Zimbabwe alien encounter: How 62 kids ‘saw UFO land outside school’ in staggering mass-sighting featured in Netflix doc
OVER 60 children claim they saw a UFO land outside their school in one of the most compelling mass sightings of all time.
A new Netflix documentary, Encounters, is now revisiting the case of the students who said a spaceship and a ‘being’ landed from the sky in Zimbabwe.
Many consider the 1994 ‘encounter’ to be the most significant of the 20th century, especially due to the high number of witnesses.
And almost 30 years on, many of the now-grown students stand by their extraordinary claims.
Skeptics have slammed the alleged sighting as a prank, mass hysteria, or simply suggested the children misinterpreted what they saw.
But others, including experts in the documentary, highlight the unique nature of this case.
The new Netflix series explores the events of September 16 1994 and investigate whether the children can be considered as reliable witnesses.
It also digs deeper into four other eerily similar stories of people who claim to have had encounters with non-human life forms.
The show has hit screens just as two so-called “alien corpses” have been put on public display in Mexico City.
UFO enthusiast Jaime Maussan presented them at a congressional hearing after they were found in Peru and tests confirmed they were not manufactured by humans.
The children, now grown up, give eerie interviews where they speak about what they saw that day.
While they were outside the rural Ariel school in Ruwa, for their morning break they said an object floated down from the sky into a field in front of them.
While some ran away, others stayed to watch and some even described “beings” exiting the “silver disc” object or objects.
The kids, who later told their teachers and parents, were interviewed extensively by journalists and even a Harvard University psychiatry expert, Dr John Mack.
He was later criticised for defending the accounts of the children as credible witnesses, saying that they displayed no signs of mental illness and it appeared to have been a real experience.
After the baffling event was widely reported on, it was assumed that around 62 children aged between six and 12 all had similar accounts of the event.
While some disagreed over what it was they saw – the descriptions of one or multiple UFOs and an ‘alien figure’ were, and still are, incredibly similar.
Many were asked to draw what they remembered, with sketches showing what looks like aliens with large black eyes and disc-shaped hovering objects.
Emma, a former student at the Ariel school, recalls: “We were at recess. I was in year 6. The teachers had gone on a quick staff meeting so Salma and I were kind of roaming on that out-of-bounds area.
“And I remember that there was a bright light, really close by, just above the grass.
“Both Salma and I kind of went, “Ooh what’s that?”
Salma said the light disappeared and reappeared, almost as if their eyes were playing tricks on them.
The documentary includes footage taken after the children claim to have seen a UFO, as a 10-year-old Emma says: “I saw a little object hovering, it was quite big actually.
“And then there were little ones all around it. It looked as if they were changing spaceships.”
Another former student described a “silver shiny disc” with lights.
A grown Emma gestures in the field outside her school, recounting her memories of the day: “Just here were the ships.”
Both Emma and Salma then recall seeing a “being” standing in front of them outside the school, just metres away.
“There was definitely no mistaking what we were looking at.”
“It had a very big head, oval… a pointy chin,” Salma said.
Both remember the being dressed in black, and several of the students in the documentary also describe a kind of “telepathic communication”.
Another former student, Lisil, said she had tried to “live a normal life and move on”, from her experience, but it had stayed with her.
“I could hear the other kids screaming, crying but it was just like I was being drawn in by this being.”
“I remember seeing big black eyes. I don’t know if it was telepathic… but the message I remember recieving was that we were harming the planet.”
Other students share similar accounts of what they saw almost 30 years ago, as they did when it happened.
It’s not the first time they were given the chance to tell their story.
Last year a documentary film, Ariel Phenomenon, was released just days after a landmark hearing in which intel chiefs fessed up their have been 400 sightings and 11 near misses with military aircraft in the US.
Ariel Phenomenon’s director Randall Nickerson told The Sun Online he hoped the conversation would move in the right direction for those who have these experiences to be heard without fear and stigma.
He added he UFO phenomenon is “global” and said “every country has these reports”.
“We have to be able to be truthful about people’s experiences and say ‘well, maybe we don’t understand what is going on”, the filmmaker said.
“It is necessary at this point, we are seeing more and more as our technology develops.
“It is something we have to have a conversation about and explore – and Ariel is a big part of that.”