AP PRESSWhat happened
During a 15-minute break, pupils reported one or more craft and small beings at the edge of the schoolyard scrub.
The record on unidentified anomalous phenomena
On September 16, 1994, at a small private school outside Harare, sixty-two children came in from morning break saying something had landed. Their teachers, meeting indoors, saw nothing. The children were separated and asked to draw what they saw. The drawings match.
The episode presents the case through the record it left — the drawings, the same-week interviews, the filmed sessions — and takes the skeptics' file seriously: suggestibility, a fireball over southern Africa two days earlier that primed the region, and the controversy around the Harvard psychiatrist who interviewed the children.
During a 15-minute break, pupils reported one or more craft and small beings at the edge of the schoolyard scrub.
62 children aged roughly 6–12; teachers were indoors and saw nothing.
Same-week interviews and drawings; BBC coverage; Harvard psychiatrist John Mack's filmed interviews two months later.
No official inquiry; witnesses, now adults, largely stand by their accounts.
Children are suggestible; a re-entering rocket stage had made the whole region look up two days earlier; and John Mack arrived with a reputation that critics say shaped the answers. What that reading must carry: sixty-two witnesses interviewed before Mack ever arrived, consistent drawings produced separately — and adults who, thirty years on, repeat the account unchanged. Both readings are in the episode.