After the disturbance beyond their school grounds on 16 Sept 1994, the Ariel pupils finished school at 1pm. Some of the children lived in Harare or other towns, less than an hour’s drive away from the school’s location in Ruwa.
One so far unanswered question is what media could the children have been influenced by in the time period between them going home to their families, and them making their drawings and remarks in interviews the next week, with Tim Leach of the BBC on the Monday, and then by UFO researcher Cynthia Hind on the Tuesday?
The answer can be found in the television schedules of that Friday afternoon and the weekend of 17-18 September 1994. These were printed in Zimbabwe’s state-owned newspaper, The Herald. The similarly state-run Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation (ZBC) ran two terrestrial channels with programs beginning mid-afternoon and running until close-down (these were the days when television used to stop at the end of each day).
Zimbabwe, once a British colony that became independent in 1980, retained a British influence in its newspaper and television media. During the 1990s, The Herald, had a similar sober tone and content to middle-market broadsheet newspapers found in the UK and focused on local and international politics, crime, celebrity, and sport.
However, The Herald was not always so serious. It ran a weekly leader page called It’s a Weird, Weird World, that took a more light-hearted look at bizarre stories from around the globe. It covered British contortionists squeezing themselves into glass bottles, giant pink condoms adoring obelisks in Potsdam (a World AIDS Day promotion by fashion brand Benetton), a Canadian couple escaping death by frozen urine-icicle fallen from an aeroplane, or Kermit The Frog’s upcoming speaking engagement at Oxford University’s debating society.
Yet, after reviewing these pages between 17 September and 3 December 1994 – the period between the Ariel School sighting and John Mack’s visit to the school – there is not a single mention of a mass sighting of UFOs or aliens at Ariel School, Ruwa, which was just a short drive away from the newspaper’s headquarters in Harare. If it had been a major news story, as some claim, you’d expect it to, at the very least, feature somewhere in this section of the paper. In fact there are no stories at all about the Ariel school UFOs or aliens in the Herald during that period.
But that’s not to say that UFOs or Aliens were beyond the scope of the newspaper. For example the column includes this description of a Fortean Times gathering and mentions several major themes of ufology:
“The Fortean Times has invited experts on spontaneous combustion, cold fusion, and alien abductions and impregnations to debate their views with scientists…people will have their first chance to hear first hand from investigators and researchers [Cynthia Hind maybe?] on various subjects, including sea monsters, UFO abductions, and controversial discourses on the edge of science.”.
It’s a Weird, Weird World leader page in The Herald newspaper Zimbabwe, 1994
Also, like many newspapers around the world during the 1990s, there were almost daily articles about the trials and controversies of Michael Jackson, about the accusations of child abuse made against him, and of course his infamous kiss with his new wife Lisa Marie Presley at the opening of the MTV music awards on 8 Sept 1994. These were front page stories.
Nathaniel, one of the pupils at Ariel, would later reference Michael Jackson when describing the hair and clothing of the humanoids he saw at the school.
A Familiar Television Schedule
Salma, one of the Ariel witnesses describes her access to television media:
“We had three TV channels, not becasuse cable was not available, but because it was expensive”. 1
ZBC’s television output will be familiar to any British, American or Australian of primary school age in the 1990s. It included Sesame St, Tom and Jerry, Worzel Gummidge, Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, Teddy Ruxpin, Laurel and Hardy, Muppet Babies, Brum, Giddy Game Show (a personal favourite), Neighbours, LA Law, and The Bill amongst other content.
A claim made at the time by Cynthia Hind, the first UFO researcher to interview the pupils, was that because the children did not have prior knowledge of UFOs or aliens what they described and drew must be the unadulterated truth. She even goes as far as ruling out any arguments for science-fiction influence from the media entirely when she claimed “People in Africa don’t have television..I can tell you the media don’t deal with UFOs there”.1
But the evidence to disprove this is in the Herald, in black and white.
This article, for example, published on page 5, 5 July 1994, months before Ariel School event, mentions not only UFOs, but John Mack, and alien abductions involving “molestation” by “creatures from outer space”.
Not only was the television content in Zimbabwe on a par with that of London, New York, or Melbourne, at the time, but there were programs containing UFOs and aliens broadcast on the very day of the sighting, as well as other programs with environmentalist, or anti-nuclear weapons messages. The same messages that would become a feature of some of the children’s interview remarks to John Mack when he arrived on the scene two and a half months later.
It’s important to remember that the children did not make drawings of what they saw on the morning of Friday 16 September until they returned to school on Monday 19 Sept.
The intervening days contain several notable examples of science-fiction based television that could have been a source of inspiration for them:
ZBC Television Schedule, Friday 16 Sept 1994
ZBC Television One
Friday 4:21 pm: Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left
It is likely that children returning home from school on Friday afternoon would have time to see this program.
It was an Australian children’s series with a similar premise to Third Rock From the Sun, based on books by Robin Klein. A family of aliens on the run setup home on earth where, disguised as humans, they have to fit in with Earth’s customs, with the awkwardness producing hilarious consequences.
If we needed an example of how the Ariel children might know how to empathise with how aliens might view humans then there is no better example than this.
One motif of most episodes involves the children holding hands and communing telepathically with a spaceship or materialising objects into existence via an orange light which reaches out across the galaxy toward their home.
ZBC Television Two
Friday 5:30 pm: Feature – Delta Space Mission (1984)
Later on that same afternoon the feature shown on ZBC Television Two, was the colourful Romanian animated science-fiction film Delta Space Mission.
The hero is a blue/green alien journalist with large almond shaped eyes. She features prominently throughout the film.
It also features many fantastical space ships with windows, doors, and landing gear.
One sequence in the feature film includes a swarm of strange spaceships that resemble two of the drawings by Emily B, a pupil at Ariel School.
Again, a reminder that the children’s drawings were done on Monday 19 Sept 1994, two days after this film was broadcast.
ZBC Television Schedule, Saturday 17 Sept 1994
ZBC Television One
Saturday 11:15 am: Strange But True?
Saturday morning television the day after the disturbance at Ariel School offered a chance to watch Strange But True?
The original air date for Strange But True? Was 21 May 1993 and the next episode, episode 1 of series 1 was not broadcast until 28 October 1994, so the episode on the schedule for this day could only have been the pilot episode of Strange But True?
Hosted by Michael Aspel, this TV show about the paranormal included dramatic reconstructions of UFO sightings and encounters with aliens. Noted UFO researcher Jenny Randles, was the story consultant and this pilot episode featured the UFO sighting and alien abduction story of policeman Alan Godfrey, in Todmorden, United Kingdom.
The full episode can be watched here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hkj43
ZBC Television Two
Saturday 6:07 pm: The Other Side of The Moon (1990)
This was most likely the 1990 documentary that included interviews with Apollo astronauts about their experience of going to the moon.
ZBC Television Two
Saturday 9:30pm: A Nuclear Free Pacific (1988)
A documentary that travels to nine Pacific nations, including New Zealand, to chronicle the long struggle to create a regional nuclear arms free zone.
This documentary seems especially relevant because it foreshadows some of the remarks made in the Mack interviews conducted months later.
In this interview with Mack, Lisil says:
“What I thought was maybe the world’s gonna end, maybe they’re telling us the world’s gonna end…all the trees will just go down and there will be no air and people will be dying.”
The film began at 9:30pm on Saturday evening, but the compelling explosion images appear early on in the running [at 02:54 in part 1]. They show an orange saturn-shaped explosion, a blast wave across the ocean surface, and palm trees being brought down.
The whole documentary can be viewed for free here: https://www.nzonscreen.com/title/nuclear-free-pacific-1988
Just the Facts Ma’am
The fact is that in just that one Friday afternoon and weekend between the sighting at the school and the children’s interviews and drawings being made, there are several programs with significant space, UFO and alien imagery that were shown on terrestrial television in Zimbabwe. Unless every pupil was kept in draconian isolation and deprived of all television, any claims that these children would have had no prior knowledge about UFOs or aliens is almost certainly false.
Also, as has been mentioned, those looking to limit interpretations of the 16 September 1994 mystery to that of a genuine alien visitation, such as Cynthia Hind, and later James Fox, and Randall Nickerson, lean into the “rural Zimbabwe” angle to suggest that the children lived in a bubble uncontaminated by media influence. The evidence tells a very different story.
The Mysterious Events at Ariel School, Zimbabwe – 16 Sept 1994
- Randall Nickerson Discussing the Ariel Phenomenon at McMenamins UFO Fest 2018 https://youtu.be/UCqVpwg0oPc?si=y5xL39DuUBm4AgiC [Timestamp 1:05:35] ↩︎
This is an extremely important find regarding the possible source of imagery and concepts that may have influenced the children of Ariel School. After a weekend at home, following the playground excitement, children may have watched these familiar programs with a heightened sense of their own relevance to the program’s mysteries. On Monday, the BBC greeted them at school, confirming the reason for their excitement. A few days later, Cynthia Hinds interviewed the children as a group in one room – which most investigators know sets up group contagion. The individual’s testimony is unwittingly tainted by what she hears in the group.