Mid-morning break at a small private school on the edge of Ruwa, a Friday in September. The staff are inside for a meeting. Roughly two hundred children are out on the grass, and the grass runs down to a fence, and beyond the fence is rough bush with gum trees and a line of power poles.

That, the children said afterwards, is where it came down.

Sixty-two of them, aged from six to twelve, later described something silver and disc-shaped (some said three or four of them) coming in low along the power lines and settling in the scrub just past the fence. Then, they said, a small figure in a tight black suit was standing on top of it, or beside it, with a thin face, long dark hair and eyes far too large for its head. Some of the children ran. The older ones stayed put and watched. One girl said the figure moved as though it were bouncing, as though the ground were not quite holding it. Then, within about fifteen minutes, it was gone, and the bell went.

The adults took a while to take it seriously. The tuck-shop lady, the only grown-up outdoors, had heard a commotion and thought it was play. The headmaster, when the stories did not fade by the afternoon, asked the children to draw what they had seen. The drawings, dozens of them, show the same thing in different hands: a saucer with a domed top, a small dark figure, the trees.

Within a week the story had left Ruwa. Tim Leach of the BBC came on the Monday and filmed the children in the playground. Cynthia Hind, Zimbabwe’s one full-time UAP investigator, arrived the day after and gathered the drawings. In November a Harvard psychiatrist, John Mack, flew in with a colleague and interviewed the children on camera. Several of them told him the figure had put a message into their heads, something about the world being in trouble, about pollution and trees. That detail does not appear in the earliest interviews, and sceptics have pointed at Mack, an environmentalist, as the reason it appears later.

What else was in the sky that week matters. Two nights earlier, on 14 September, a slow, blazing fireball had crossed the whole of southern Africa, trailing sparks, and hundreds of people in Zimbabwe and Zambia rang the newspapers about it. It was most likely the Zenit-2 rocket stage from a Russian satellite launch, burning up on re-entry. The children had heard about it. So had everyone.

The sceptical account, then, goes: a rumour-rich week, one child’s story, a playground of small copiers, and adults who asked leading questions. The other account is that sixty-two children, questioned separately and again as adults, have never changed their story. Some of them, now in their forties, appeared in a 2022 documentary still describing the same eyes.

Nobody found tracks. Nobody photographed the object. In 2023 one of the former pupils said on television that he had made it all up, contradicting his own earlier interviews; the others said he was wrong. The gum trees are still there.