Fri. June 12

 What the heck are UFOs doing in Africa? We always thought it was US/UK thing, mostly, like pop music of the '60s and '70s. That was one of our first thoughts when we caught wind of "Encounter in Ruwa: The Ariel School Sighting," a "documentary" about the strange encounters of the 3rd kind that up to 60 elementary school children in Zimbabwe had with two alien beings in black who came to town in the obligatory fashion. Which is to say they did it without being shot on video by anyone - an increasingly hard thing to do in this day and age when every move is caught on some security camera somewhere or some nitwit's cell phone camera. All right, this visitation happened in 1994, before the world was so equipped. Just those aliens luck. We do wonder why, in this aforementioned age - and given the amount of purported visitations and visions - we haven't seen any great proof caught on camera and immediately YouTubed forever. We do know that late Pulizter Prize-winning, but somewhat off the rails, psychiatrist John E. Mack was big on this visitation thing, earning hims scorn and ridicule from his more level-headed colleagues, but immense attraction from the UFO-ologists and "X Files" fans out there. Which I am, sort of, one.
Let me explain: When I was 16, a freshly minted driver, I was picking up my parents from their church in Maine. I was parked on a slanted driveway, looking upward at an angle over, well, the University of Maine campus police station. What appears, in a flashy, up over the station's dome? An unidentified foreign object. Of that we have no doubt. It was unidenitifed, forever. I would describe as a classic flying saucer of its time - two halves of saucers, joined in the middle, with colorful lights rotating around the midsection. I was shocked and stunned, but I also found myself, logically enough as a Spock-raised kid, methodically counting off the seconds I saw it. I got to 10 and the damn thing disappeared. Like, poof. That's the end of my story. There were reports in the local paper in the forthcoming days about other sightings, but my part of the drama ends here. And nothing, of course, was ever proven. What did I see? I don't know. An unidentified flying object, that's what. Believe me, the sighting challenges my skeptical brain even more now. I've been a big reader of the Skeptical Inquirer and a Carl Sagan fan and I rebel against what (I think) I saw, several decades ago. Couldn't have happened? But did. Was it all in my head? What of the subsequent reports? And then what of all they myriad other accounts of Roswell and beyond, of trained Air Force pilots watching superspeed aircraft zip by their aircrafts like they were standing still?
This is a long way to go about saying we're curious about the film made by Randy Nickerson (in photo) about the Harare, Zimbabwe sightings made in 1994. There are 12 kids, now adults, who confirm the same details about the encounter. Things like this put us in a tizzy. How can we deny the liklihood of life beyond our little planet, or an advanced race's ability to visit us, through time-travel or whatever? How can we be so convinced this is all - every single damn crop circle or pilot sighting or alien abduction - fiction? Even if 99% are fiction ... what does that mean? What does what I saw fit into this?
For me, that's enough reason to make it to 38 Cameron St. in Cambridge, Friday June 12 7-9 p.m. for the unedited screening of the film Nickerson is making. (Mack collaborated with him; he died in a London car crash in 2004.) Wanna go? Email is Dominiuqe Callimanopulos, who traveled with Mack to Africa helping in the research he did.

38 Cameron St., Cambridge, 617-661-0203 www.johnemackinstitute.org