THE STERKSPRUIT U.F.O.
Apart from being an ardent music fanatic, I also collect and read science fiction. I have done so from quite an early age. I once picked up a couple of library books by one Captain W.E. Johns, writer of the old Biggles stories, of space adventures and I was immediately hooked. I quickly got to know SF authors and I soon graduated to the adult section of the library and “devoured” all I could find. I only started actively collecting SF once I was earning a salary. New paperbacks cost under R2 back then. Once on audit, I started scouring secondhand bookshops wherever I went, for SF. I often bought up a shop’s entire stock of SF – at 20-30 cents a book, how could I go wrong? Once I had enough books, I’d make up one of those old note boxes and send the books back to my mother, in whose yard, my trailer was parked. She would dump the parcel in the trailer where it would stay until I was able to get home again. In this way, I built up a sizeable collection which I am finally reading my way through at the moment. My daughter had a fabulous set of library shelves built into where we stay now and I finally have the library I always longed for.
But I digress! The fact that I read SF does not mean that I am a wild-eyed fanatic with crazy ideas but it does mean that I like to listen to as many viewpoints as possible before I dismiss things like flying saucers out of hand. I’ve read countless accounts about the phenomenon and feel I’m quite well informed on the subject. But nothing prepared me for what I saw one summer evening, while taking a slow spin in the hills near Sterkspruit with my Beetle. I had had supper so it must have been about 7.45 in late December of 1971 or 1972. It had been a hot day and I drove out towards Umlamli Mission Hospital, at the foot of Amajuba mountain. I had my car’s lights on and the radio playing, while my side window was closed. I was about 6 Km outside of town, coming back when a light off to my right, caught my eye. I recall thinking it was just my dashboard lights reflecting off the side window but I looked again and then jammed on brakes, stalling the car. I turned off the radio and lights and got out because flying along all lit up, was a long-shaped object, which I assumed was a passenger plane. It seemed to be unusually low for a passenger plane and I was convinced it was going to crash because it was already below the level of a hill known as Thaba Lesoba and looked pretty big. It was cylindrical in shape and all along it seemed to have brightly lit “portholes” – I’ve always likened it to a brightly lit passenger train seen from a distance at night. As I stood watching and listening for the sound of jet engines, it emerged from behind Thaba Lesoba and sailed steadily off into the higher reaches of the mountains. I watched until all I could see was a red glow which emanated from the rear of the craft. At no stage did I hear a sound, even though it was a perfectly still evening with no other traffic on the road. I was concentrating very hard to try and mark its trajectory because I still believed it to be an aircraft about to crash and when it did, I wanted to be in a position to point out where it had happened. Yet no crash occurred and I suddenly realized that what I had been following with my eyes was just too big to be a conventional passenger plane. I’ve now often seen big planes flying over at night and the cabin windows are simply not lit up the way the “windows” on the UFO were. I was actually trembling with excitement when I realized that what I had seen could not be a conventional flying machine and that it could only be a UFO.
Some years ago I was contacted by ECUFOR (Eastern Cape Unidentified Flying Object Research) and my report was added to their records. These were serious people gathering data on a subject which has generated much interest worldwide.
THE GRAAFF RENEIT UFO
While I was auditing at Graaff Reinet branch, I told the manager of my experience and of my interest in UFOs and he remembered this when one of his clients, Jacques Laubscher, had been in to see him and had with much excitement, described how he had filmed several UFOs while he was braaing on a Sunday afternoon. His kids had spotted several glowing objects over the town, flying somewhat erratically and he had dashed in and grabbed his movie camera and pointed it at the phenomenon. I subsequently phoned Jacques myself to hear his story firsthand and he very kindly sent me a copy of the video. The story made the Rapport newspaper and ECUFOR also did a thorough investigation, which included sending the video to an expert in Australia for frame by frame analysis. I have some copies of the pictures on the frames and there is no doubt that there was something well lit, with fuzzy outlines but solid nevertheless up there and that there were several of them.
THE ROSMEAD UFO
The next town up from Graaff Reinet is Middelburg and near the town is a railway station called Rosmead. Petrol companies have large storage tanks there and there are several houses as well as a tennis court, apart from the station. The papers were full of reports, back in the sixties, of a glowing object which had been seen landing on the court, and which had left several holes in the surface of the court when it took off again. Bits of the court surface were found on a koppie nearby, where the object had momentarily rested before disappearing for good. The court was repaired and I have actually stood on the court myself and seen where the holes were. There was a theory that the court had been built on an old rubbish dump and that methane from rotting rubbish had seeped out and caught fire but the phenomenon reported by witnesses does not tally with a methane explosion, so that is unlikely. There is a little history of Rosmead in which a chapter is devoted to the UFO and two soldiers doing guard duty at the fuel depots were quoted as witnesses by the author. I wish I could talk to them!
THE MIDDELBURG UFO ABDUCTEE
Before I drop the subject, I told these selfsame stories while at Middelburg branch and some of the ladies who had lived in the town all their lives, recommended I talk to one of their clients I’ve forgotten his name but he quite willingly sat down and told my assistant, Francois Booysen and I his strange tale warning us that we would probably not believe him. He had been returning to Middelburg from Noupoort and calculated that he would reach the town around 9 o’clock that night. Between the towns, the railway line crosses over the road and as he reached this little subway, his bakkie’s engine suddenly cut out. He recalled coasting to a stop just beyond the bridge and when he tried starting the engine, it took quite normally. He recalled light around the bakkie but did not remember seeing anything above him. He was very puzzled because where his estimated time of arrival was 9 pm, it was already more than 15 minutes beyond this point in time and he wasn’t back at home. It worried him so much that he reported the incident to the police. They in turn reported it to the Air Force in Pretoria who within the next day or two, sent two officers to interview him. He didn’t really have much to tell them as he simply could not recall if anything untoward had happened, except for the unexplained time lapse.
The next thing that happened was that two experts from America arrived to interview him and sought his permission to hypnotise him. (At least the part about the Americans seems to be a fact because one of the ladies who had been at school in Middelburg, recalled how the news of the arrival of the men had spread like wildfire in the town). This was arranged and the session recorded. Once again he said that he had no recollection of what had happened but he listened to himself talking under hypnosis on the tape and what he said astounded him.
He described how he had been driving along when he became aware of a light around him and at that moment his engine cut out. He then heard how he had somehow been lifted up to a waiting craft, bakkie and all and once inside, how tiny beings had shown him the inside of their craft. I have to admit that I found his story farfetched and didn’t really listen too carefully to his description of the craft and what went on in it. He laughed at my incredulity and said he couldn’t believe it either, yet he had heard himself describing it and its inhabitants in considerable detail. I asked if he had a copy of the tape but he said they’d refused to give him one as it was all Top Secret. Yeah, I suppose it WOULD be!
I have quoted this story not so much to invite ridicule but to illustrate how belief in the UFO phenomenon is to be found everywhere these days, even in conservative Afrikaans communities. One can put it down to mass hysteria, the influence of television, overactive imaginations, glimpses of secret manmade craft, you can take your pick of any number of possible reasons for the belief. The fact still remains that people ARE seeing craft in our skies which don’t appear to be of earthly origin. I’ll testify to that too simply because I have also seen one.
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