The Three-Inch Spacemen of Stowell School, Bukit Mertajam

Bukit Mertajam sits in Province Wellesley, now Seberang Perai, in the Malaysian state of Penang. In August 1970 Stowell School was an ordinary English primary school. Just outside its fence lay a patch of secondary scrub, the kind Malaysians call belukar. According to the reports, a group of boys was playing cops and robbers in there.

During school hours, before the bell, a ten-year-old said he saw about 25 small objects landed among the bushes outside the school grounds. From each of them, he said, emerged a humanoid three inches tall. Then the bell rang. He went in. He never saw the objects depart.

After school, six boys were in the bush. They saw a very small disc-shaped object, blue in colour, land in the bushes near their school. The Straits Times later described a soup-plate sized flying saucer with two ladders. Five little men put out a gangway and alighted from the saucer.

They were three inches tall. Four wore identical blue uniforms. The fifth seemed to be in charge. He wore a yellow tunic decorated with stars and had a pair of horns on his head. Some of them, the boys said, had only one arm. The paper called them "horrible looking" space Lilliputians.

The little men went to work. They installed some type of aerial on a tree branch, and it apparently sent out signals. The boys became frightened and ran away.

K. Wigneswaran, aged 10, had tried to approach and grab one of them. He said it fired at him with a miniscule space gun. Afterwards there was a small red dot on his right leg. "SPACEMEN SHOT AT ME, CLAIMS BOY," ran the Straits Times headline.

A later claimant, Mohamed Arriffin, aged 7, had a small cut on his left hand. Wigneswaran drew the spacemen, with horns and without, and drew their craft. The drawings ran in the press.

Word spread fast. Crowds of hundreds came to the school, and it shut its gates. CID officers looked into the matter. More boys came forward, among them T. Veerasingham, 10, and A. Devaraj, 12. Within two days, the Straits Times ran the headline "39 spaceships, 31 spacemen, so where are the other 8 little men?"

Headmaster Ooi Keat Guan questioned the boys. He found no physical evidence, and concluded that "the whole thing was a figment of their imagination." No one confessed to a hoax and no prop was ever found. No medical record of the wounds survives. Later retellings grew bolder. The horns became a spiked helmet. The red dot became a thigh wound, then a faint and a painful scar on the arm.

Malaysian researcher Ahmad Jamaludin included the case in his survey in Flying Saucer Review, and Albert S. Rosales logged it in HUMCAT as case 812. Five days later, on 24 August 1970, a small object shaped like a turtle shell reportedly landed in front of a school at Rawang, Selangor. Five three-inch humanoids with horn-like protrusions emerged. The two stories have travelled together ever since. Tiny visitors and a crowd of schoolchildren also invite comparison with Ariel School in Zimbabwe, 1994. At Stowell School, the little men left only drawings, headlines and a red dot.