Russian Rocket Over Africa

In the opening few minutes of Ariel Phenomenon (2022), a film primarily concerned with being a hagiography of the late Harvard professor, Dr. John E. Mack, created by his former patient Randall Nickerson, we hear various voices speaking over archival video clips and stills of newspaper clippings that paint a misleading story about lights seen streaking across the skies of Southern Africa on the evening of Wednesday 14th September 1994. 

There is a voiceover from Tim Leach, a war reporter and cameraman working for the globally respected British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), that creates the mystery: “none of it made any sense” he says. It couldn’t have been a meteor, we hear him say, “meteorites come down in an arc they don’t fly parallel to the ground” – what evidence he had to make that judgement is not provided by the filmmakers, but there is apparent support from a newscaster who we hear refer to “South Africa’s top meteorologist”¹ and we see a quote from him in a newspaper article that reads “It’s the first time in my career that I have seen something as serious as this”. 

The clear intention of this dramatic introduction is to imply that experts were stumped, that it was an anomalous event, and, as another voice tells us, one there was “no rational explanation for”. 

“No Rational Explanation”

But there was a rational explanation. The lights in the sky were identified almost immediately. The identification came from Geoffrey Perry (MBE)² who was space correspondent for Independent Television News (ITN). (Incidentally Tim Leach had formerly worked for ITN). 

Perry had risen to prominence in the 1960s when, as a physics teacher at Kettering Grammar School in England, had organised a group of amateur satellite trackers – later known as The Kettering Group. Using unclassified equipment they were able to listen to and successfully track secret Soviet satellites, and were even able to identify where they were launched from. What was seen in the sky over Southern Africa was part of a rocket that had put a spy satellite into orbit which had then reentered Earth’s atmosphere in spectacular fiery style.

Perry was the source of a short Daily Telegraph story that was printed in the UK on the morning of Friday 16 September 1994 – the same day as the Ariel Shool sighting. It was concise: 

The print edition was slightly longer. It read:

In addition to this newspaper story the lights seen over Africa on 14 September were reported on BBC Ceefax – a textetext news service in the UK. Their article read:

Geoffrey Perry was interviewed by telephone for BBC World Service Television where he was asked about the lights in the sky, “what did they see?”

His response was that the lights seen were the upper stages of a rocket reentering the atmosphere. He had tracking information, Two Line Element (TLE) data running to 10 pages (including diagrams) that confirmed the ground track “passed over the pyrenees, across North Africa and down towards Johannesburg.“³

Surprisingly archival notes revel that he and his wife had even seen it with their own eyes from their location in Bude, a seaside town in Cornwall, England.

In another note Geoffrey Perry said he’d contacted the ITN News Desk with his expert observations, but they had “declined to run the story”. Presumably this was because there were no photos or video to accompany a Television report and any report would have had little news value to their main audience in the United Kingdom.

So the lights over Africa were identified. The UK media had been informed by experts, but had given it only marginal coverage.

Meanwhile in Zimbabwe…

This was all more than 48 hours before Monday 19 September, when Tim Leach arrived at Ariel Primary School, outside of Harare, Zimbabwe, still in pursuit of the story about an alien mothership coming to Earth.

The Telegraph’s story and Geoffrey Perry’s contact with ITN was ignored in Tim Leach’s reporting. Yet, as part of the BBC he would certainly have had access to that information and to expert opinion from specialists in the UK that would have explained how the lights seen on Wednesday evening did in fact make sense.  

But the UFO flap was already underway because Leach’s appearance on Zimbabwe Broadcast Corporation (ZBC) radio was itself reported by local Zimbabwe media at the time as an official BBC judgement that the lights were anomalous, rather than as the uninformed opinion of one of their cameramen. 

Dr. Nisbet’s Eyewitness Account

Dr. Euan Nisbet, a professor of Geology at Royal Holloway University of London, was in Zimbabwe at the time, and witnessed the lights on 14 September 1994. From his position in Zvishavane in the South of the country the lights emerged on the horizon and travelled almost directly above him. Initially he thought the lights were a meteor breaking up and he was quoted in two Zimbabwe newspaper stories at the time as saying “It took about a minute to cross the sky, although it seemed much longer”.

Professor Nisbet told me recently that what he saw was:

For a visual approximation of what a spacecraft looks like breaking up in the atmosphere, the spectacular video of the 11,000kg ATV-1 reentry filmed from an aircraft in 2008 by the European Space Agency (ESA): was, Dr Nisbet told me, “very similar” to his memory of the event. 

When Professor Nisbet returned to London he made enquiries and was told by a contact at the Royal Air Force that (as the Kettering Groups had also said) it was a Russian rocket, not a meteorite, and not a UFO. 

In addition it should be noted that professor Nisbet told me he was asked by the Scientific Association of Zimbabwe, of which he was a Fellow, to speak to The Herald, (Zimbabwe’s largest Newspaper) specifically because of the hysteria about an alien mothership that was caused by Tim Leach’s appearances on Zimbabwe’s media.

Zimbabwe’s press were very slow to pick up the Telegraph’s story that the lights were caused by a man-made object. Almost a month later on 8 October the story that it was made by Russians, was not a meteorite, (nor an alien mothership) appeared on the front page of The Herald. It quoted Dr. Nisbet’s eyewitness report and referred to the object as “a large spent Russian rocket re-entering and burning up” and said what came down into the atmosphere was the “dead launcher”. But, even then it was hardly definitive, leaving room for doubt with the phrases “could have been” and “most likely”.

However by the time that 8 October story had run, wild rumours of an alien invasion had spread, including at Ariel School whose pupils by then had been subject to weeks of interviews by journalists with an interest in UFOs and aliens, this included Tim Leach (BBC) Cynthia Hind (MUFON), Nicole Carter (SABC), and Jill Dark (ZBC News).

Those rumours had been catalysed by Tim Leach’s appearance on ZBC radio on the evening of 14 September, and the characterisation of the lights as mysterious.

But this could have been reported differently because the correct explanation was just a telephone call away. Instead what occurred was an appeal for people in Zimbabwe to urgently phone-in to with their own eyewitness accounts.

The confusion caused by this media coverage, driven by non-expert testimony, likely inspired the class discussions at Ariel School about UFOs that had reportedly occurred earlier that week.⁵ It culminated in someone yelling ‘Aliens!’ in the playground two days later on Friday morning, when the children described seeing something shiny glinting and some figures beyond their school boundaries.⁶ 

UFO FLAP IN ZIMBABWE

The lights in the sky seen on 14 September, were most notably framed as a possible alien spacecraft by Cynthia Hind, a prominent UFO investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) who lived in Zimbabwe and was the first to speak with some of the Ariel children by telephone on Saturday 17 Sept.

She consistently linked the lights seen on the 14 September directly with the events at Ariel School. Beginning her article Report on Space Activity in Zimbabwe, that appeared in the December 1994 MUFON journal with a brief outline of the lights seen in the sky, before moving on seemlessly to describe the Ariel school event in the same article. 

Hind included the Russian rocket explanation in her article about Ariel School, but she didn’t favour it. Instead she characterised it as “speculation”: 

Later, in her own newsletter UFOAfrinews published in February 1995 she compiled a collection of eyewitness accounts of the lights under the title “UFO FLAP IN ZIMBABWE”. Again she mentions the Russian reentry explanation, but she barely entertains it as a possibility, and inexplicably segues to a completely unrelated story of an American who claimed to have seen a missile shot down by a Flying Saucer in 1964⁸. 

Then in her 1996 book UFOs Over Africa she gives up all pretence that she believed the lights had a prosaic explanation and were a human-made object, and expresses her view that although it was a Russian rocket there was also an alien spacecraft (!) that had come to monitor it:

Even in the face of expert opinions confirming that it was a rocket, Hind refused to give up the notion that it was aliens.

Variation in Eyewitness Reports of Lights Seen in the Sky

For those who have witnessed a large meteor fall that particular explanation did indeed make no sense, as Tim Leach had said, because it lasted too long. For example, earlier that month a large meteor was seen over the West Coast of the United States on 10 September 1994, it was reported as a very bright light, and sudden flash, with a beautiful tale of blues and greens. But, newspaper reports at the time say it was over in less than 10 seconds. It was literally gone in a flash.

What’s interesting is that witnesses describe the 10 September US meteor with the same variation of perceptions to those in Hind’s collection of eyewitness reports. Some seeing the US meteor perceived that it might have been an aeroplane on fire and about to crash, others saw it as “perfectly round” or believed it to be the size of a “Volkswagon Bug.” ¹⁰

In Hind’s reports Mr. Patel in Bulawayo thought it “moved at the speed of an aeroplane”. Brett Ding, thought it “was not very high, travelling fairly slowly”, C.H Alexander thought it was a “wide-bodied aircraft” that he observed for “five minutes”. Brian Auchterlonie saw it overhead and thought it “had a flat base of a dull metallic grey”. ¹¹

And of course some who saw the US meteor also thought it was an alien spacecraft…


The Modesto Bee, 10 September, 1994

A Misleading Connection

As with Hind’s newsletter, the events of the 14 September are immediately followed in Nickerson’s 2022 film Ariel Phenomenon by the story about Ariel School on 16 September, as if there were a causal connection between them. 

This is a link that is clearly intended to mislead an uninformed audience, implying that after almost 40 years, the lights seen remain unexplained (perhaps it was the aliens arriving!). However, as we’ve seen, the lights have already been explained.

Instead the film leans on the almost 40 year old clips of the initial impressions of a few eyewitnesses who didn’t have all the information that we now have. But the film makes no attempt to explain the actual cause of the lights. We’re left as uninformed as those witnesses.

“None of it made any sense”

If we go back to Tim Leach’s statement that “none of it made any sense” we have to understand what he could have been talking about, and why he was wrong. 

Perhaps, something that might have added to the confusion at the time was the naming convention used by the Russian Space Agency that was designed to hide the military spy satellite program. The word ‘Zenit’ was used to name both a class of launch vehicles (rockets) and also the spy satellites (spacecraft) they put in orbit. 

For example this spacecraft was also named “Zenit-2”.

…and this smaller rocket was named “Kosmos”.

The word ‘Cosmos’ is also spelled ‘Kosmos’ and names both the spy satellites and another class of launch rocket (smaller than the Zenit-2), respectively. But ‘Kosmos’ is also used as the mission name. We see both spellings used in newspaper articles of the time. Confusing!

Around and Around the World in 18 Days

What Leach described as not making any sense was the discrepancy Hind refers to above – the time delay of more than two weeks between launch and reentry of the rocket. This is likely the cause of the continued confusion about this reentry event, and the reason it is still being used today in Nickerson’s film to embellish the Ariel school mystery and give it an additional dimension of intrigue. 

Typically multistage rockets have a first stage that doesn’t make it into orbit. It falls back to earth soon after launch. The second stage does make it into orbit and is required to put spacecraft (the spy satellite in this case) into its orbit, but remains stranded there.

As of 2023 there are 18 large sections of Zenit-2 rockets launched in the 1990s that, decades later, are still in “disposal” or “cemetery” orbit around the Earth¹². It is hoped they will eventually burn up harmlessly when they reach Earth’s atmosphere.

These “rocket bodies” are exactly the same part that burned up spectacularly over Zimbabwe in the evening on 14 September 1994. They are carefully catalogued and monitored because a collision with any one of them in space could cause a catastrophic chain-reaction of collisions producing even more fast moving space junk that would pose a hazard to future missions. 

The rocket body second stage section, named an SL-16 R/B, that burned up on 14 Sept 1994 over Southern Africa was tracked for days by the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) and given an identification number (23219).

What may have also lead to confusion is how the 26 August 1994 launch differed from prior Zenit-2 launches that left rocket body space junk drifting in orbit. This is because it was launched to place a new type of spacecraft, the Orlets-2, a military optical reconnaissance satellite into an eccentric orbit. This was before the time when images were transferred wirelessly from satellites to ground stations, and the Orlets-2 was designed to send back its camera film in physical capsules during its mission. These would then be recovered. The unusual orbit was part of this function. 

Note: We can see from tracking data of previous Zenit-2 launches that their second stage boosters typically travelled far higher above the Earth. This is the reason some are still up there to this day (note they have no decay date). Whereas 23219, the booster from the 26 August launch, only reached 120 km at its highest point.

We also know it wasn’t the spacecraft itself that came down as some stories have suggested. The Orlets-2 was continually tracked until its decay in 1995.¹³

Tracking the Rocket Body

The tracking data for the rocket is public information and is available at space-track.org. The Two Line Element Set (TLE) data for the rocket body with the NORAD ID number 23219 that decayed over Southern Africa is:

23219 SL-16 R/B
1 23219U 94053B   94257.75288299  .37353504 +79040-5 +12375-3 0   9991
2 23219 064.8275 117.7743 0005857 359.2076 000.9109 16.58759904003138

If we enter this in an obital simulator (here I used flightclub) we see the rocket body passing over Zimbabwe on the evening of the 14 September 1994, where the main spectacular burn out occurred and was seen by thousands of people as it travelled North West to South East.

Another simulation using Metabunk’s Sitrec tool allows a more first person view of the path the rocket took over Dr Nisbet’s position in Zvishavane, Zimbabwe. (-20 lat, 30 lon). The rocket emerges from the horizon to the North West, crosses almost directly overhead [Timestamp 3:00] and disappears (disintergrates) in the South East over Mozambique.

Finally, all these details should be made clear to any audience interested in (or concerned about) the prospect of alien visitation. The point being that a film made in 2022 that purports to be a “documentary” about such a potentially humanity-changing event at Ariel school exploits this moment of confusion about a rocket reentry while making no effort whatsoever to document any counter arguments to why Tim Leach thought “none of it made any sense”. It simply puts all of it’s faith in the fact that he worked for the BBC, so whatever he said must be true.

Publicly available data show this was not an alien mothership coming to Zimbabwe and that it was a human-made device that had been tracked and anticipated since its launch on 26 Aug 1994. 

The only connection the Russian rocket, seen burning up over Zimbabwe, has to the Ariel School mystery was in the imaginations of Cynthia Hind and now, unfortunately, those who have watched Nickerson’s misleading film. It was the product of poor investigation, personal attachment to an idea, and sensationalist media coverage.

Footnotes

1. Who is unnamed but is likely Werner Kirchoff, son of Peter Kirchoff a noted amateur astronomer from South Africa. ↩︎
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/22/world/geoffrey-e-perry-dies-at-72-monitored-soviet-satellites.html?n=Top%2FReference%2FTimes+Topics%2FPeople%2FG%2FGlanz%2C+James ↩︎
3. Notes taken from The Kettering Group archives: KET/B/14/ Two-line element sets and notes for the year 1994 viewed on location at the Dana Research Library, London. ↩︎
4. Notes taken from The Kettering Group archives: KET/B/14/ Two-line element sets and notes for the year 1994 viewed on location at the Dana Research Library, London. ↩︎
5. https://bufora.org.uk/documents/1995UFOsExaminingtheevidence.8thInternationalconference.pdf p.38 ↩︎
6. The Believer, Blumenthal, 2021, p. 329 ↩︎
7. MUFON Journal, No.320, December 1994 ↩︎
8. Former US Air Force First Lieutenant Robert Jacobs ↩︎
9. UFOs Over Africa p. 221 ↩︎
10. The Tribune, 10 September, 1994, page 13 ↩︎
11. UFOAfrinews, No.11, December 1995 ↩︎
12. https://www.space.com/most-dangerous-types-space-junk ↩︎
13. Report: Europe and Asia in space, 1993-1994. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA338573 ↩︎