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Oct. 22, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:59
Edition 317 - Zimbabwe ET "Contact" Case

Randall Nickerson's made a film about an astonishing forgotten ET case at an Africanschool...Also features contactee Salma Siddick...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you very much for your recent contacts, all of your emails, please keep them coming, and all of your guest suggestions and the stories that you're telling me.
You can always email the show, go to the website theunexplained.tv, designed by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool, who gets the show out to you.
There, you can send me your information, stories, guest suggestions, anything you like.
And if you'd like to make a donation to the show, of course, you can do that there by following the donations link.
And if you have made a donation recently, thank you very much.
No shout-outs on this edition, because we have a very important story to get to.
It is something that some of you have been asking me to cover for a very long time.
Now, I think we can.
It is a story of close encounters contact of a very real kind.
It happened in southern Africa.
Now, for those of you who think that UFO contacts only ever happen in England or the United States or Canada or Australia, this is going to be a surprise.
You might have heard a version of this story already.
I've read a couple.
But let me tell you the bones of it.
On September 16th, 1994, at the Aerial Primary School in Zimbabwe, 64 children claimed to have seen a disc-shaped craft land behind the school during the morning break.
Two strange beings were reported, one of which approached the group of children, and there were multiple sightings of unusual aerial phenomena by thousands of Zimbabweans during the same time period.
The children were interviewed by the BBC and other news agencies, and then apparently the story faded from public attention.
Now, I have to say that this is a little part of my life, because two and a half months after that, I went to South Africa for the very first time.
1994, very near to Christmas, I went to the South African Broadcasting Corporation to train journalists and broadcasters there.
At the time, I was working at London's Capital Radio, and I took a break from that, and I'd been invited to go down for the first time.
It was a remarkable time in my life.
But nobody, two and a half months after that happened, and there was a lot of talk of stories that had happened in that period in southern Africa, nobody mentioned this story to me.
And I wonder why that might be.
We're going to be talking with a man who's made a new documentary, a detailed investigation of this subject, talking to people who witnessed these events.
Randall Nickerson is his name.
He is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
Like I say, thank you very much for all of your communications.
Please stay in touch with me.
Shout outs on the next edition.
And I think we should get to filmmaker Randall Nickerson now and talk about this highly unusual aerial school sighting in Zimbabwe in 1994.
Randall Nickerson, thank you very much for coming on the show.
Thank you, Howard.
I appreciate you giving us the time.
And Randall, you have somebody to introduce to me.
Now, you know, I wasn't too aware of this until a day or two ago, but you've got one of the experiences also on this conference call here.
So hopefully you're both in the U.S. In another part of the U.S., there's somebody else.
You can introduce her.
Yes, that's true.
Her name is Salma.
She was one of the witnesses at this event that took place in 1994 in Zimbabwe.
And I found her, I don't know, I think it was about the second year I was on this project because I was trying to find all the witnesses to this event.
All right.
And yeah, she's here.
Salma, nice to have you on.
If you can hear me, whereabouts in the U.S. are you?
Hi, thank you so very much for having me.
It's such an honor.
I am actually in Seattle, Washington.
All right.
And Randall, where are you?
I'm in Massachusetts.
So we are literally linking the globe here.
I'm in London.
That's true.
Salma, you're in Seattle, Boeing Country.
And Randall, you're in Massachusetts.
So that's, well, kind of East Coast, Boston-ish.
That's true.
All right.
Okay, well, we're going to try and make this work because I think it's going to be fascinating stuff.
Now, Randall, let me start with you.
Salma, if you want to come in at any time, please do.
But I will be coming to you anyway.
Talk to me, Randall, about this project.
I've had emails from various listeners here saying, Howard, something happened in southern Africa 20 years or so ago, and it would be ideal for your show.
And then I try and start to research it.
And the kind of information that is there is not on a par with the Phoenix Lights or Roswell or the aliens that are alleged to have stopped nuclear missiles from working.
There's not a lot of stuff there.
Why would that be?
About this story particularly?
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
This story was initially covered back in 1994, and then it just sort of disappeared off the media.
I'm not quite sure why that is, because when you really look into this case, there's just an awful lot of credibility to it.
Well, the people who email me and tell me about it, they claim that it was a remarkable case.
And certainly looking into it myself, it sounds that way.
But I might take issue with you when you say that it was covered pretty extensively at the time.
Now, look, I was working on the biggest London radio station in 1994 when this happened, Capitol Radio.
If a story like that had been in the news, I'd have been all over it because it was a station like, you know, it was top 40 station, but we did news as well.
So that would have been right up our street.
I don't remember that story.
Then, towards the end of 94, I went down to South Africa, just across the border from Zimbabwe, to train journalists.
Nobody mentioned it to me there.
Interesting.
Well, the BBC war correspondent that covered it, he did have a lot of problems with the BBC main office trying.
He was just like, this is a real story.
And they just were not willing to run it.
They ended up doing a small short thing about it back in 95.
And the real press really was in America when John Mack went over there.
And the sightings program did a short thing about the event.
We have to be fair because I can think back very clearly to that era.
And I think things have changed a lot with our media, certainly in the UK, and maybe also with the US media.
The media now would be much more willing to latch onto a story like this and develop it.
Back then, certainly the BBC, which remains quite a conservative organization, would not be massively keen on pursuing a story like this.
They may reflect it, but they wouldn't be massively keen on pursuing it even now, I suspect.
Yeah, that's very true.
You know, interviewing the BBC reporter Tim, he said that a lot to me, that, you know, this kind of story, they didn't want to hear about it.
And yeah, I think things have changed a bit.
People are definitely more open-minded.
And with all the scientific discoveries in the last 10 years, that there's planets out there, that scientists are pretty much in agreement that there has to be life out there, it's kind of opened the conversation a little bit to actually saying, well, what about these other events that we've been hearing about for decades?
There may be something to these things that we might want to look into.
Well, yeah, I'm glad you did.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the movie that came into my mind when I thought about this.
Were those events as far as you see them?
And we'll get Salma in just a moment across the other side of the U.S. to tell me her perspective on this.
But, you know, is that what this was like?
Well, not quite.
I mean, I don't know how to compare the two.
This was a daylight event happened in broad daylight in the morning, about 10.30 in the morning on a Friday afternoon on the 16th of September, that was 1994, at the Ariel School in Zimbabwe.
And there were several other events beforehand witnessed by adults, which most people don't know.
And yeah, I mean, close encounters of the third kind.
I mean, in a way, from everything I've been able to discover, that this event, it was a landing of a strange craft and a couple of these strange creatures getting out and approaching the playground.
So we have a playground full of school kids.
It's daytime, and we have something highly irregular happening.
I have to say, when I went to school, the most unusual thing that ever happened in my schoolyard was a man who claimed that he could make funny shapes out of balloons came to visit, and that was about it.
So for something like this to happen is just staggering.
Salma, I can hear you laughing.
Salma Siddiq.
Now, you were part of this.
According to the notes that I've got here, grade seven at the time of this incident.
You tell me, because you were there, what you think happened.
Yes, actually, Howard, I was in grade six in 1994, and we were actually having our school break.
Teachers were having a staff meeting, so there weren't any adults on the playground as, you know, as they normally would be, you know, supervising and sorts.
So we were the oldest on the playground, and we were just enjoying our break.
And then we sort of noticed something shining from a distance.
And you have to understand, the school that Ariel is in a rural area, I don't know what it looks like now.
I have not been back, but it was in, it used to be a farm.
The school was not particularly developed at that time.
And so there was a lot of sort of bush in the background.
And we weren't sure if we were looking at a copy, a rock, you know, we just, we didn't know, but there was something very shiny and it was very unusual.
And that is what caught caught our eye, certainly caught my eye.
And then a few of us gathered and it sort of just ensued in this chaos on the playground.
It was a little scary, but just very, very, very, very surreal.
For listeners in the UK, how old is sixth grade?
Just so our UK listeners know.
Oh, I was 11.
Right.
Right.
So you were old enough to understand things, but you hadn't got the perceptions of a teenager quite yet.
So what did you think that you were seeing?
What did you think that you were going through?
You know, I honestly didn't know at that moment.
I was definitely old enough to be able to, you know, draw, reiterate, explain, write about what I had seen, but we certainly didn't have any, you know, sort of like outside influence.
So I had nothing really to compare it to.
There was no internet.
So I, you know, I wasn't like, oh, I could look at this and say, and compare it to something else.
I knew that it was something not of this place.
It was something different, something special.
I wasn't really sure if everybody else could see it except for the people next to me.
I remember holding my friend Emma's hand.
We were standing at the edge of our playground, which was bordered simply by eucalyptus tree logs.
That was the border of our playground.
Beyond that was bush, very, very tall bush.
And we never ventured beyond there, but whatever we saw, this being, did not cross our boundary either.
So we were not particularly far apart from each other.
I would say maybe two or three feet away, just looking at whatever this being was that I later described as being a small man.
But this being you think got out of some kind of craft.
Are you sure about that?
Well, I don't know where it came from.
I remember seeing the craft first or something like a Craft, not particularly landing, but on the actual ground and being very, very, very bright.
It was, you know, shiny was the word I used, and the best that I could think of.
But it was not something that was constant.
So you saw it, you didn't see it, you saw it, you didn't see it.
So it was almost as though you felt like your mind was playing tricks on you.
But when I looked at Emma and she looked at me and she said, did you see that?
And I said, yes, did you see that?
And we were sort of confirming each other's sighting.
It was absolutely extraordinary.
Not at the time.
I didn't quite think it was extraordinary, but I certainly have come to appreciate my experience a lot more.
Was it spinning?
Did it have lights?
It was not spinning.
I did not see lights.
Again, this was broad daylight, so it was very bright.
It was September in Zimbabwe.
So, you know, the sun was shining.
I did not see any lights.
I did not see it spinning.
It was very, very bright.
So I don't know if that was a light, if that was the actual vessel itself.
I have no idea.
Now, September time in the southern hemisphere is late winter.
You're heading towards springtime then, aren't you?
I think.
That is correct.
Ish, yes.
We would have just come out of winter, yes.
The sun is low there, and I know it can produce beautiful effects.
You're absolutely sure that what you were seeing was not something that could have been created by a low angle of the sun.
I definitely don't believe so.
No.
Definitely my understanding at the time was, you know, I knew the terrain of what I was looking at because that was a cross-country course.
So I had run it before.
And, you know, you know that there are mountains, there are copies, you know, there's a lot of granite rock.
But that reflection that came off of whatever it was that we saw was not, I'm definitely not a scientist.
I most certainly wasn't an expert at 11 years old.
But I knew that it was something that was not natural and something I hadn't seen before because it just, it was, it was so, it was so bright and it was so clear and then it was gone.
And it was so bright and it was so clear and then it was gone.
It was this constant, now you see me, now you don't, kind of situation that it, it just, there's, I did not believe, I was like, this is just not, this is not the usual.
Now, I can't recall things in detail that happened to me just as well when I was 11.
So I'm maybe asking you for a little more detail than you can provide, but just give me a sense of how you felt.
Did you notice that there was anything different about the way that you felt in the presence of this thing?
We'll talk about the being in a moment, but in the presence of this thing, did you feel that it was doing anything?
You know what I'm getting to here, that some people talk about when they seek craft.
There are feelings connected with them, and they can sometimes have physical effects.
Absolutely.
What I did feel was that it seemed as though everything was moving very slowly.
I didn't quite know what to make sense of it, but it felt like time was, I knew I was moving, but it almost felt as though it had stopped, if that made sense.
Like I could see everything else around me, but it felt like I was in very, very slow motion.
Those were the feelings that I got.
My heart was racing very, very quickly.
I remember this, just because I didn't know what was happening.
I knew something was different, but I didn't know what it was.
And that's as vivid as I can remember it being.
And if it's sort of hanging there and it's keeping back from the perimeter fence of the school, which you say that was the case, it would have been hard for you, I guess, to get a handle on how big this thing was.
Absolutely.
I mean, not yes or no.
The being itself was only three or four, two or three feet away from me.
But the craft, yes, the craft I have no idea of because I did not see it in its entirety.
And did you have a feeling, Salma, that the being and the craft, this is a silly question because these were unusual things to be happening.
So you would make that assumption, I would guess.
But did you get a feeling that the being and the craft were connected?
They were one and the same thing.
I did.
I didn't know that it was a craft per se.
I just knew that it was, I don't know, something, like I said.
I mean, I had barely watched The Jetsons as a child because I think it played on reruns and I had seen E.T. like once.
So I had no, and I didn't read comic books.
So my comparison personally was very, very little.
I had very little to compare any of this with.
But I did feel that there was some form of a connection between the two.
I didn't know what.
I just knew that this was something different and that it made me feel different.
Like I just, the time was a, that was just a very crazy thing for me.
I don't know how much time passed.
I have no idea.
And we have to say that in that place, and it was the same across in South Africa to perhaps a lesser extent, but still the same, you didn't have the kind of exposure to media that I would have had even growing up, you know, well before the 1990s.
But you didn't have that kind of media.
There wasn't a lot of television there.
Yes, you had the movies.
And you can amplify that some more too if you're in the country which you were.
So you were not exposed to alien movies and lots of stuff about this.
It just wasn't that kind of culture.
Absolutely.
It wasn't that kind of culture.
My parents, I mean, there was cable, but my parents didn't have cable.
I certainly did not.
There were some of my classmates who did have access to that and more, but I did not personally know.
So there was no outside influence at all.
All right.
So the being is three feet away from you or so, whatever, behind the wall.
Is it aware of you?
You're aware Of it?
Does it appear to be aware of you?
It was aware of me because it looked me right in the eye.
And just to clarify, Howard, it wasn't a wall, it was open.
There were logs that were just a boundary on the ground that we knew we could not go across.
Beyond that was absolutely open field.
So it was all open.
I wasn't looking, nobody was looking through a fence, nobody was trying to look over a wall.
It was all out there in the open for us to see.
But it had a sense of boundaries.
It didn't make an effort to come in.
Correct.
Correct.
Which I didn't really put together until I was talking about it later.
But yes, it did not cross for me the boundary of the gum tree logs.
It did not.
And I do think that it had a sense of me because I looked at it in the eye and it looked me in the eye and there was sort of just like this hold and this pause of an interaction of sorts, I guess.
But it was very brief.
And then I let go of Emma's hand and I said I'm going to go look, check in on my brother and sister.
I had a younger brother and sister who were playing in the younger playground further away and I walked away.
Now, you said you had eye-to-eye contact.
I can see a photograph of you on my screen here.
I know what your eyes look like.
What did its eyes look like, though?
Its eyes, oh my gosh.
I actually drew a picture of this, I remember.
Big, just big black eyes, big dark, very dark eyes.
But I wasn't, I was, I was, I wasn't afraid.
I was curious, if that makes sense.
Very, very curious.
It was nothing like I'd ever seen before, but I also wasn't afraid.
And I don't know if that was because of this eye-to-eye contact, if it was because I had nothing to compare it to, but I was very curious.
Just so we have the thumbnail sketch, give me a description then of what you were looking at.
So I would describe this being as being maybe, I don't know, was way shorter than me, maybe like three to four foot tall.
Human-like characteristics, very big, very big head, very big eyes, but not, I mean, it wasn't like something horrific.
I mean, we said that it had a sense of its boundaries.
So it didn't appear to want to scare you.
It was keeping back.
Do you get a sense it was trying to communicate with you?
It was looking at you?
I definitely do think so.
I think if I had stayed in that eye lock gaze, perhaps some other more forms of communication would have happened.
I don't know.
I definitely didn't get any messages or anything.
But at the moment I broke that gaze to go and check on my brother and sister, that was the end of sort of my experience.
But like I said, I don't know how long that lasted.
I have no idea.
And you said that Emma was there with you through part of this experience.
Who else was there?
Any teachers?
Anybody else see this?
No, the teachers were in a staff meeting.
So they were all in, they were in the school.
And the grade sevens were taking an exam.
So as the oldest on the playground, we kind of, you know, we were the big ones on the playground.
We were running the playground essentially.
But they weren't any other grown-ups.
After a few of us started gathering and pointing and talking about what was at first, well, now we can describe as the craft, somebody did go back and inform the teachers, but it took a while for them to come out because they just thought we were lying that we were telling ships.
I mean, as you said, it isn't the kind of thing you hear every day.
Of course.
Did it look as if it was wearing some kind of space suit?
Did it have silvery skin?
What were its defining characteristics?
I think it was the best kind of attire that I can describe the being as wearing would be something like a scuba diving outfit, if that makes sense.
Just black and very fitted, but I couldn't tell you what it was made of.
It was nothing like I'd ever seen before, but that was the best way I could describe it.
And when I drew it, I remember drawing it that way.
In terms of pigmentation, it was almost like porcelain, if that makes sense.
That was the best that I could describe it, but not stoic.
I mean, I didn't really, I didn't find it.
You know, I thought at first I was like, well, maybe this is kind of like a mannequin was my first sort of like go-to, because, you know, you look for things to rationalize in your mind when you see something that you're not used to seeing at ant-11.
The best that I had was maybe this is a mannequin.
And presumably, look, in later years, you will have seen, certainly since people have been interviewing you about this, the various diagrams of various kinds of aliens and all of the groupings of them, the Greys and all the rest of them, the Nordics.
What kind of alien was this?
Would you, using those, I'm sure you've seen all the pictures by now.
What would it best have appeared like?
Did it look like anything that we are aware of, or was it different?
Um, I...
I would say probably maybe a gray would be the closest.
You know, I really didn't do a lot of research into this after the event happened.
I kind of just let it subside and thought it would just go away, if that makes sense.
You know, nobody really interviewed us very much afterwards, so it took me a while to be able to, except for Randall, who I met in 2010, and I thought it was a joke, actually.
He just kind of messaged me through Facebook and said, hey, you know, I'm picking up where, you know, Dr. Mac left off.
And I thought, oh, God, okay, for real.
I really did think it was a joke.
And it took me a while to respond to him because I wasn't sure if I wanted to reopen these wounds, sort of.
And so if I were to describe it in answer to your question, I would say probably a gray.
And by the time you were aware of all of those things, and you were checking on your brother and sister, was it going away?
Had it gone away?
What was the status with it?
I was still feeling.
Feeling, mm-hmm.
My brother and sister were fine.
That part of the playground, incidentally, nobody saw anything.
They were a lot younger on that side of the playground.
We think we're talking grade one through two, four.
We're playing on that side of the playground.
It's all one big open space, but they had swings and they were busy laughing and it was just a very different, it was a different feeling on the bigger kids' playground.
Yeah.
Playground's very large, too.
Very, very large.
It's very large compared to any other playground I've ever seen.
It's huge.
Because, you know, I think one thing we have to tell people who live in crowded cities up here in the northern hemisphere is the one thing you have in southern Africa is space and plenty of it.
And that's one reason why it's not a bad place to grow up at all, really, if you want to be in the open spaces and close to nature.
But this is something way beyond all of that, Salma.
Before we get back to Randall, and thanks for being so patient, Randall, I just want to get the story out there, and then I'll come back to you.
So you tell the staff, and they think that you're joking.
Some people ask you some questions.
Who are the people who asked you questions at the time about this?
Who interviewed you then?
Did local police talk to you?
Oh, I don't remember police.
A lot of people spoke.
Honestly, probably Randall knows better.
That I can recall.
Definitely, there were news reporters.
I remember Jill Duck, who had a...
She had a...
What would you describe her show as, Randall?
That's it.
She had an astrology show.
Jill Dark came and spoke to and interviewed us.
And I'm pretty sure somebody from the BBC did because I had an aunt who lived in England at the time who recalled either hearing about it on the radio or seeing me on TV and called my mother very soon after and said, what is going on?
There were SABC there.
There were a lot of press.
It was a lot of conversation about what we had seen.
Our teachers asked us, I think I remember our headmaster at the time.
He asked a few of us, not all, because there were a lot of us.
That's kind of a lot of children to go through, I think.
But our teacher, Mr. Vernon, asked us a lot of questions.
She was like, okay, who saw what?
And so within my class, there were quite a few of us who did.
Emma was one.
Lisa was one.
They were all standing close-ish to me.
Emma was the closest, and she was my very good friend at the time.
And, you know, we didn't actually remember that we had had this experience together in such close capacity until a few years ago with Randall.
So the school eventually accepted that you were telling the truth as far as you knew it.
Obviously they did because, you know, they sounded like they were quite benign towards you.
And then the media got involved.
Yes.
I don't know if they actually ever believed us, how it's be honest.
I think that they had to, they allowed the media to interview us because they had to.
They probably didn't want to think that they were hiding anything.
But I can also understand, given the time, given everything, I can understand why they did not believe us.
But my parents did, which was the most important to me.
And then you become a teenager and you grow up and you leave school and you eventually arrive in America.
How do you rationalize as the years go by what happened to you?
Did you just forget it?
Did you put it to the back of your mind?
Was it always present?
What did you do with that experience?
It was always present, but I didn't speak about it.
I spoke about it once with my parents because I had to because they were eventually going to see me on TV, so I couldn't hide that.
And I remember my, you know, my mother said, well, do you believe in what you saw?
And I said, yes.
And she said, okay.
And I said, all that matters to me is that you don't think I'm lying.
And she said, I don't think you're lying.
I don't know what you saw.
I don't understand it, but I don't think you're lying.
And my dad said the same thing.
When we moved to the States, I mean, I just, I had no idea.
I knew that somehow it would come back.
I just didn't know in what capacity.
I knew I probably would want to write about it one day, but again, didn't know in what capacity.
And then Randall, so I go about my life.
I, you know, moved to Seattle with my parents in 2001.
I moved to Chicago for undergrad in 2005.
And then in 2010, I'm in grad school and I get this message from Randall who wants to talk to me about the incident.
And I thought, oh my gosh, are you kidding?
I actually thought it was a joke.
I thought it had been done and buried and nobody, I thought everybody had gotten what they wanted out of us, which was kind of, you know, what it felt like.
And at what stage did the late John Mack become involved in this summer?
He was there in 94, I believe, 94, 95.
Yeah.
So he was the first one, one of the first ones that I remember talking to.
Yeah, I remember him.
And that was a very connected.
What was he like to deal with?
Because, you know, the guy is a bit of a superstar in this field now.
Sadly, I never got the chance to speak with him in his lifetime, which is a great regret to me.
Heard many stories from people who knew him well.
You know, what was he like to deal with?
He was very, I mean, we had, again, no point of reference.
He was just another man.
He sounded, he had a great accent, but he was very calm.
You know, this is for people who had, you know, I'd never left the continent of Africa.
So I was always very fascinated by how people sounded.
And he was just very, he was very calm.
So the first thing I remember was he was tall.
I mean, I was tall, but I thought he had like this stature about him.
But I also think that he was someone who was very calm.
He was very calming.
So, you know, you're nervous.
You've been asked so many questions by so many people.
You're worried that people are not going to believe you.
Personally, it was very refreshing to just have someone who was like, draw me a picture.
Tell me about your picture.
What do you think this means?
And for me, that was my experience with him.
I found him very calm.
I really did.
And when he asked you anything about him.
When he asked you to tell him what you thought it all meant, you were young.
What were you able to say?
My memory of what I said to him was something along the lines of, I don't know what it means, but I will one day.
And I just know that this is something special and something unique.
I thought that was it.
And it's taken me a while to figure out what that is.
And I still don't know if I have any one answer, but it has most definitely impacted my life.
All right.
I was going to ask you that.
I mean, you're what, 34 now, are you?
I am 34, yes.
How do you think, here comes the question then, since we've built up to it, how do you think it changed you?
Because you've just gone and told me that it did make an impact.
It did.
I don't know if I can, if it's something I can say in words or in any one way.
I do know this.
It has, I never, I mean, at 11, you don't think you're closed-minded.
You think you know a lot of stuff, obviously.
But I never doubt anything that I see or experience since that day, ever.
I know that anything is possible.
I 100% believe that anything is possible.
And I know that the reason why I saw what I saw and my experience that I got to experience with my friends is that each one of us has something different to take away from it.
And whatever that is, is something different to everybody.
I am still figuring out what mine is.
I think, again, me breaking, sometimes I regret breaking that gaze, but my number one concern was for my brother and sister because I was concerned that if I was feeling how I was feeling, which I couldn't even put into words at the time or express, how were they feeling?
And they were so much younger than me.
I know that my role is to continue to talk about what I saw.
I didn't always feel this way, but I do, thanks to Randall.
And this started in 2010.
So honestly, from about seven years ago, I really started to kind of re-evaluate my experience and what my takeaway was from it.
Look, I don't know whether you have children or whether you have a plan to have children one of these days.
I don't have any children.
I do have plans one day soon.
Okay.
And, you know, when that happy day comes, what are you going to tell them, assuming there's more than one or he or she, about the experience?
Will you share the experience?
I will.
I think I will share the experience when maybe when the kids are a little bit older.
I have thought about this because I've thought about what I would tell my nieces and my nephews.
I have a new niece and I have two nephews and one on the way.
This is something that I think is very important.
My parents have never encouraged me to suppress it.
They've never encouraged me to talk about it.
They've just said, you know, you do what you feel you're comfortable with.
I think I'm going to tell them exactly what happened, exactly what my experience is.
And I think by the time I have my own children, I will have more of an understanding of what this experience has meant to me.
So I can tell them this experience has helped me be who I am in that, you know, I believe anything is possible.
I believe there's other life out there.
I believe that I'm supposed to talk about this because I experienced this in this very small country with, you know, a few other children with very little influence, if any, of outside information about what extraterrestrials are.
There is a reason why we experienced what we experienced in our little old country of Zimbabwe.
I mean, why?
Why us?
And the fact of the matter about Zimbabwe is, and, you know, we won't get political here because we don't do politics on this show, but it is still run by a man called Mugabe.
He is still there.
You know, he has his friends and supporters and he has his people who do not like him around the world.
But one thing that Zimbabwe has is a media that is not entirely, I don't think it's unfair to say, not quite perhaps as free as the one that you know in the United States and I know here in England.
I'm wondering whether there were any difficulties in getting this story out in that kind of a country at the time.
I'm talking about at the time.
Yes, I think at the time, I mean, we were certainly interviewed by ZBC.
I remember that because I had people ask me, family members, who saw me on the news.
So we were definitely interviewed by ZBC.
I don't know how much they got out, Randall.
Maybe you know more about that, but they did interview us, Howard, and they interviewed us more than once.
All right.
And just very quickly before I cross to Randall, and listen, thank you for this summer.
I've wanted to keep you on and get all the detail about this because it's a fascinating story and you sound totally credible about this.
What are you doing with your life now?
Oh, goodness.
At the moment, I work at a nonprofit.
And my goal has, I would honestly say, since high school, was that I wanted to do something that helped other people.
That's always what I wanted to do.
Now, I don't know if the experience helped with that or aided in that in some way, shape, or form.
I just knew that this was something I always wanted to do.
So at the moment, I work at a non-profit, but I did attend law school in the UK, actually.
Really?
For a little bit.
And then I moved back to the States in 2014, yeah.
Okay, where were you at law school here?
I went to Cardiff.
Ah, so did I. Okay.
Yeah, I went to Cardiff.
Okay, what University College Cardiff?
Cardiff University School of Law.
Okay, well, we both started.
I studied in Liverpool and I studied journalism in Cardiff.
So you probably came across the...
Yes.
How great is that?
I didn't.
I don't think that's in your biography.
That's great.
All right, listen, stay where you are.
I want to get Randall, who's been really patient on.
Randall, I wanted to get Salma to tell her story here.
Salma, you stay there in Seattle.
We'll come back to you.
In Massachusetts now, Randall, you made the documentary about this.
You rediscovered the story.
Talk to me about the process of making this and connecting with Salma.
Yeah, I just want to tell you, yeah, we're in the post-production stage, so we haven't released the film yet.
We're still fundraising to get the final things done.
But I just want to say, I mean, you can see what you heard, Salma, like that's the kind of witnesses to this event that they're just very credible, real people.
And, you know, just that's what really impressed me about this event, you know, is that the witnesses were really credible.
The story was consistent.
Over time, their interviews didn't change.
I mean, I have interviews although, you know, for, you know, over time, over a three-year period of time, they were interviewed these kids by different organizations.
And then when I re-interviewed them very recently, and the story didn't change, which tells you something.
But Salma said, Randall, that, you know, people who experienced it in the school, at the school, experienced different things.
Emma experienced it differently.
So what sorts of stories about this were you told by other witnesses?
Yeah, I think that people did have slightly different experiences.
I think it depended on where they were, you know, when this event went on.
Yeah, and that's very true.
But the descriptions of, and, you know, this, I've done a lot of research into people that have seen these things.
And, you know, a creature like that in black, and yes, it's sort of like the UFO culture gray type of being with a large head, small, short, and big eyes.
I mean, that's the typical, people call them gray description.
But this was a little unusual because they were in black.
And those descriptions were consistent.
The details about the event were consistent across everybody.
You know, a few other of, actually several of the kids had felt like they had gotten, you know, they had had messages put into their mind about when they had eye contact with this creature.
That's what I was keen.
I know Salma's still listening to this.
That's what I was keen to ask Salma about.
And Salma didn't particularly feel that she'd been communicated with, apart from having shared eye contact.
What sorts of messages in other witnesses, other experiences were imparted, were you told?
And this is from the early interviews.
They talked about this in 94, that about they were shown pictures or messages about what we were doing to our environment, which is just, I know it shocked John Mack, Dr. Mack, when he went out there that that was coming out of their mouths.
And yeah, I mean, that was just a message of, and I don't know why that, I think about that a lot, like, well, why did that happen or how did that happen?
And I'm not sure.
You know, I wonder, well, when an event like this happens, do you think about your, you know, your environment, your own environment, because you have an outsider coming in?
were they wise enough these creatures to be saying you know in some kind of observatory observing fashion saying hey you guys need to get your stuff together because you're doing some damage on the planet and in 94
Why would you go, if you were an alien presence or some kind of extra-dimensional presence or something, why would you go to a school in rural Zimbabwe to impart the message of look what you're doing to your planet?
Because that's not exactly a spoiled part of the planet.
You would go to Detroit to do that, wouldn't you?
Very true.
Very true.
Well, I've researched other events around the world, and that's not an unusual thing.
A lot of people that have had contact that I've researched into also had been given that a message about our environment or seeing the destruction of our planet.
So it's pretty common, actually, I found.
And that surprised me because I didn't know that beforehand.
And what about involving kids, though?
Because the classic alien abduction and contact cases are things like Betty and Barney Hill and, you know, so it goes down the years.
And they're not kids.
Right.
Well, I wonder about that.
I wonder, well, that's kind of smart, actually, that they may have imparted Their presence as being something that actually is real to children who would grow up and speak about it or share it with their family.
I, you know, personally, my personal feeling is I feel like, and this may sound strange, that there's almost like a domestication process going on, like they're getting us used to them slowly.
And I don't know if that's true.
I just wonder about that, because that's what we do with other wildlife.
You know, we approach wild animals and, you know, I do a lot of nature photography.
And the first experience is pretty traumatic with a wild animal for them.
And then over time, I'll wear the same clothes.
I'll go out, you know, just I'll look the same to keep them calm.
And eventually they get more comfortable with me.
And I just wonder about that.
And I know primatologists and other wildlife people who have that same experience.
So I wonder, you know, if there's other species is out there, are they doing the same thing?
You know, obviously they're not interested in taking over the planet or anything.
But it seems like there's something going on here that's very complex.
And it seems to have been a very benign contact.
And maybe they chose, and look, I'm speculating now, but maybe they chose this particular place this particular time because those children will not have been, I won't say spoiled, that's the wrong word, but affected by mass media to the same effect.
From what I remember of 1994, it was just before multi-channel everything.
It was just pre-internet.
It was just on the cusp of everything.
And if you went to a place like that, and I did go to southern Africa then, you know, if you wanted to hear international communication, well, then some hotels had CNN or Sky, perhaps.
But mostly it was kind of shortwave radio or AM radio by night, and you would hear the BBC or Voice of America.
People were not as affected by full-on 24-7 media as now, which we were beginning to get in 94 up north in the northern hemisphere, but they didn't really have then.
That's true.
Yep, you're absolutely right.
Boy.
And so listen, Salman, I know you're listening to this now.
Do you ever feel that do you ever miss that simpler life back there in Zim?
I have to ask you this.
Every day.
Every day.
You know, I would never change the life that I had.
I would never change my upbringing.
I had no idea what this experience would mean or just going to school, like going to school in Zim, being from Zim.
Even with the experience and with the incident and everything that happened, it was still, you know, life kind of just went on, but it was still very, very simple.
And I do miss it.
I absolutely do.
Well, look, I have a sense of what you might be missing because I can remember very fondly right up into the beginning of the 2000s driving through villages in South Africa, you know, up towards the north and the border area there.
And, you know, you would look at villages and people would have a television set, perhaps.
But they would all come out and they'd have a big smile on their faces.
And I would think to myself, what have they got to smile about?
And the answer to that question is quite often much more than I've got to smile about.
Absolutely.
That was the case.
I mean, even just driving to school, I mean, Rua is, I don't know what it looks like now, but at the time it was very rural.
And it's, you know, what, 60 K's out of the city, out of Harare or something like that.
And there were lots of kids who would be walking to school when we were driving to school or getting driven to school.
They would walk to school and, you know, no shoes.
They'd have the uniform.
You had to have some form of shoes.
And they would walk miles, sometimes with just a little bag full of books and an umbrella.
Yeah.
If they even had a bag, if they had an umbrella, because it was either you had a jersey so you could have a jumper, but then that might mean that you couldn't have shoes or you could have shoes, but that might mean you couldn't have a jumper.
Smiles all the time, every day.
Just absolutely amazing.
It's just so humbling.
You know, never really thought about it because, I mean, that was just kind of, you know, you're in it.
And at 11, I mean, I would like to think I was not entirely selfish and I was kind, but I have a much better understanding of the differences in a lot of things, in equity, in education, and everything, in what's attainable in Zimbabwe to what I did.
Then I have a much clearer understanding now, obviously, being older and being here and seeing what the country has become.
Randall, back to the documentary, and thanks for that, Samuel.
We will come back to you before the end.
The documentary, you spoke with people who experienced events that were not at the school.
You said at the very beginning of this there were some other events around the time of this incident.
These incidents.
That's true.
Talk to me about those.
I became aware of it within the first year.
I had gotten phone calls from people that had seen it the day before.
I guess one of the most riveting was three pilots that were at altitude at 25,000 feet that saw this thing at the Zimbabwean border that crossed.
It was like they just describe it as a ball of light that was off on their left wing and it crossed their path really fast and crossed the entire horizon within four seconds, which is really fast at 25,000 feet.
Because you can see a huge horizon there.
Yeah, and they never forgot it.
And there were other pilots also that also witnessed this from the air.
And then there was a woman in the morning of the aerial school also witnessed this thing close to the ground in the back of her house, which was about Two miles from the aerial school.
And that was early in the morning.
And then there's a whole bunch.
It happened, there were a whole bunch in the daytime on Friday, sorry, Thursday, and then in the evening on the day before, and then also the day before that.
And basically, there were a four-day period because even after the school, after the event at Ariel, there was another event on the following day with a gentleman who ran into these things on the road.
On the road?
On the road, he had to swerve his truck off.
He ended up in a ditch.
And when you say he ran into these things, what, did he run into a couple of beings walking by the roadside?
That were walking down the road.
And he had to swerve.
Did he have any interaction with them apart from swerving to avoid them?
No.
No, I mean, he just felt like, I mean, again, this is what you run into in Africa, which is, you know, it's an amazing.
And I got to say, the school is still very rural, just to say.
We're going to go back there sometime.
Yes.
And so, you know, there's people that live in the village that, you know, to them, to him, he wondered if it was his ancestor spirits.
You know, there's just a whole different cultural interpretation of things that they see.
But he described them as pretty much what was seen at Ariel.
But that's also the good thing about Africa, too.
Like, there wasn't a lot of exposure to UFOs or aliens or any of that concept.
It just wasn't there.
It was there in little bits and pieces, but it wasn't a big thing like it was for us in the Western world.
Did you get assistance from the authorities down there?
Yes.
You mean the government?
Well, I mean, government, police, local government, that kind of thing.
No, I kind of avoided them because when I went in the first time, they were having riots and the State Department here, you know, warned me not to go.
Well, look, if you were going down there with a whole bunch of recording equipment, they will take an interest in you.
You know that.
I was there at the same time the New York Times reporter got thrown in jail.
He got thrown in jail for three weeks, and I was there at the same time.
But I was staying on a farm.
He had stayed in a hotel room.
That was a mistake.
I think you were very lucky that you didn't get your camera seized.
You didn't get questioned.
You were very lucky.
I was very lucky.
Yeah, I was very lucky.
Yeah.
But yeah, it's an incredible story, really, and out of Africa.
And there's so many other stories in Africa I've heard and discovered.
So it sounds to me like you've got a lot of scope for not only going back there and doing a follow-up, but maybe returning back to the continent.
Oh, definitely.
I mean, I love it.
Like Sama was saying, like, I met the happiest people I've ever met in my life, and they have nothing, but they have everything.
It's been a big part of my life over the years, so I can understand what you both are talking about.
Yeah, I really appreciate that you understand it because a lot of people, I've done interviews, they have no idea.
You know, and I really appreciate that you've been there and you've spent time there because it's something you have to see first person.
Well, my memories are, I mean, there's Umpumalanga, but also the Drakensberg Mountains down in South Africa that run the whole length of that, in fact across the border.
I think they even go.
But I can still see now, and I saw this many times, because once you go once, you've got to keep going back.
But you see the sunshine around it.
I'm recording this now.
What is it?
Actually, it's a little late now, but say an hour or so ago, 4 o'clock, 3 o'clock.
And at this time of year, the sunshine would be very low.
And the kids are walking home from school and they are backlit by golden sunshine and they're all smiling.
Nothing prepares you for it.
And it still warms my heart just to think about it.
I know this has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs, but we've got to put this into context.
And for listeners around the world who've never been, that's the context.
Yes, Salma?
Absolutely.
Howard, you just took me back to my homeland, and I have not been back in 17 years.
And I felt just by your description that, you know, I was there looking at that, being a part of that.
So thank you.
That's exactly how it is.
I think that your description of sort of what people are like speaks to the very reason why people should believe us, you know, and that we're credible and that maybe this is why we were selected out of all the places in all the world to have a visit, Austra otherwise.
Well, I mean, if you think about it, you know, down there that you haven't got the motivation, and certainly not then.
You know, kids are not thinking about, well, you know, if I ham this story up a bit, I'm going to be an international superstar and I might get myself on America's Got Talent.
Absolutely not.
Oh my God, there was no.
This is why I took a while to respond to Randall.
Randall, I don't know if you're, I think he actually had to reach out to me a couple of times because I ignored him.
I thought he, I thought, do you remember this?
I'm sorry, Randall.
I was just like, I remember when we met, I said, look, I apologize.
I just, I thought you were a fake.
I didn't really know what was going on.
It's been, you know, nobody's wanted to talk to me about this since 1994.
And all of a sudden, here you are in 2010.
And how the hell did you find me?
I'm in Chicago.
What do you want?
So, so yeah, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
It's just, it's been, it's been, it's been wonderful.
And I appreciate the fact that, you know, I did, I do come from where I come from.
And Randall has picked up what he's picked up with extensive research because he definitely did his homework before he met any of us.
And you knew more, I mean, you remembered the interviews more than I did.
You were like, oh, well, you know, you had this conversation and this conversation.
And I was like, oh my gosh, okay.
All right.
He's legit.
I can do that.
So you were hardly champing at the bit then wanting to get involved in this.
You took a bit of persuading.
Absolutely.
No, I took a lot of persuading.
He really had to persuade me.
You know, Howard, one of the things that I really am trying to get across in this film is, you know, we're all human beings on this planet.
And, you know, why is there in the past been this sort of stigma around even talking about this subject?
You know?
And particularly when there's some really, really good people, credible people.
And, you know, yeah, they've seen something strange.
Well, maybe the thought we can park all of this on, and I'd like to talk with you both again, really, to be frank, is this has been wonderful, and I've really enjoyed this.
But perhaps the point to leave our listener with is that here we have a bunch of people who have no agenda.
These days, everybody's got an agenda.
Everybody wants to be a star.
They're born to be a star.
But we are harking back to a time when there wasn't an agenda like that.
You know, kids were not primarily told that Simon Cowell is going to step in and make you a megastar.
It wasn't like that.
So perhaps this makes the whole story, number one, all the more warm to listen to and all the more credible, perhaps.
Yeah, very true.
But look, you're still working on the documentary then, Randall.
Tell me when it's going to be out.
I am.
And it's, can I do a little plug?
Do it.
Yep.
Okay.
I, yeah, it's my website or the film's website is aerialphenomenon.com.
You know, financially, this has been a tough, bro.
You know, I've been doing this for 10 years because it's been very difficult financially to make a feature documentaries and to make it good.
And that's been my, I knew I had a, as a filmmaker, I knew I had a great story here.
And I've really taken the time to do it right.
And, you know, I've had to work, work in between.
I'm still working now at another job just to pay my editors to go.
But anyway, we're in post-production.
We're running an Indiegogo campaign to raise funds.
It's Indiegogo back, you know, forward slash aerial phenomenon.
And yeah, we're just looking toward right now, probably February is probably going to be the release time.
We're going to have a good, yeah, definitely.
We're going to have a really good cut by December.
Well, keep in touch and let me know how this goes.
And I'm sure we'll get some attention across to the website and get some attention across to you.
I just have to say that it's been a pleasure speaking with you, Randall.
It's been an absolute privilege and a pleasure speaking with you, Salma.
And to be able to hook up London at 5 p.m. in the sunshine with Seattle in the far northwest with Massachusetts is a pretty cool thing.
And when you're talking about a subject like this, it makes it even more amazing, I think.
So thank you both.
Thank you for the opportunity, Howard.
Yeah, thank you, Howard.
I appreciate your worldly knowledge.
And yeah, we do our best.
Let's see what our listener thinks about this.
But both of you, thank you so much.
And I hope it isn't the last time we speak.
No, I don't.
I hope so too.
All right.
Take care.
Take care both.
Bye-bye.
Thank you.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
And I'll put a link to the movie, a documentary, on my website, theunexplained.tv, so you can go and see more about that.
Thank you very much.
If you have made a donation to the show recently, if you feel you'd like to, it would be gratefully received.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, and you can also leave me a message there, too.
Things that you would like to tell me about the show, how you think it can be improved, and who you would like to hear on the show too.
Always gratefully received.
That's theunexplained.tv.
More great guests coming soon in the pipeline.
It'll be November when you next hear from me.
So until next, we meet here on The Unexplained.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe.
Please stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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