Case file · Sighting
Zimbabwe fireball of September 1994
Two days before the Ariel School report, people across southern Africa saw a bright fireball break into burning streaks in the night sky.
1994 CE · -17.83, 31.05 · status: explained
The account
ZBC Radio asked listeners to phone in what they had seen, and the many calls set off a wave of UFO talk in Zimbabwe. Some witnesses took it for a comet or a meteor. The local researcher Cynthia Hind collected other reports from the same days, including a daylight sighting by a boy and his mother and a trucker's story of beings on a road.
The sceptical view
Brian Dunning and others identify the fireball as the re-entry of the Zenit-2 rocket stage from the Cosmos 2290 launch. Skeptics argue the publicity primed the Ruwa children's accounts two days later.