All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
Dec. 29, 2020 - Skeptoid
18:55
Skeptoid #760: The 1994 Ruwa Zimbabwe Alien Encounter

This popular tale claims 62 African schoolchildren were contacted by an extraterrestrial. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|

Time Text
The Zimbabwe UFO Incident 00:09:37
1994, Rua Zimbabwe.
Amid a rash of UFO reports from all over Africa, one story stood out.
62 children at an elite private school reported a craft landed in the adjacent field, and a silvery astronaut communicated a telepathic message of environmentalism.
Today, it's often cited as the most compelling proof of alien visitation.
But did what actually took place differ from the way the story is remembered today?
That's coming up next on Skeptoid.
Hi, I'm Alex Goldman.
You may know me as the host of Reply All, but I'm done with that.
I'm doing something else now.
I've started a new podcast called Hyperfixed.
On every episode of Hyperfixed, listeners write in with their problems and I try to solve them.
Some massive and life-altering, and some so minuscule it'll boggle your mind.
No matter the problem, no matter the size, I'm here for you.
That's HyperFixed, the new podcast from Radiotopia.
Find it wherever you listen to podcasts or at hyperfixedpod.com.
You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
The 1994 Rua Zimbabwe alien encounter.
It's one of those stories that defies all rational explanation.
62 children at a school in rural Africa all witnessed a craft come down out of the sky and land just outside their schoolyard, and a strange being stepped out and communicated a telepathic message to all of them that they need to take better care of planet Earth.
The event was broadly documented, not only by responsible news organizations such as the BBC, but also by a respected academic who interviewed the children and reported that they all told exactly the same story.
Surely, 62 children wouldn't all tell the same lie.
And surely, rural Africans would have no pop culture references from which to fabricate a flying saucer story.
While today's skeptical academics dismiss the episode as a case of mass hysteria, the UFO community embraces the Rua Zimbabwe encounter of 1994 as an unassailable body of evidence that we were visited by extraterrestrial beings.
It was the mid-morning break on September 16th, 1994.
250 school children were all outside playing at the Ariel School, a private elementary school in the Harare province of Zimbabwe.
Rua itself isn't even a town, just a local place name, little more than a crossroads in an agricultural region.
The adult faculty were all inside having a staff meeting, and none of them witnessed what happened.
62 of the children saw it, aged 6 to 12.
Nearly 200 did not.
The details are not actually as consistent as usually reported, but the basics generally are.
Somewhere between one and several silver balls or objects or spacecraft either appeared in the sky or darted about or came floating in low to a field of brush and small trees just outside the school property.
One or more either landed or hovered above the field.
And anywhere between one and four men, either normal-looking black men or conventional small gray aliens wearing black clothes, stood either atop the craft or beside it, faced the children, and communicated telepathically the need to take good care of planet Earth.
The craft either faded away, flew away quickly, or disappeared, either leaving one or more men behind or taking them away.
When classes resumed, some of the children told their teachers.
Some told their parents.
The story got out.
Universally, it was reported that 62 children with no reason to lie and no prior exposure to the concept of space aliens would all make up and stick to exactly the same story.
A couple months later, the event got its most famous stamp of authenticity when John Mack, a prominent and respected professor of psychiatry at Harvard University, came in person and interviewed the children.
Many of these interviews were videotaped.
What was the feeling when you looked at the eyes?
It was scary.
It was scary?
Why?
What made it scary?
The eyes looked evil.
Evil.
And what was evil about them?
Say what you mean by evil.
It looked evil because it was just staring at me.
Staring at you as if what?
As if to do what?
As if it wanted to come and take us.
And another little girl.
How did those thoughts come to you?
Did they come to you from the craft or from...
From the man.
The man.
Did the man say those things to you?
How did he get that across to you?
Well, he never said anything.
It's just that the face is the eyes.
What was the sense you got from those eyes?
He was interested.
Mack reported to the world that the event was genuine, that the children were telling the truth, and that extraterrestrials had indeed visited Zimbabwe on that day.
And his is the verdict that has been endorsed by the popular media ever since, including at least two features on the TV program, Sightings.
Inside academia, however, it is the mass hysteria explanation that has found the most traction, as happened in a number of other mysterious cases we've talked about here on Skeptoid.
A literature survey published in the Malawi Medical Journal found that such cases are surprisingly common in African schools, citing many such cases and concluding, the psychosocial environment plays a crucial role in the occurrence of mass hysteria in developing countries.
Whether mass hysteria was involved here or not, the psychosocial environment absolutely did come into play.
To see how, let's go back and look at some of the less commonly reported details in this event's history.
As with most UFO stories, we can trace a case back to a single person who became its primary advocate and creator of the legend.
In this case, there were two.
One was John Mack, and the other was UFO writer Cynthia Hind, editor of the periodical UFO Afra News, and also the African representative for MUFON, the mutual UFO network.
One day, Hind heard on ZBC Radio that there had been a rash of UFO reports from all over southeastern Africa, consistent with a large meteoric fireball passing over the continent at about 9 p.m. on September 14th, two nights before the Ariel School event.
Few Africans knew it, but that fireball had been the re-entry of the Zenit-2 rocket from the Cosmos 2290 satellite launch.
The booster broke up into burning streaks as it moved silently across the sky, giving an impressive light show to millions of Africans.
Many people answered ZBC Radio's request by calling in with all sorts of disparate UFO reports prompted by that re-entry, ranging from one shooting star to a fleet of 16 brightly lit spaceships.
Zimbabwe was gripped with its own little wave of UFO mania.
The radio announcer said that the BBC was looking for anyone with information or photographs.
Well, as this was her jam, Hind picked up the phone and spoke with the BBC correspondent in Zimbabwe, Tim Leach.
Two things transpired from their conversation.
First, Hind learned of the Arial School event, as someone had phoned it in to ZBC Radio.
And second, Hind recommended that Leach call John Mack.
Hey everyone, I want to remind you about a truly unique and once-in-a-lifetime adventure.
Join me and Mediterranean archaeologist Dr. Flint Dibble for a skeptoid sailing adventure through the Mediterranean Sea aboard the SV Royal Clipper, the world's largest full-rigged sailing ship.
This is also the only opportunity you'll have to hear Flint and I talk about our experiences when we both went on Joe Rogan to represent the causes of science and reality against whatever it is that you get when you're thrown into that lion pit.
We set sail from Málaga, Spain on April 18th, 2026 and finish the adventure in Nice, France on April 25th.
You'll enjoy a fascinating skeptical mini-conference at sea.
You'll visit amazing ports along the Spanish and French coasts and Flint will be our exclusive onboard expert sharing the real archaeology and history about every stop.
We've got special side quests and extra skeptical content planned at each port.
This is a true sailing ship.
You can climb the rat lines to the crow's nest, handle the sails.
You can even take the helm and steer.
This is a real bucket list adventure you don't want to miss.
But cabins are selling fast and this ship does always sell out.
Media Bias and Student Reports 00:07:11
Act now or you'll miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
Get the full details and book your cabin at skeptoid.com slash adventures.
Hope to see you on board.
That's skeptoid.com slash adventures.
As she was local, Hind went to the aerial school the next day and had the children draw pictures of what they saw.
She took 22 photocopies of what she said were the clearest of them, and most that have been reproduced online show a very conventional flying saucer sitting on the ground on the usual footpads with the usual row of windows around the equator and the usual bulge on the top.
When Sightings did one of their two shows on this, their token skeptic pointed out, I think kids knew about flying saucers.
The way they drew the flying saucer and the so-called people who came out of it.
Now those are pictures you'll find in TV programs and movies.
But Cynthia Hind quickly countered.
Well, a lot of these children don't go to the movies.
They live in the country, parents of farmers.
Her argument was that students at a rural African school would not have had exposure to modern media and thus would not be familiar with the concepts of UFOs and alien visitors.
So when they report them and draw detailed sketches, the source must be an actual real-life encounter.
Let's have a look at the Arial School.
Rua is a suburb of Harare, a modern metropolis of 1.6 million people, 1.2 million in 1994, and Zimbabwe's capital.
Since its founding as a British colony with distinctly European architecture, to its modern display of glass skyscrapers and office buildings, Harare has always been the nation's economic center.
A 15-minute drive down the R5 highway, and you soon get into agricultural regions.
And right about at this transition is where you'll find the Arial School.
Their neatly uniformed students have active programs in many sports, clubs, and other extracurricular activities.
They have a competition swimming pool, tennis courts, and a golf course.
The demographics have changed.
In 1994, the school was mostly white Zimbabweans of British and South African origin.
Today, it's mostly black Zimbabweans.
English is the language spoken in schools, so all the students, then as well as now, are perfectly fluent.
Ariel was the most expensive private school around, and the students were generally from wealthy families in Harare who wanted to send their children someplace nicer than the crowded urban schools.
Ariel's students had just as much exposure to the world's movies and television as people in every other modern city around the world.
Certainly, including the wave of UFO mania that had been saturating Zimbabwe's news media ever since the fireball two nights before.
It wasn't just Cynthia Hind.
In all the pro-UFO reporting of this event, you'll read that these rural African children were unfamiliar with popular media, and you certainly will not read that all they'd heard the day before on every radio and TV station was that spaceships were saturating their skies, all stemming from that Zenit 2 rocket reentry.
The UFO community misrepresents the children's background in an effort to persuade you that their stories deserve more credibility than they do.
And those children's stories came to us mainly through John Mack's interviews.
Mack was going through a rough spell professionally.
Earlier that year, he'd published a book called Abduction, Human Encounters with Aliens.
As a tenured professor, he'd virtually abandoned his academic work and had devoted himself nearly full time to attempting to prove his deep conviction that aliens actively visit the Earth.
Harvard had opened an official investigation into him for misconduct, specifically for telling people who believed they'd been abducted by aliens that their experience had been absolutely real.
One colleague wrote in the Los Angeles Times that Mack was, quote, a brilliant fellow who occasionally loses it, and this time he's lost it big time.
Keep that in mind.
Harvard's issue with Mac is that his thing was convincing people they'd had an alien encounter.
So it was with a heavy baggage of bias and preconceived conclusions that Mack arrived in Harare to speak with these children.
When multiple witnesses are involved in something, they should be interviewed as soon as possible and separately to avoid any cross-contamination between their stories.
Mack did the opposite, giving the students two months to converse among themselves.
A crucial insight into Mack's interview technique is revealed when comparing his results to those obtained by Cynthia Hind two months earlier.
The whole theme of a telepathic message to protect planet Earth was not found in the stories collected by Hind at all.
This major part of the story did not exist at all until Mac's interviews.
Why?
Because he prompted and suggested it, according to his existing beliefs.
In addition to being an alien visitation advocate, Mack was an anti-nuclear and environmental activist.
Hind ultimately did report this angle extensively, but only after Mack's interviews.
Hind's own interviews were even worse.
She interviewed the children in groups of four to six, while the other children were allowed to watch and listen to each group.
Every single child's story was necessarily cross-contaminated with the others.
There is little wonder that she always reported that all the students told exactly the same story.
Maybe an alien spaceship did land there that day and communicate telepathically to this handful of children.
Or maybe a couple strangers strolled through the nearby field and maybe a stray party balloon floated past.
We'll never really have any good idea of what did or didn't happen on that day, if anything happened at all.
Keeping in mind, that nothing at all is what three-quarters of the students reported.
The actual events are buried under a nationwide UFO frenzy triggered by the rocket re-entry, under the hopelessly incompetent story-sharing session of Cynthia Hind, and under the skilled promptings of Harvard University's resident expert in persuading people that they had an actual alien encounter.
As far as serving as evidence of alien visitation, the 1994 Rua-Zimbabwe encounter falls just a little bit short.
Support Our Skeptical Mission 00:02:03
But you know who never falls short?
Skeptoid's premium supporters like Dave Pasquantonio, Clint Lovell, Gareth Priceless from New Zealand, Karen Coy, and more than 2,500 other listeners just like you.
If you're not one of them, they're the ones making Skeptoid possible and bringing it to you.
If you feel more people in the world should learn and embrace the skeptical perspective, then you've got the ability to make that happen.
Become one of our premium members and support the show with monthly micropayments so small you'll never miss them.
It's easy.
Just come to skeptoid.com and click Go Premium.
You're listening to Skeptoid, a listener-supported program.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Hello, everyone.
This is Adrian Hill from Skookum Studios in Calgary, Canada, the land of maple syrup and moose.
And I'm here to ask you to consider becoming a premium member of Skeptoid for as little as five US dollars per month.
And that's only the cost of a couple of Tim Horton's double doubles.
And that's Canadian for coffee with double cream and sugar.
Why support Skeptoid?
If you are like me and don't like ads, but like extended versions of each episode, Premium is for you.
If you want to support a worthwhile nonprofit that combats pseudoscience, promotes critical thinking, and provides free access to teachers to use the podcast in the classroom via the teacher's toolkit, then sign up today.
Remember that skepticism is the best medicine.
Next to giggling, of course.
Until next time, this is Adrienne Hill.
From PRX.
Export Selection