrived, to have the children draw. He had about thirty to forty drawings. She copied twenty-two of the clearer ones. She wrote that most of the descriptions matched, that some drawings were vague, and that some craft were very obviously flying saucers, and she asked herself how many of the children had seen that shape already. She interviewed ten or twelve of the older children, on the BBC tape. Hofer’s instruments gave nothing on the ground they were shown. Hind walked the pylon line herself and found no place where foliage had been pressed down. She thought the bamboo stumps would have stopped a landing. The day was about 33°C.

John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard, was not in Zimbabwe that week. He had published Abduction earlier in 1994. He reached Harare at the end of November and spent 2 and 3 December at the school with Dominique Callimanopulos. They spoke with twelve of the children, and with Mackie and teachers. The warning about the planet is in those December conversations. Mack asked what it had felt like to look at the eyes, and whether an idea about the Earth had come then. One girl said the man never spoke, that the eyes looked horrible, and that the thought of trees gone and no air came when she got home. Another said it came through her conscience while the being looked at her, and that she had not been a child who thought about harm to the world before. Callimanopulos printed that as a message from the eyes. It is not in Hind’s first write-up of the Friday. Mack told the parents that calling the children liars would not help. He did not file a finding that the school was free of invention, or that a craft had been on the ground.

Some of those children, grown, have gone on giving the same account.